back to alaska

Hi again. Back again from guess where?? Alaska. We are once again in Alaska. Hyder, Alaska to be exact. We rolled on down the Cassiar after filling the tank again because there aren’t a lot of places to get gas on the Cassiar. We drove in about 30 miles before finding a gorgeous little lake called Blue Lake. There was a fairly large turnout and we positioned the camper so that the big windows were facing the water. We made drinks and dug out the lawn chairs and sat by the lake. It was in the 70s, sunny and just great. We shared the spot with a big Class A from Illinois and another smaller motor home. Later, a car with a small trailer and a big dog showed up. While we were sitting there, we started looking for a small duck that we had seen when we pulled in. We didn’t find it but we did find the most beautiful Loon. Its colors were so clear and bright, it looked like a computer generated picture. We watched it float around the lake and then it yawned (it looked like a yawn, really) then it stretched each one of its legs separately out of the water behind it, turned its head around backwards and tucked it under its wing and went to sleep. We still watched it but it didn’t do anything else. Later in the evening after it got dark, we heard it call out and get answered by another loon from a pond across the street. This went on several times and the next morning, our loon was gone.

We headed out fairly early in the morning. We drove through the Cassiar mountains and saw a lot of lakes, streams, creeks, rivers and even bigger lakes. There were some huge lakes that went on for miles and miles. You couldn’t see a camp or cabin on any of them. The Cassiar Highway is another true wilderness area; 450 miles long and little else but the occasional gas station, hotel, restaurant and campground combined….with a couple of exceptions. The first of which is a place called Jade City. There are 2 jade stores across from each other on the road. This area of the Cassiar Highway is responsible for 80% of all of the jade in the world. It is mined right there in the Cassiar mountains. Cheryl was wearing a piece that we had picked up in Valdez and they recognized it as one of the pieces they had made right there. Small world! We watched them cut some pieces that they would use to make jewelry. The rough pieces look like any (large) rock. Once you cut and polish them they take on the beautiful green color. We managed to escape without becoming attached to anything we couldn’t live without (Cheryl already had her jade).

We then moved into the space between the Coastal mountain range and the Skeena mountain range. The Skeena range was large and rounded and rocky while the Coastal Range was taller, craggier and glaciated. It was pretty spectacular and we spent a lot of time stariing up. Soon, we passed through those too and hit another lake region. Lots of lakes with no boats or camps on them. It is so strange to see these massive lakes with no manmade things on them. Along the way, we saw a wolf walking down the road. We stopped but he sidestepped into the woods and walked around us and back onto the highway. Later on, we saw a black bear along the road. He checked us out and quickly headed into the woods.

We were pushing to get most of the way through the Cassiar Highway. We wanted to be within reach of the Yellowhead highway which will take us to Jasper, Alberta and the Canadian Rockies National Parks. We ran out of lakes before we got as far as we wanted to go so we eventually pulled into a roadside rest area to spend the night. In that rest area was a billboard advertising Stewart, BC and its neighbor Hyder, Alaska. Hyder, Alaska is about as far south in Alaska as you can go. It is almost at the end of the tail. Until you drive south out of Alaska, you don’t realize how long this tail is. When we first came into Alaska, we were in Skagway. It took us 2 days to drive from there to the main part of Alaska and we were a lot further north than we are now. I digress. The billboard talked about glaciers in Hyder and bear watching. Hmmm, maybe we were a little hasty in discarding Hyder from our itinerary. We looked at each other and decided we could stand a little more bear watching so off we went towards Stewart and Hyder.

The road to Hyder skirts a bunch of mountains and is downhill for miles. As we got closer to Stewart (still on the Canadian side), we kept finding glaciers. We would stop and take some pictures of the glacier and then drive around the corner and find another one bigger and better. Stop, take picture, move around next corner and repeat previous step. This went on and on. We saw antother black bear in the road but he took off. We realized that it was probably the wheel cover with the loose hub that makes us sound like a moving junkpile.

We got into Hyder and found a campground that is run by a husband and wife from Owl’s Head, Maine. We had a nice discussion about Maine. He told us about the bear viewing area up the road. They have a platformed viewing area along this stream. You can see bear there most of the time when the salmon are spawning (which they still are). The bear don’t seem to bother anyone so we will head out early in the AM to see the bear. Then we will head up to the glacier and play there. Their dump station is actually the city dump station in Stewart. Oh, yea and their internet is the internet of SeaAlaska, another campground, hotel and bar. He said you park out in front and log into their wifi. They do things differently up here. Then we will continue on our way to Jasper. We probably won’t get there tomorrow but I think this will be worth the effort. One last day in Alaska.

We did have Pizza for supper. A café down the street has wood fired pizza in the evening. We miss La Festa. That has been our favorite place to eat out so this was fun. It was not as good as La Festa but it was good. Well, the music is playing in the background, I have a Southern Comfort on the rocks and Cheryl is making out another round of postcards since she can postmark another round from Alaska. It is getting late, actually it isn’t since we are back in Alaska, we are on Alaska time so it is really 9:30 although our clock says 10:30 (we didn’t change back to Alaska time) and it is 1:30 at home. I wonder why I am confused. Wait until we hit Alberta and we have to give back another hour.

Antother reflection on this trip. I am amazed at the way people camp alongside the road here. It is great. There are lots of turnouts and during the evening, they fill up with campers. In the morning, everyone hits the road. You have to be pretty much selfcontained but some of the areas have restrooms. Some of the places are beautiful and some are just convenient. In our part of the country, if you try to do this, you will be rousted by the police and told to move on. Of course, this part of the country is much more sparsely populated and there isn’t so much vandalism so it is tolerated. I am not sure I see it working in our part of the country for a variety of reasons but here, it is expected. Cool!!

Morning dawned early (sort of) in Hyder. We had set the alarm clock for 5 as we wanted to get an early start and be out of Dodge by high noon. First we made some toast and headed down the road for the bear viewing platform at Fish Creek. This is one cool facility. It is part of the Tongras National Forest. It is a large catwalk along a creek that is a spawning area for several kinds of salmon. Bears, wolves and eagles come here to feast on salmon (other animals come here too but when you have coastal Grizzlies (dark brown instead of the blond brown of Denali), black bears, wolves and eagles) who cares about the other animals. There is also a family of black bears that are a tan color. All of them. They have determned that they have an abberant gene that causes the color difference. They are not albino as they have normally colored eyes. We saw some pictures of them and were told that they come to the platforms occasionally but we were not lucky enough to see them. That is one of the consequences of only staying there a half day. We hit the platforms.

There were 2 ½ dozen people there from avid photo nnuts to professional photographers. You would think you were at an interview site outside of Congress to see the equipment set up along the deck. There was nothing going on as we arrived. Soon however, a bald eagle flew into the creek and began to feed on the dead salmon. He was a strikingly beautiful bird and we watched for a while as he shredded a couple of salmon finally having his fill and flying away.

As we pulled into the parking lot, we spied what looked like a black bear crossing the road just beyond the parking lot. While we were on the deck, a bear come underneath the bridge into the “arena” and began pawing through the dead salmon along the shallow water. We realized then that the bear was a grizzly and remembered that the coastal grizzlies were smaller than the Denali Grizzlies and were a dark brown. This one was so dark that from a distance he looked black. He did, however have the traditional grizzlie hump on his back. While there was some interest, most of pro row ignored the bear. He (or she) came down the creek munching briefly on the dead salmon and moving on. It was said (but we did not observe this) that the bear was eating only the eyeballs of the dead fish. Soon enough though, he moved into the deeper water and went after a live one. After a brief struggle, he came up with a fresh salmon in his mouth and went into the woods. He seemed to like his privacy when eating a whole salmon. After a couple of these trips to the woods, he jumped one and ate it right in the middle of the stream. Soon he grabbed a salmon and came ashore right underneath us. There were a lot of bushes and berry bushes near us and into these he retreated. We couldn’t see him at all even though we were only about 12 feet away from him. All we could see was the bushes shaking and moving around as he ate the samon. He finished up by coming out into the open and eating some berries before going back into the river. The bear wandered beyond the end of the arena so we left.

Next on the agenda was the Salmon Glacier. The Salmon Glacier was another 14 miles up a steep winding narrow dirt road. The manager of the campground asked us if we were planning on going saying that it was difficult with a motorhome and not recommended. After finding out we had been on the Top of the World Highway, he said we shouldn’t have any problem and some busses did make the trip. Everything they said about this road was true. It was a tough drive and should one change his/her mind, there was no place to turn a motorhome around. We had no trouble and the trip was worth the effort. This is supposed to be the 5th largest glacier in the world. We started in Hyder at almost sea level and drove up 4,000 feet. At the top, you look down on the glacier that sits between the mountain you are on and a couple of others on the other side. It was quite a different view. The clouds of the morning cleared as we climbed and by the time we got to the top, the sun was out. There was a man at the top (lived there by the looks of things. He had tents and firewood and food. He was selling a book and a DVD that apparently he had put together. They were about the glacier and the animals of Alaska. Upon seeing our license plate, he came over and said he was from Fredricton, New Brunswick. We still didn’t buy his book. The more he talked to us, the more he realized we had done most of the things he had in his book. Before long, I noticed that the road continued on. I knew it didn’t come out anywhere so I asked him where it went. He dug out a map and said it continued on to 3 other glaciers and to one of the terminal areas of the Salmon Glacier (it goes down both sides of the mountain). He said the road went on for 7 more miles but none of it was nearly as spectacular as where we were. Since this sidetrip was a lark, we decided to head on back to the road. After all, it was noon.

On our way back into Hyder, we stopped at the bear viewing area but nothing was happening. A flock of seagulls were trying single handed to clean up the carion in the stream but even they were not up to the task. Back on the road again but soon we were stopped by a traffic jam on the little dirt road. There was a bear chasing salmon in the stream and not doing too well at it because unlike the viewing area where the stream is narrow making it easy for the bear, this area was wide and fast flowing giving the fish the advantage. The bear was funny finally giving in to running after the salmon down the stream. Back to the Cassiar.

The Canadian Customs office was cordial and quickly managed with a few basic questions (there is no US border crossing, I guess we don’t care who goes to Hyder. There is nothing to blow up there. The pavement stops at the Stewart border. There are some great things there including access to The Tongas national park which includes the bear platform and a bunch of glaciers. There are some old gold mines, the Wildflour Café with its evening pizza in a wood fired oven and the bus, a place to get sea food cooked to perfection. The sign there says that if you are in a hurry, you came to the wrong place. They catch most of their own fish and the place got crowded right after we got there. During non-tourist season it is another story. Of course, Cheryl made a friend there. I noticed a man wearing a denim shirt with an emblem on it proclaiming “Master Gardner” and Cooperative Extension University of California. Cheryl being a good representative of UNH’s Cooperative Extension service and a proponent of NH’s Master Gardner Program, couldn’t ignore this and off she went to talk about Master Gardners as applied to the State of California. Worse yet, he worked in the program….is it any wonder we didn’t get out of Hyder any too soon. Hyder should be on anyone’s list of places to go. The drive into Stewart is spectacular and Hyder is equal to the task.

The ride out and down the Cassiar is another story. Not too much there…not bad mind you but after Hyder, kind of mundane. We hit the Yellowhead highway, turned east and hunkered down. The mountains kept coming. Snow covered and 7/8 thousand feet tall. Since we had started so late and delayed our departure even more at the bus. We decided that there was no need to push hard so we looked for a Provincial Park. We soon found one but after a couple of tries found that we were too big for it and moved on. Eventually we came to ***** Canyon. This was a narrow place in a fairly large river that went down through this gorge area. People were dipnetting salmon there and selling them for $5 a fish (uncleaned). Pink Salmon were on my list of unfulfilled types of salmon so we stopped and picked one up. Soon after just down the road in Smithers (a place we had heard about on the radio that is fighting Wallmart) we found signs for a municipal campground. It was a really nice place: electricity (only 15 amps but that’s enough to run the lights and the stereo), water and sewer. They also had great piles of “FREE” firewood and firerings and most of all, dry weather and sunshine. We had our first campfire of the trip. We also had darkness that set in about 10. Real darkness, none of this twilight for 3 hours crap…..darkness. The wood was dry and the fire was friendly and warm…..aah, I can go to bed a satisfied man. In fact, we were so taken by the campfire, we never cleaned up after supper so we have that to do this morning. We slept late (9) and are taking our time. We did consider staying here another day but Jasper beckons. We want to get through there and try to settle in somewhere before the labor day weekend throng of campers hits the road. Well, that’s about it. Cheryl is done her shower so as soon as the water heater recovers, I am off and then it is a marathon cleaning effort as it is now 10 and there is only an hour left before checkout and we still have a lot of miles to go to reach Jasper. Probably another night on the road.

Well, we didn’t get a very early start. We slept late and barely made our exit right on the checkout time 11:00 on the dot. We trucked on down the road. Not too much going on today. Not much to see and frankly not nearly as many miles as we had planned on. We set out breakfastless with a mission to find a Tim Horton’s. They, like everything else, are few and far between but we finally managed to find one. The problem was, like every Tim Horton’s we have found, there is no place to park for creatures such as we. They seem to set up on very small pieces of land and cater only to cars. The one we actually got into had a mall nearby and we were able to park there. To alleviate our disappointment, we managed to find our first vegetable stand. We bought some fresh corn, peaches and raspberries. The peaches were the best I have had in a long time. They were ripened on the tree and were juicy and sweet. The rest, I will report on tomorrow. We have been hearing from my mother that the corn at Tuttles is the best ever. We are missing not only the summer at home but the corn season as well. We eat corn at least twice a week from Wally’s first until the frost is on the pumpkin so we actiously await our entry into the corn season.

We finally found a poprivet gut to attempt to repair the wheelcover. Heads turn whenever we drive through a town because of the bang bang clang bang. I am charging my drill up (probably to the detrement of the folks next door) and hope to fix the wheelcover in the am. We will cook the salmon tonight. I filleted it out this morning and did a poor job of it with way too heavy a knife but it will still be good. We just pulled into our campground and set up (5 minutes work, mostly with hydraulics). See ya

C2

Chicken anyone???

Greetings from Chicken. We just arrived in Chicken, Alaska. We are at the Goldpanners Campground where you can drycamp for free if you fill up with gas there. This is the last gas before Canada and is the only gas in town so it isn’t that bad a deal.

We left Homer at the last pitstop of the Watkins Glenn Race. We wouldn’t be there for the end so we picked a point near checkout time and checked out. The sky weeped to see us leave. In fact, it weeped to see us arrive and to see us stay in Homer every day we were there (as well as a few days before we arrived. The Kenai Peninsula is noted for its rainy weather but that was more like being at Bremerton in their winter than anything else. It may not rain all day but it rained pretty steadily and then would let up. When you saw it stop, you would head out to do something and as soon as you got a half mile from the camper, it would start up again.

We camped at a National Forest Site that night (in the rain) then headed into Anchorage the next morning. We went to the Anchorage Art and History Museum. These were the tickets that we got with the Indian Cultural Center tickets. We drove to the museum but found that there were no places to park our battleship. I had read somewhere that there was a parking lot where you could park an RV for $5 a day. Luckily enough, we found it about 4 blocks down (first try). They had several exhibits there. The first was an exhibit on Raptors (birds of prey). A really nice exhibit with lots of stuffed birds and explanations of how they lived and what problems they had in todays world. In another set of rooms, they had art exhibits from a series of painters and sculptors who specialized in Alaskan art. They had a room of photographs taken in western Alaska. Upstairs, they had historical exhibits portraying the history of Alaska from each of the groups of tribes of natives to various explorations of the area by Russians, Italians and Lewis & Clark. They showed how the state evolved through the gold rushes and the development of the 2 still existing railroads, statehood and the 1964 earthquake. I remember that one because Jane Hussey ( or someone in that class) had a relative living up there when it hit. It was a really nice place and instead of the 90 minutes we expected to spend there, we were there for 5 hours. We wandered around downtown for a while after we left there looking for either something else to do or salmon and found neither.

We headed north again but decided that we wanted to see the Zoo of Alaska (also in Anchorage) so we grabbed the first campground we came to at Eagle River. This was one of the nicest state campgrounds we found. All the sites were paved (parking areas, tents had grassy or gravely areas). There was a raging grey (glacial silt) river on the grounds with a really nice trail along it. We walked along the trail (in the rain of course) and viewed the river from several banks upstream.

The next morning, we got a bright and early start (for us at least, we seem to be staying in bed later and later….its getting dark around here again). The zoo is noted for specializing in arctic animals. They had wolf cubs, coyotes, brown bears, black bears, polar bears, moose, caribou, a nice selection of hawks and owls and a couple of exotics (snow leopard and Siberian tigers). Oh, yes, they also had an elephant. Why an elephant in an Alaskan zoo?? The elephant started the zoo. A woman iin Anchorage won a contest where the top prize was an elephant or a sum of money. The perpetrators were sure the winner would elect the money rather than an elephant but this woman fooled them and wanted the elephant. They searched high and low and finally found a baby elephant that had been in a circus. She boarded it with a friend and eventually they had to do something with it so a group of people bought 5 acres of land and started this zoo. Most of the arctic animals are there because they are no longer capable of liviin in the wild. There is a lynx that was hit by a car and had to have a leg amputated (her name was mary not tripod) and a young pair whose parents were killed and who will be reintroduced into the wild when they are a little older. An owl had only one eye and could not hunt. Well you get the picture. While it was a great place to see animals up close, it was sad that so noble a group of animals were no longer capable of living in the wild and had to be caged (or die). Oh, by the way, it rained the whole time we were at the zoo.

On the way north, we stopped at the Portage Glacier visitor center and on the way out, there was a salmon viewing area. There was a nice deck where you could watch the salmon swimming up stream. At the time we were there, there were 4 kinds of salmon in the water there. I never thought that they had to share the streams with other kinds of salmon. Oh, I also found a spot to buy salmon. We have had it a couple of nights in a row. Grilled salmon salads. One of my favorites.

We arrived in Palmer in early afternoon, got our mail package and did some food shopping. Now, with the larders bulging, we were ready to return to the wild!! We headed out on the road to Glenallen and drove until 9:30 when we stopped at a turnout for the night. This morning we passed Glenallen and drove up the Tok Cutoff to Tok. Along the way, we took a rock in the windshield leaving a star crack, had the oil change light come on (800 miles early), had someone stop me and tell me that my spare was about to fall of the camper and got the camper covered in mud (did I mention that it rained all night and into the morning??). a pretty good morningsworth of disasters. Upon reaching Tok, I got the oil changed and learned from the book that there is a light warning that needs to be reset when you change the oil (news to me), I found someone to attempt to fix the windshield without replacing it (it expanded while he was fixiing it but it may hold (he gave us a box of fudge to help us forget that the crack is now 5 inches long vice a little star shot), I found the parts I needed to fix the spare tire and got that hooked back up to the frame and the mud…..well, that I still there because we will be seeing many miles of dirt road over the next few days.

That is how we got to chicken. We will spend part of tomorrow touring the 3 buildings that make up Chicken and heading out onto the dirt roads for the Canadian border. Slow and easy show the way. The scenery is supposed to be worth the effort and I expect we will camp by some river somewhere along the way. All for now.

C2

Just another day in Chicken Alaska. Cheryl woke up this morning and headed out to the gift shop to resupply her post card inventory and check out when the tour of Tisha’s house and schoolhouse. It turns out that the people that run this campground also own the original Town of Chicken. It is now a ghost town since the gold dried up and the company that owned all of the claims pulled out. Tisha is a woman who came here and became the school teacher during the height of activity when Chicken was really a place on the map (it still is but with a population of 15, it ain’t what it used to be. Cheryl came back almost immediately saying that there was only one tour today and it was starting in 5 minutes. I thought we were going to see this old schoolhouse but as we went along, I realized that there was a complete ghost town. There were prospector’s cabins including one that was lived in much later than the others. A prospector’s cabin was quite small. There was a bed, a plate steel barrel type stove, a table and a bureau and not much else. He had a wood shed that was bigger than his house (it gets 50 to 75 below zero around here) and a low chache building where he kept his prospecting supplies. The school building was fairly large and was split in half with living quarters in one side and school in the other. The floor had given out so they put in a new rough sawn floor but put it in over the old floor so you couldn’t open any of the doors any longer (the floor went right over the doors). You could enter the school but had to go back outside to enter the living quarters even though there was a door between them (you couldn’t open it from either side). One of the buildings had sunk into the ground 3 feet (all of the ground here is permafrost. Heat in the buildings melt the permafrost under the buildings and causes the ground to get soft allowing the buildings to sink into the ground) There was a building that had been a store. It had originally had a sod roof. The company that had owned the buildings before our hosts had put metal roofing to protect the buildings. On this building, they put the metal roofing right over the sod roofing so you can see the layer of sod roof between the metal roof and the wood portion under the sod.

There is no electricity in Chicken. There are several generators that provide for corners of the town. The Gold Panner RV Center has one, Chicken Gold camp has one and Chicken Center has one for the stores. I am not sure who provides the post office with electricity but I noticed that they have a gas lights as a backup. Chicken post office is very much the antithesis of South Berwick and Eliot post office. They are friendly and helpful and they even have their own postmark (Chicken, Alaska). They only have mail on Tuesdays and Fridays but you get personal attention. Each item is personally hand stamped before the plane comes in to get it and drop off the new mail delivery. We talked with the postmaster (postmistress?) for quite some time about chicken and the fitness of the world to exist at all. Then we went down the street to Chicken Center and found a post card of the Chicken Post Office with the Postmaster (or postmistress) out in front. It is a small log cabin (and I mean small).

We walked over to the Pedro Dredge (which we can see very plainly out our camper window). It is probably closer to us than any of our neighbors at home. This is the newest entry to the national historic register and is purported to be the most complete dredge anywhere. This thing is as big as a small ship and it works in these small creeks here in Alaska and the Yukon. They have a boom in the front that constantly digs up the creek and conveyors it inside for processing (I don’t know how that works but I think I will be able to tell you more after we reach Dawson City). This one is being restored but is far from being finished. After the processing inside is finished, all of the rocks and debris are conveyored out the back onto a boom that swings from side to side filling in the space that the dredge had dug out of the front. This debris formed a dam which kept water in the space that the dredge floated in between the digging out and the debris dam. That is how a multi-ton barge sized vessel could float up a stream bed that was wayyyy smaller than the size of the dredge. Cool.

Then we walked over to the Chicken Center after getting lost…go figure! 3 stores, a post office, an historic site and 2 campgrounds and we get lost. When you go down the airport road (I did mention that the mail came by air) the road to the dredge turns off and comes back in on the other side of the stores so we missed them and ended up at the airport. Eventually, we found them (you really can’t get too lost here). The Chicken Emporium was rather nicer than I expected but to make up for it, the Chicken Saloon was really sleazy. After the Emporium, we checked out the saloon and the café and ended up sitting on the bench outside the saloon, weighing the benefits of Alaskan Amber vs. pie and ice cream. Then the tour busses hit, two of them at once and we chose quickly knowing that any hesitation would mean we would be left out of either. We belined for the café thinking the pie with ice cream and coffee was the better choice. We walked in the door and the counter was full of pies. There was just enough space to conduct business and choose your pie (apple, blueberry and cherry). They heated the pie and put a nice scoop of vanilla ice cream on it. I didn’t mind the paper plate but the plastic fork and paper coffee cup spoiled the affect. Then the Café was flooded with customers, all with their neat little name tags and their propensity to fill anyplace to overflowing.

We wandered back to our camper and got our gold pan and headed down to the creek. They have some funny rules here about gold panning. They provide a pile of dirt and a branch of a small stream for the guests to use but you have to use their pans (small). We bought our own pan but will have to wait to use it somewhere else. We panned here for a while and Cheryl even pulled out a couple of flakes of gold, met a woman who is a crafter and went in to visit when the rain (rain, remember rain, it was raining when we woke up this morning and has showered several times today). I headed back to start supper and fill you all in on today’s activity.

Tomorrow, we are up early to head off to Dawson City. It is only 108 miles (48 of which are dirt), a ferry across the Yukon River, Canadian Customs and who knows what else. The gentleman (and I use the word loosely) just came out of his airstream trailer and bitched about the noise of our generator (before 8:30) when quiet time is 11:00. He obviously doesn’t have one. My generator is not all that loud. All I was using it for was to play music over the sound system from my Ipod (3,500 songs) and to fuel my computer so in the feeling of neighborlyness, I turned it off 2 ½ hours early and started playing music on my computer (same 3,500 songs) while I write.

Dawson City Tomorrow.

C2

Homer - Doh!!! OR rain rain go away

Just another day in paradise. Got up this morning with things to do. The first thing was to call Dr. Crow and have him send a prescription to the Wallmart in Wasilla. That will hold me for a month or two. Then they will send a new mail order prescription to my mother to forward to us for mailing. Then at 9, we have an appointment with our new found friends at Valley RV. If you remember, they were the ones who got us straightened out after our accident. They looked over the battery system of the camper and declared the batteries (no wonder Bobby Labonte left the Interstate Battery Team) toast. With new batteries installed, we headed out to Wallmart hopefully to collect my prescription. With expected time to kill, we stopped and had lattes. Giardelli chocolate (dark for me and white for Cheryl). I bought an Anchorage paper and read a nice article about Tom Brady, a less than nice article about Floyd Landis and noticed however briefly that the Red Sox trailed the Yankees by 2 games

We got word that the prescription had been sent so we headed out to visit our new Alaskan friends that we met on our fishing trip (did I tell you about the fish I caught??). They live in Eureka, Alaska. That is on the Glenn Highway about 2/3 of the way from Palmer to Glenallen (about 75 miles from where we were in Wasilla). The road runs through the mountains (what road in Alaska doesn’t?). We arrived about 3:30. Their names are Ray and Nancy McCarty. They moved to Alaska from California 29 years ago. They live the Alaskan life. They hunt, fish and sit in their kitchen and look at the mountains and glacier they can see from their kitchen. Across the Glenn Highway are the Eureka Lodge and a small kettle pond which Ray flies his Piper 2 seater out of. He runs an air taxi business. When we arrived, he told us that caribou hunting season opens on Thursday (this was Tuesday) and he was about to head out to scout the wilderness behind the kettle pond and would I like to come…..WOULD I?? Does the bear defecate in the woods?(oh wait a minute. We learned at Denali, that the bears also like to defecate on the roads!) This was one of the very small float planes that are the workhorses of Alaska. They can land and take off pretty much in a puddle. We skimmed a section of the back land and saw a lot of moose, some swans and finally a dozen and a half caribou. They were way back (12 to 15 miles). The area was laced with 4 wheeler trails and some single track trails that Ray said date back to the gold rush. We headed back and Cheryl got to take a spin into another section. Her results were about the same although she saw fewer moose and more caribou. When he brought Cheryl back, he took a younger person, he knew out to another section to scout. They found only one bull in that sector but while returning, they flew over an area that they hadn’t hit in any of the flights. Ray said there were 3 separate herds of caribou in this one valley and that the total number of caribou in these 3 herds looked to be in the thousands. He and Nancy talked about how they would approach the hunt on Thursday. I could see many small shacks (hunting shacks like the fishing shanties of our winter) along the trails. There were even some vehicles out there already; a couple of trucks and a jeep. We loaded about as much halibut into the freezer as would fit (it cost me my ice cube trays, not Southern Comfort on the rocks until we eat some of the freezer). It was a nice visit. Making new friends is one of the benefits of travel.

We slept in their driveway and headed out at 5 am. We hoped to see some animals with the early start but didn’t see much. Not a caribou to be seen. We did see trailer after trailer of 4 wheelers along the road headed up into caribou country. We assumed that they would set up camps in the backcountry and do some scouting to get ready for Tomorrow’s opening. They have some interesting laws up here. If you are old or disabled, you can get a license and proxy it out to someone to hunt for you. I don’t think we have anything like that but then I am not a hunter.

We headed back to Wasilla and picked up my prescription at Wallmart and headed south towards the Kenai Peninsula. Upon reaching Anchorage, we searched out the Alaska Native Heritage Center. We missed it on the first go-around as we were looking at a cooling tower across the street sending a pillar of water vapor into the atmosphere. We ended up driving all the way through Anchorage, finding the road again and driving back to find the center. We could not understand why we missed it until we got to the top of the off ramp and saw the cooling tower. The center celebrated all of the different Native Alaskan groups and their individual heritages. They had members of each of the groups in houses representative of each of their cultures and they talked about the lives of their groups over the years. It rained of course but was a fascinating place to visit. For lunch in their dining room (outdoors on a covered deck) we had a reindeer hot dog and an elk hamburger. After visiting the gift shop and watching some native dancing and drumming demonstrations, we headed out. We also have tickets to a cultural art museum downtown but we will use them on our way back through. Check this out: admission to the cultural center was 23.50 (discounts were available for Alaskans, natives, armed forces, school groups and some others). The 23.50 was only for out of staters, however, you could get a combination ticket to the cultural center and the art museum for 21.50. go figure!

The drive south was a different kind of spectacular. The road wound along a huge bay with just enough room between the mountains and the water for the road and the railroad. It was cold, rainy and windy so we stopped a lot but didn’t get out of the truck much. We ended up at a National Forest Campground. It is a nice place but has no wifi (we did stop at a private campground that advertised wifi but they said it didn’t work and the phone company couldn’t seem to find the time to come out and fix it. Well, sorry about that. I had to shut everything down quickly as our carbon monoxide alarm went off. We had the generator going and the stove so who knows just what it was. I shut off the generator and went out and looked over everything. Nothing seemed to be awry but we are in a place where there is no moving air so that may have caused the problem. We put on the vent over the stove and vented that outdoors and the problem went away. That will bear watching though.

I made chili out of one of the packages of moose hamburg that Ray and Nancy gave us. It was good although I didn’t have my normal spice rack to work out of so it was not nearly as hot as it usually is (Cheryl is smiling while she eats). I did cut down and brought a mixture of oregano and basil (I use them together anyway) parsley and chili powder. We miss some of the others (cayenne, cumin and rosemary specifically) but if we only had to bring a few, we brought the ones we use the most.

We baked off the last of the toll house cookies last night. Those refrigerator rolls by Nestles are almost as good as the real thing. We cooked half of them last week (in a weak moment) and finished them off last night. The first time, we made them the size the package called for (8 cookies from a half package) and they were a little small and suffered in the tiny oven (too dark). This time, I made 6 instead of 8 and cooked them at 350 rather than the 400 it called for. It took a little longer but they came out perfect. Hot cookies and milk in the woods of the Kenai Peninsula.

We are still not sure where to go. There is a fishing derby starting up in Seward and we have been warned several times that there will not be any places to stay there as it draws a huge crowd. We have a days grace but people will get there early so we may head down to Homer first and then see. If we have had enough water and fishing people we may just bypass Seward entirely (it is 50 miles off down a side road so if there is no where to stay it is another 50 miles back to the main road. We are wandering so we will just wait and make up our minds when the decision point arrives.

We started another dominoes game last night. We haven’t played for a couple of days but Cheryl is hot and catching up fast. We played until I fell asleep in the middle of placing a domino on the table. I went to bed and Cheryl read for a while. This morning, we finished the game and we are now tied in the overall score. I am really surprised we have enjoyed playing the game as much as we have. Well, time to break camp and see where the road takes us. I hope it is to a place where we can send out the rest of the Denali section. See ya!

As we got further south, the weather closed in and we ran into shower after shower. There wasn’t much to see as tops of everything was in the clouds (even tall trees). Eventually, we came to the Kenai River, a hotbed of salmon fishing. With the recent arrival of the silver salmon, the industry has picked up significantly. Many of the campgrounds and lodges along the way are filled and every stream and river you see has people in them fishing. The Kenai River is a fairly large fast flowing green colored river. There were boats everywhere with people fishing. We did not see anyone catch anything but I am sure they were. We didn’t find much of interest along the way. We stopped at the Russian ferry and watched the people fish. We stopped at a restaurant to eat mainly because they advertised wifi available in the restaurant. It was 3 in the afternoon but there were 5 tables of people eating, 3 of them with computers. The next 3 groups that came in all had computers. Mine of course did not work. It kept telling me that the wireless communication switch was off and needed to be turned on. I didn’t have the manual with me so I could not get it to work so you don’t have your Denali Part 2 still. (I did find the switch this morning so all I need is to go over to the office and send it out.

We continued on right into Homer. This is pretty much the end of the road. The road runs out onto a sand spit (the Homer Spit) and several miles out, there is a little community of shops, fishing charters, bars and campgrounds. Included in all of that is the Heritage RV Park, the most expensive campground I have ever experienced…..nice but not that nice. The only place in town that’s decent syndrome. We are here for 3 nights. They pretty much have everything here including satellite TV, a large putting green, a café and many beachfront sites. We parked kind of cockeyed in our site but it gave us a nice view of the ocean out of every window in the coach except the back bedroom window. We have been far enough away from the office that we haven’t had anyone assigned to either of the spaces around us. We have now been here 2 nights and it has rained pretty much all of the time we have been here. We wandered around the spit yesterday (only took about 3 hours). We checked out all of the shops and charter offices. We decided not to take the boat to Seldovia because of the weather and cancelled plans to go fishing for salmon as our freezer is already so full of halibut that I had to take out the ice cube trays to fit in all of the fish. We are right next to the “fishing hole”, a place that fills with tidal water as the tide comes in and goes out. Fish come in with the tide and people line the outside of this pool and fish. They catch salmon too. We watched for about a half hour and saw many salmon caught. We also watched a sea otter float around the pond. I don’t think they eat salmon but this one was eating something.
We have only the Fairbanks area to go in our travels and we are considering leaving in the next week so we can spend more time seeing more parks. Our original plan was to rush out to Alaska and rush back for the races. We have been thinking that we may leave early and take our time returning. We are considering returning through the Canadian Rockies, Glacier National Park, Devils Tower, Mt. Rushmore, Badlands, Jewel and Wind Caves, Crazy Horse and whatever else gets in our way. Hmmmm. More on that later.

Tomorrow we head back to Anchorage. I hope the weather improves Later!

C2

Denali - Part 2

We are going into our 3rd night (of 7) here at Teklanika. It is everything we had hoped. It is beautiful and an experience we are not soon to forget. This is the first day we have not seen any substantial wildlife but we haven’t tried either. We have been watching a ground squirrel industrially carrying food back to his (or her) nest. I wonder if it the same one we saw carrying a huge mushroom the first day we were here. He had it stem and all and had to carry his head really high to keep the cap from dragging on the ground. We wondered if we would see him swinging from the trees after eating or smoking part of the thing (or are we just showing our civilization again??).

Goodbye for another day. Each day is an event here. You really don’t want to waste them but this day off hasn’t been a waste.

Refreshed we head out for a hike this morning. First an update on our search for the electrical problem. We shut off all of the electricity last night. We left it on for a while but shut it off well before bedtime. This morning, the level of electricity was pretty much the same as we left it last night. I guess that absolves the batteries somewhat. We ran the generator this morning and charged the batteries up again. Before we went on our hike, we shut off the heating system, all the lights, water heater and water pump. The refrigerator runs on propane but electricity plays a part because if the batteries go dead so does the refrigerator. This afternoon, it was better than yesterday but still somewhat drained when we used little power. We have worked up enough of a routine so that this is not going to be too much of a hardship. After all, we used to be tenters and got along without all this stuff.

We poured over the map and decided on something that did not involve crossing the river. There are some cliffs that are visible near here. We suspect that the picture on the Denali web site of Teklanika was taken from the top of those cliffs so off we went to check it out. Since hiking in Denali involves bushwhacking we decided to start in the back of the campground. We crossed a stream and skirted a swampy area onto the park road. We scouted along the road and found an animal trail heading in the direction we wanted to go. We found several instances of moose droppings and some tracks. The animal trails weave in and out of themselves crisscrossing the underbrush. We found one portion of the trail that went up a steep loose sand area and dismissed it as too hard to climb. Our trail traversed for a while and soon we found a rocky path up towards the top of the ridge. We spent some time climbing this figuring that the moose probably passed this by and went around. After a while we came out on top of the ridge and were rewarded by a wonderful view of Teklanika River Campground and the Teklanika River itself. Off the back side of the ridge were several other mountains and the park road winding off into the distance. We continued to climb the ridge stopping to enjoy the views from both sides. We encountered moose droppings in several places along the ridge refuting our thought that no moose would make the climb we just made (we still may be right; they may know better ways to get there off the back side where there were no cliffs). We also encountered wolf droppings. You could picture wolves up here before you would expect moose. Tundra vegetation was everywhere. All of the small plants, flowers, lichen and berry bushes were everywhere. There were blueberries along the ridge. They were ripe but as people had told us, they were tart and not nearly as sweet as the ones we are use to. We did stop and pick and eat some though. We finally got to the cliffs that were visible from our campground and just sat and stared at the river and mountains.

Eventually, our reverie was broken by the sound of voices. We were not alone on our wilderness hike. A German couple soon came into view along the ridge we had just climbed. They were touring the US for 10 months. They had come here and bought a “beater” small motorhome and were “making the rounds”. They had hiked extensively in Europe and were enjoying their stay. They had read a book about hiking the Appalation Trail and were intrigued by it although they didn’t have time to do it.

From the cliffs, we could see what looked like a small cabin on the next hill. We decided to hike down the end of the ridge and check out the next mountain for future reference and then loop around to the next hill and check out the cabin. It was slow going as there were lots of small spruce trees and other brush which made the going tuff. We skirted a swampy area but still found lots of areas that were like walking on a wet kitchen sponge. We eventually came to the “cabin” which turned out to be a water tank. We figured it was the water for the campground. It was 15 feet in diameter and 8 feet high and held 10,000 gallons and was made by the Pittsburg Steel Company (I am not that smart, it was engraved on the side of the tank). As disappointed as we were that we had not found some long lost mountain man’s cabin, we were excited as we expected a more traditional path from there back to the road. We were right; the path came out right in front of the Tek bus stop.

A late lunch, another round of dominoes (Cheryl now leads) and some time for reading and of course a nap. Tonight there is a ranger talk (we missed the wolf talk the other night (bus trip) so we are looking forward to this one (whatever it is about).

The ranger talk was a washout. There was one on Tuesday that we missed as we had just returned from our 13 hour marathon bus ride. On Wednesday, thinking it was Tuesday; we went over to the amphitheater for the talk which of course was a day late. Last night, knowing it was Thursday and the previous talks were on Sunday and Tuesday, we went to the amphitheater only to find it empty. I guess it is Sunday, Tuesday and Friday. I have to pay better attention to the announcements. We took a walk around the campground and at one site, watched a snowshoe hare eating in a fireplace. The fireplaces are shaped like a piece of 55 gallon drum but made of steel. The bunny would stick his head out of the fireplace and look around then go back to eating then stick his head out again. This repeated over and over again. It was a riot. The people in the camper at that site couldn’t see the rabbit, just us. I am sure they wondered about us. We stood at the end of their campsite and just laughed. Someone there kept looking out at us and I am sure it looked rather odd with 2 people in front of your camper rolling on the ground laughing. They didn’t ask, we didn’t knock on their door. That would have scared the hare away.

As we completed our rounds of the campground, someone came out of a camper and got our attention. It was the German couple we had met on our climb. We talked for a while and invited them over to our camper for tea as theirs was too small for company. We visited for a couple of hours. They were really nice. They were here on a 10 month trip. They were going down through the states on the Pan American highway which goes from Alaska to South America. They did not plan to go past Guatemala. Cheryl and Vita seemed to have a lot in common with their crafts and Jan was a hiker and skier. They talked about some of the hikes they had been on (600 and 1000 miles) and how different hiking in Europe was. In many cases the hikes passed through towns and even cities. You could stay at inns and hostels along the way spending a minimum of nights in tents. Not nearly the wilderness they had experienced here at Denali. We exchanged emails and addresses and they invited to visit them in Germany.

RVing in Europe is very different than here. The RVs are much smaller as larger units would have a lot of trouble getting through the narrow streets and under the much lower bridges and tunnels. They said there was also a lot of robberies of people in RVs. They were a target in some (repeat only some) areas.

Well morning generator off time has come and gone so I am working off batteries (which do not last too long). We have to decide if we are going on a bigger hike today (involving crossing the river or finding some other hike or just scoping out the river crossing and leaving early tomorrow as this hike looks to be a fairly long one. Don’t know, we are just drifting through our time here enjoying everything about the place. It changes your outlook on everything knowing you have 8 days and 7 nights.

We decided to take the bus up to Polychrome Pass and see what kind of trouble we could get into up there. We wandered out to the road a little after noon and caught the first bus by. We also met the people camped right across from us. Husband, wife, 2 teenage kids both dressed in black all the time. They turned out to be German tool. We rode up to Polychrome Pass and got off the bus. We scouted around and saw a couple of people climbing the mountain to the right of the park buildings. We checked the map and it seems that Polychrome Mountain is a massive complex of peaks. The near peak that the busses drive around is 4,200 ft and climbable though steep and crumbly. Far off in the back is the main peak which is near the 7,000 foot mark and probably not easily scaled if at all. There are several other peaks around the mountain near 4,000 ft or less. We picked the peak near the road and set out. One of the determining factors was the visibility of several paths to follow. They were certainly not the trails of the east coast mountains but would do for a starter. At one of our breaks, we were surrounded by ground squirrels that popped up, chattered at us and ran around chasing each other. There were large sections of the mountain that were nothing more than broken up rocks and gravel. These sections were difficult climbing. We lunched just below the summit on the tundra (very comfortable). While we were having lunch, we spotted a pair of caribou standing on the ledge where we had taken our first break. We watched them for some time but soon set out for the summit. 4,211 by GPS and 4,212 on the map….close enough. Often you hike with a minimal reward: it is cloudy or raining or just hazy and the view is minimalized or non-existant. The view from the summit of Polychrome was spectacular. Only McKinley was wrapped in clouds; everything else was clear and the panorama of mountains, colors and braided riverbeds took your breath away. We did the victor’s pictures from the top and tried to take a panorama of the surrounding 360 degrees of view but I am sure that the pictures cannot possibly convey what we experienced. We walked along a long ridge back from the road but did not as far as we could. The hour was getting late and we didn’t want to chance all the busses being full. We decided to take a different route down rather than descend the same dirt slides we went up on. We descended a talus slope that was not too steep. This put us into an area of shrubbery that turned out to be a little difficult. At this point, we noticed a caribou at the bottom of the trail we were on. It was feeding and soon lay down. The tour busses kept coming by and stopping to gaze in wide wonder. It turns out from the bus people we rode back with; this was not a great day for wildlife gazing. This caribou was pretty much the best thing they had seen. No bears, no moose and Dall Sheep that were so far away they were little white dots on the mountainside. We made the bottom and headed down away from the caribou (park rules prohibit getting too near the animals unless you are on a bus). That didn’t work as the road at that point falls away from the mountain. As you can imagine, there was quite a backup at the caribou and we spent the next several minutes ducking busses without going over the cliff (no guardrails). Finally one of the bus drivers said we should hike up to the rest stop (all uphill of course). He didn’t think the caribou would present a problem to us and he said he didn’t think the returning busses were allowed to pick up passengers along this area of the road.

We arrived back at our camp, ate leftover spaghetti from the night before and headed over to the ranger talk (finally we got to see one). It was about the relationship of the snowshoe hare to the lynx. They talked about the 11 year cycle of the hare population and the corresponding 11 year cycle of the lynx population. It seems that every 9 to 11 years the hare population crashes followed 2 years later by a crash in the lynx population and the inevitable climb of both once again. They opened the talk by discussing human behavior when meeting bears, wolves and moose (there has never been a human fatality here in the park that could be blamed directly on the bears (I am not sure what that directly on the bears part means, sounds like some hanky panky with the statistics to me). There have however been moose fatalities. The moose here are aggressive and show little of the calmness that our moose at home show (no cute phrases like Bullwinkle either).

We hit the sack early. We were tired. It is noticeably getting dark earlier too. It started to show signs of twilight around 10. The twilight here lasts quite a long time. When it was still light at 11, the twilight lasted until 12:30 when it really started to get dark. Now the twilight is a lot earlier and I can’t say when the dark is.

Today was kind of a washout. This morning we were greeted by low clouds and heavy rain. We spent the morning writing postcards (4 weeks on the road and we are still trying to get the first round out. We played with the pictures on the computer and made up some cards from the pictures we took the last couple of days. This afternoon, the rain let up and the sun came out but it was a little too late to make a serious attempt at a climb and the brush at the lower elevations was still soaking wet. We played another round of dominoes and Cheryl won and still trails by a single game. We have found a game we can play that we both seem to enjoy and play evenly. I spent the afternoon reading and cooking. I made a braised chicken with sweet potatoes. I had to make it on the stove top as the pan I chose wouldn’t fit into the oven with its cover on. The stove has a really small oven. We watched another John Wayne movie (we found a collection of 20 john Wayne movies at Wallmart for 6.95. Most of them are really old B&W where even Gabby Hayes looks young. They run about 55 minutes. We have watched about 8 and haven’t seen one we have seen before but I know there are some at the end of the last disk. I baked some cookies tonight. We ate late this afternoon and probably won’t eat anything but the cookies tonight.

We are off to our last ranger presentation. I will probably split this into 2 or 3 blog entries as it now shows as 9 pages….long winded aren’t I?? We are having long discussions about our tentative agenda. Cheryl would like to see Mount Rushmore and the Badlands since we are all the way out here so we may leave a little early, hit the Canadian Rockies, Yellowstone and South Dakota. More on that later.

We went to the ranger presentation. It was about sound levels throughout the park. Over the last 5 years they have been doing studies on sound levels throughout the park. They have identified areas and acceptable sound levels. The main body of the park is a low sound level area. The idea is to give the customers a wilderness experience including the sound. That is why the generator hours are so short. They want everyone to have the wilderness experience. The area around McKinley is designated a higher sound area. There are a lot of companies flying tours around the mountains and the climber support is all by plane so there is a higher noise level. The lands that have been added to the park in 1980 allow Native Alaskans (not the Indians but all local born Alaskans to hunt portions of the new part of the park and to use snowmobiles there in the winter.

After the ranger presentation, we wandered down onto the river bed and walked around. We watched a bear and 2 cubs feeding on the slope opposite the campground. In fact, it was right in the area we were planning to hike today if it hadn’t rained. People have also seen wolves in the same area. We found some moose prints in the new mud from today’s rain so this river bed is a bustling place.

Denali, Part I of 2

The adventure begins. After our last “civilized” (water, electricity and wifi) night, we headed up the road towards Denali. We have 7 nights reserved in Teklanika River Campground and one opening salvo at Riley Creek. We drove past the entrance to the park to find a store to pick up a few things we hadn’t been able to get such as milk, eggs and bread. Bread was the interesting item. We went into a convenience store and could find no bread. Once we got to the Grizzly Campground, we saw no bread in their store either but on later inspection, they had bread in the freezer. We didn’t look in the freezer so maybe they had it in the first place?? Oh well. We picked up a few things but couldn’t find everything we wanted. Once we got to the park, we visited the Riley Creek Mercantile and found everything else we needed plus a few things.

I digress. We landed in Denali and proceeded to the Wilderness Center. All Campground reservations, shuttle bus reservations and tour reservations are managed here. They also have some information counters and a film about the wilderness aspects of the park. I arrived at the desk (3 people working the desk) and in seconds got someone to wait on me. By the time all my questions were taken care of, there was a long line. When they were getting my campground pass ready, the person waiting on me remarked that we were staying in Teklanika for 7 nights: “that must be a record”. Apparently people stay there for 3 nights (required by the park) and head on out. We planned to use this as a relaxing point and wanted to really feel the “wildness” of the park. They make an issue that Denali has no trails in it. It is a “wild” place. You basically have to bushwhack wherever you go. There are some trails near the entrance but just nature trails and short “safe” trails for those who do not have the time or desire to “see” the park.

We arrived in the Riley Creek area about 11:30 and did a full trip around the Wolf Loop. They had spots marked for Campers 31 feet and longer. We found out that the type and length of your rig determines your fee. Tents are one fee, small campers are another and the bigger motorhomes and trailers are a third fee. The first long camper site we came across had a 2 man tent pitched right in the middle of it. We found a nice level site and proceed to set up (4 minutes). A little later on we met our campground host and had a nice discussion with her about working in National Parks. She gave us a lot of tips and sources of job listings. She and her husband are working at Denali this summer. They were at Yellowstone last summer and are looking for something in Washington State for next summer. This winter they have a job working for an RV dealer in Florida. The job consists of demos of RV Equipment for 2 months each in 3 different locations. They work 15 to 20 hours a week and get site, facilities and salary. They are retired and are living off what they are making while their retirements grow. Worth looking at.

We walked up to the Visitor’s Center. It was a brisk uphill mile+ walk in the rain. You learn to ignore the rain around here or you stay inside much of the time. They had a 22 minute film about the park. There was very little talking mostly pictures and sounds of the park. It was very affective. We hurried back to the camp stopping briefly at the Mercantile (a second time) to buy Cheryl a Wool hat (ok, I got an ear band; it was really cold, low 40’s). Then we hurried over to the amphitheater. There is a group of college student aged people who do nondenominational services in the National Parks. It was drizzling and cold but the service although sparsely attended was warm and friendly. We sang Amazing grace (sounded pretty good considering the lack of people) and another that I was not familiar with that didn’t sound so good as we were not familiar with the tune (we had no music, just words). We visited with them for a while afterwards and hurried back for something to eat before the ranger talk on park birds just 30 minutes later. We had some soup and a bagel and hurried back. Afterwards, we played dominoes until 1 am.

Today dawned late but held promise as there was no rain and some signs of blue sky scattered amongst heavy grey clouds. We drove up to Healy and topped off the propane tank, had breakfast and bought a few treats to scatter among the days of our wilderness experience (wilderness does not mean no Cherry Garcia!). We headed into the park. And soon found ourselves amongst the park shuttle busses. The sky never cleared but it didn’t rain and the clouds were higher today than they had been and we could see the mountains. We arrived without fanfare at Teklanika and drove around checking out the available campsites (they have a pretty good system. They know the total count by type (Tek is all hard sided campers) and do not try to manage the sites. You are given a card with the date you are to check out. You find a site to your liking and hang up the card). We checked out the farthest loop first and found a couple of possibles but when we headed around the first loop, we found a site that had a great view of the mountains and overlooked Teklanika River. Of course (nothing is ever easy) getting the dinning table side facing the mountains (or why bother) meant going past the site, turning the 35 foot camper around (one lane road) and driving about 50 yards the wrong way into the site. It took a while but it is well worth the effort and we will worry about how to get it out of here in 7 days. In exploring our site, we found some animal droppings. There were quite a few of them scattered around. They were oval, about an inch and a half long. We did not recognize them.

We had a nice simple lunch (bagel, cream cheese (for Cheryl) and peanut butter (who else) and headed out for a walk. We walked down on the river bed for a while and planned maybe later in the week to hike down the river bed. We walked up to the bus stop and headed down the road deeper into the park. Eventually the road came back to the river. We saw some birds and small ground squirrels and not much else. We did see some bear tracks on the edge of the road and another interesting “pile” of animal droppings (full of hair). We looked down on the riverbed and saw a mother brown bear and a cub. They were “playing” along the river. The mother chased the cub and rolled him over right into the water. Cheryl got some decent pictures (though a little shaky). It was really cute. Then we kind of lost them and saw some bears (mother and cub) on the other side of the river. They were quite a bit further away but I assumed that they were the same bears. A bus driver who had stopped to show his passengers the bears came out and said that they weren’t the same bears and since we had lost track of the bears on our side, we should hightail it out of Dodge as these bears have been seen several times on the road. We and the other hikers and bikers that had gathered went our separate ways hoping that was the last we would see of these critters for the day at least.

Now we are back at camp. It is generator time so we are charging the batteries for the night and listening to music and writing. Nice way to spend the afternoon/evening. I think we will try to squeeze in another round of dominoes too. We are playing a best of 7 world championship match which is tied 1-1. I also see some fish chowder in our future. Have to get the fish stocks down to a reasonable level so I can fit in the halibut. Yumm.

We were walking around at 11 tonight and noticed that a couple of groups of campers were having a campfire. That in itself is not unusual in a campground but the idea that they were having this campfire in broad daylight at 11 pm made the whole scene surreal. Campfires are jolly times where groups of people get together and tell tall tales and regail each other with humor and wit. I do not believe that this can take place in the daylight. Some modicum of darkness is required to make a campfire raucous. Last night, after the ranger talk, we noticed a new group of campers had arrived in the campsite next to the trail we walked down. Father, mother and 2 kids had set up camp (pretty easy with a motorhome) and had started a campfire. They were toasting marshmallows. The reason that all of this was memorable was that it was raining and they were all sitting around the fire in lawn chairs with umbrellas. One hand holding the umbrella and the other holding the stick with the marshmallow. We did notice the smoldering ruins of some other attempts at campfires, probably during pauses in the rain, but few showed the signs of success. It is 8:00 and time to turn off the generator. I expect another round of dominoes.

Just back from our tour of the park. We took the longest tour and went to the end of the road. That gave us a pass for the rest of the week anywhere we want to go (these Tek passes are limited by the tour you purchase. What a great time. It was another long day though. The tour was 13 hours but we got a break by being an hour out along the route already so we saved an hour on each end of the tour. We got as far as the bridge over the Teklanika River before we stopped for a wildlife sighting. The bridge is just around the corner from where we saw the bears last night. The sighting was for a brown bear and cub. They weren’t playing this morning. They were eating berries and digging up roots and grubs from the base of small shrubs. We were pretty sure they were the same ones we saw last night. The day was dry but overcast with occasional breaks for sunshine, not too bad. We could see the mountains but not the high parts. It wasn’t long before we started seeing animals. We saw several bears then some Dall sheep, caribou and moose then more caribou. Later in the day we saw a big bull caribou right near the road. He had a tremendous rack and looked dignified even if he were eating grass. Soon after, we saw a 3 wolf pups playing near a stream. We watched them for some time. They looked cute but you had to realize that they would be wolves when they grew up. A little later, we saw a full grown grey wolf walking in the road. He went down a steep embankment and walked into some brush. We did get a close look at a moose but when it realized we were there it bolted. Most of the animals were aware of us but not afraid of us. Then would go about their business while we watched. It was a great day but hard on the old butts. At one of our rest stops, there was a bookstore and a small exhibit of hides, horns and scat (droppings). Included in the exhibit were the two scats that we had run across and wondered about. The first (in our campsite) was winter moose droppings (they have distinctly different droppings for winter and summer. The roadside “poop” belonged to a wolf. Ok, that mystery is solved. Tomorrow we hope to hike somewhere. There will not be a ride attached to this hike; I can pretty much guarantee that. Maybe just a day of rest with a hike along the river bed. Who knows? Have to run. Generator off time is once again approaching and supper beckons…left over fish chowder from last night.

I don’t know what is going on with my batteries. Every time they sit, they go pretty much dead. We go to bed at night with nothing on that uses the batteries and in the morning they are dead. This morning, I charged them up fully and by 4:00 they are dead again. Not dead dead but hanging on by a thread. I have checked all of the lights in the compartments (found 2 early in the trip). Generator on time isn’t until 8 so it gets a little cold by then (the furnace runs on propane but the fan runs on DC Power. I checked the water in the batteries and had to add some but it has gotten worse not better. Isn’t it always the way – far away from anywhere I can get it looked at. All I do is remind myself that last year I was living in a tent and there was no heat at all. At least this year I have heat that I can use at 8.

We decided to take a day off today. Our butts were still sore from the long bus ride and we decided that we would just enjoy the campground. We went for a walk before breakfast. We walked around the campground and then walked along a barricaded former utility road that turned into a path along a stream. After breakfast, we studied the topo map we bought. We were looking for some hikes for the rest of the time we are here. There are some really nice looking hikes that we can take right from the campground and we saw several that we would consider from the bus yesterday. The first we are considering is Igloo Mountain. They talked about it on the bus trip yesterday and we can see it from our camper. It is the mountain that we can see from our dining room (that’s kind of a stretch – it is a dining table area). It appears to be about 4800 feet but has an interesting long approach on this side from the Teklanika River that runs along a ridge along several smaller peaks. If we are really ambitious, this route can continue over Sable Mountain which is a little higher (not a goal but certainly a continuation if we are not exhausted by then). The drawback to this is that we have to cross the Teklanika. This is a braided river with one (or more) main channel. It is doable but we can’t see if there is another large channel on the other side. On the other side of camp, there is Double Mountain which is about the same challenge and also has a ridge leading toward the summit. I guess we will just pick one tomorrow morning and head out.

The wilderness here is just that: wilderness. There are no trails in the park (except in the entrance area). The purpose of the park is to keep the wilderness just the way it was. They do not allow trails to build up. When an area gets popular and it looks like overuse is allowing a trail to appear, they close the area until it returns to its pristine condition. This means that you never quite know what you are getting into until you cross over that first ridge. A lot of the park is tundra with a very limited type of growth making the walking moderately easy but you often run into areas of brush and scrub growth that you have to bushwhack through. If you meet 3 groups at any mountain top destination, chances are they came via 3 different routes. For us northeasterners who are used to having trails wherever we go (and books that tell us about all of the trails), this is different and a little difficult. Baxter State Park has the same philosophy as Denali regarding maintaining the wild aspect of the park but they have trails. I think this will be fun and we are both looking forward to it.