Prince William Sound

We left Seward this morning and drove 60 miles to the Williwaw Campground near Portage, most of the way north up the east side of the Kenai Peninsula. We parked the trailer and drove 5 miles further to the Whittier tunnel, a 2 ½ mile ONE-lane, dual-use (autos and trains, so rails are laid in the single lane) tunnel mined through solid rock.

After paying our $12 round-trip toll, we passed through the tunnel (which opens only once each hour for travel in each direction) to arrive at the Town of Whittier, which serves as the Port of Alaska. We’re told that 2/3 of the water-borne freight coming to Alaska arrives here. It’s also the closest Alaska Marine Highway (ferry) terminal to Anchorage and Fairbanks. Whittier has a total year-around population of 170, 85% of whom live in a single, large 11-story apartment building as there is NO single family housing here. Talk about a company town! Whittier also receives 170 inches of rain each year, which may go a long way toward explaining its’ population of 170!

From Whittier, we embarked on a 150-passenger boat which was mostly full, for a 5 ½ hour cruise. We saw it all: eagles, humpback whales, sea otters, waterfalls, icebergs, hanging glaciers, tidewater glaciers and thousands of black-legged kittiwakes! We’ll let the pictures tell the story; there are a few included here, plus a link to a Picasa Web album click here. We encourage you to go to the link and play it as a slide show. Bob was lucky enough to capture on camera a calving of a hanging glacier that came down a waterfall channel to the water. It makes an amazing series of about 10 pictures as the ice cascades down the waterfall. If the link doesn’t work, you should be able to reach it by going to the “slideshow” tab at the top of the page, and look for the slide show titled “Prince William Sound”.





http://picasaweb.google.com/BobWhite1/PrinceWillaimSound?feat=directlink

On to Seward, AK

We left Deep Creek Beach on the southwest side of the Kenai Peninsula this morning after saying goodbye to Gene and Joyce, our bloggin’ friends who are now real friends. We drove 140 miles: first north, then east, then south to reach Seward which sits at the end of the road on the southeast side of the Kenai. This is still serious fishing country, but fishing doesn’t seem to overshadow all else as it does on the west side. It also has more varied terrain in terms of proximity to the mountains than does the west side.

After dropping the trailer at the Bear Creek Campground, we drove 9 miles on a side road to the Exit Glacier Visitors Center. From there it’s possible to hike a mile to reach the toe of the glacier, which we did. Exit Glacier is a relatively small tongue of ice flowing from the larger Harding Ice Field. What it lacks in grandeur is made up for by its’ ease of access. We also learned a new word: katabatic. This is a special type of drainage wind that results from cool, dense air that sinks and flows down over the glacier to the valley, with the temperature and density differential causing the stronger, colder wind. Brrrr – we felt it!

We drove back to Seward and spent the afternoon exploring this small seaport town. One unique feature of Seward: there are 4 or 5 municipal campgrounds that only cost $5-10 a night, right in the heart of downtown and mostly on waterfront property. These campgrounds are merely gravel lots with sites delineated by white chalk lines, but how can you complain given the price, view and convenience?!

Tomorrow we’re off to Prince William Sound for our last glacier fix before we start the journey back to the Yukon Territory, heading toward home.

Exploring the west side of Kenai

This morning we took off in the truck to meander through and photograph some of the places Gene took us last night. We visited Ninilchik’s Russian Orthodox Church and adjacent cemetery, noting how many of the gravesites were new, and how high a percentage of the folks buried there died at very young ages, even in recent years.

We also wandered through the tiny village of Old Ninilchik, situated on the shores of both the Ninilchik River and Cook Inlet. The village contains a tiny marina which can only be entered or departed at high tide – otherwise the outlet to Cook Inlet is a very shallow stream.

Leaving the Ninilchik area we headed south on the Sterling Highway toward the city of Homer, taking a 14-mile detour through the Village of Nikolaevsk, a Russian orthodox community of folks who continue many traditions from “the old country”.

Finally we arrived at Homer, a city of 5,500 residents at the southwest end of the Kenai Peninsula. The city consists of “downtown” on the hill above Kachemak Bay, surrounded by gorgeous snow-capped volcanoes and peaks of the Alaska Range, and the Homer Spit, a 4 ½ mile strip extending into the bay, with restaurants, shops, hotels, campgrounds and a marina, including a small deep-water dock with room for one cruise ship (which arrives once every two weeks in summer). We had lunch at Captain Pattie’s on the beach and both had halibut, which we noted tasted fresher and more delicious than any we’ve purchased in Seattle, ever. 

We enjoyed the Pratt Museum, an art, culture and natural history museum at which we spent more time than expected given its’ small size – but it had terrific exhibits, including an informative video about the Exxon Valdez oil spill 21 years ago, which seemed timely given what’s going on in the Gulf of Mexico at the moment. We visited other shops and galleries, and drove through the East End Road residential area.

At 5:45 we met Lea Miner, niece of our very good friends Phebe and Jim Richards, at the “Cups Café”, a super fun, artsy restaurant on the hill, for dinner. Lea has lived in Homer year-round for 10 years. The food was creative and delicious, including fabulously fresh seafood, and we had a lively conversation with Lea who was enthusiastic and gracious in satisfying our curiosity about year-round life in Alaska. She grew up in Boston and has very happily settled into life in Homer, including the long, cold winters, and loves the beauty, remoteness, outdoor emphasis and life in the lovely town at the end of the Kenai Peninsula. What an enjoyable evening! And we made one mistake: we were so absorbed in the conversation we forgot to take a photo of the 3 of us together, despite having our camera with us!

We both concluded Homer is our favorite Alaskan town so far, and though the Spit is quite touristy, it has a real downtown that’s appealing and accessible.

The volcanoes of Mounts Redoubt, Iliamna, Augustine, and Douglas, adjoined by the mountains of the Alaska Range and numerous glaciers provide exceptional scenery, and  proximity to the water provides mild winters by Alaskan standards. We’d also note that summers are “chilly” to our taste – averaging 60 degree high temps in July and August, and colder the rest of the year. Today was sunny and 53.

Deep Creek Beach: All About Fishing

We’re camped at Deep Creek Beach State Recreation Area just south of the small Kenai Peninsula town of Ninilchik. We picked this spot because we have blog friends (more on this later) who are Camp Hosts here for the summer. From what we can tell, we’re the only “tourists” in the campground despite the fact there are at least 40 campers in a mix of tents, motor homes and trailers, all with Alaska license plates. There are perhaps another hundred day-use groups with boats at the spot where the boats are launched. And they’re all here for king salmon and halibut.

There’s an unusual “boat launch” here, and it’s not your run of the mill operation. Boats of all kinds, some up to 32 feet, are launched into the Cook Inlet using what look to be logging skidders. We went down the beach to watch the operation for a while this afternoon, and they must have pulled at least one boat a minute for the thirty minutes we observed. There were three skidders, each with a two-man team: a driver and a second guy who rode the trailer, jumped into the water as the boat ran up on the trailer, hooked on a bowline and then hopped back on while the skidder pulled the boat onto the shore.

They were really hustling to secure the boats, pull them out, unhook, and go pick up another trailer and get back down to the beach. There were at least 100 empty trailers on the beach, so we assume we’ll see a major launch operation in the morning, or perhaps not – we may still be asleep.

Deep Creek Rec Area also has, not surprisingly, a creek. This is really a fast running stream about 30-40 feet wide. Even in mid-afternoon at low tide (not prime fishing time) there were at least 10 fly fishermen out trying for salmon.

Bloggin’ Friends

While in Baja last winter, we got an email from Gene and Joyce Shea telling us they’d stumbled across our blog and were enjoying reading it. We responded, asked a few questions about them, and mentioned we were planning a trip to Alaska shortly on the heels of returning home from Baja. Turns out Gene and Joyce had already committed to serve as Camp Hosts at Deep Creek Beach State Recreation Area this summer, and we quickly became bloggin’ friends (or pen pals, as we’d have called ourselves back in the day). Gene became our “travel consultant” offering tips on traveling the Alaska Highway, commenting on our draft itinerary, and sharing thoughts on “must sees” and ways in which traveling in Alaska is different from other places. We’ve been extremely grateful for all their help, began reading their blog in early May as they headed north, and came to feel we knew them and were friends. As of last night, that became literally true!

Gene and Joyce had us to dinner in their Arctic Fox 5th wheel trailer last night!  Gene grilled pork chops, and Joyce cooked delicious scalloped potatoes, had applesauce to go with the chops, and baked peanut butter-chocolate bars topped with berries for dessert.  We brought the salad and wine.  What a great evening it was! We stayed for FOUR hours, talking and talking, laughing and enjoying each other’s company. Between dinner and dessert Gene loaded us into his pickup truck and took us on a quick tour of a few points of interest around Ninilchik, places we’d like to re-visit in more leisurely fashion today or tomorrow.

So now our “virtual” friends have become real friends, and we look forward to crossing paths as we continue to travel in the coming years. They live in Montana big chunks of each year and promise to visit us if the find themselves in the Pacific Northwest.

Historic Kenai

A Travel Day

 

We left Denali this morning under sunny skies (figures!) with a temperature of 39, and headed south toward the Kenai Peninsula. We didn’t have a plan as to where we might end up for the night, only that it would be sorta “thataway”. Well, we ended up in the town of Kenai, which means we covered almost 350 miles!

Along the way we saw Denali . . . almost! We were driving south on the Parks Highway when we saw the mountain almost entirely exposed. We stopped at a viewpoint and were soon joined by 5 other rigs, all waiting for the last cloud to clear the summit. Wouldn’t you know it? After 20 minutes of watching the last cloud slowly move west, it stalled. We waited, and waited, but it just sat there. We finally gave up, happy to have seen as much of The Mountain as we did.

We proceeded south through Wasilla (nope, no Sarah sightings, but maybe we saw the “First Dude”; he was a burly guy with a mustache in a pickup, right?). We went through the western edge of Anchorage and looked further west to see Russia, but it seems there are mountains in the way. We did find a Costco and bought gas for only $3.30/gallon; it felt like they were giving it away after the prices we’ve been paying!

We then drove further south through the Turnagain Arm and onto the Kenai Peninsula. What a spectacularly beautiful area! We’re camped on the top of a bluff above Beluga Point with a great view of Cook Inlet, and we sat outside in the never-ending sun with a glass of wine and our binoculars, but failed to spot any beluga whales. Maybe it’s not the right season? Now that we’re here, we have 5 days in which we’ll drive maybe a total of 300 miles exploring the area. It will be a nice break from our “road trip”.

Mt. Redoubt, Cook Inlet Alaska

Denali Grand Slam!

 

Denali is a 6 million-acre National Park whose informal motto is “We exist for the animals, not the people”. As a result there is very little public access to the park. There is only one mostly gravel road, 92 miles long, of which only the first 15 are accessible by car. If you want to go more than 15 miles into the park, you have to take one of several kinds of bus tours. We chose the one that went all the way to the end of the road and required 14 hours, door-to-door, to traverse! As a result, it was a “tour” with all that implies: inefficiency, a bit of herd mentality and a good number of people we would have been happy to go through life without ever meeting. In addition, the day started by meeting the bus at 6am, cold, grey and rainy. Despite all this, it turned out to be a wonderful day.

We achieved the “Grand Slam”! They say seeing “The Mountain” (Denali), and the “Big Five” which includes the five large mammals that inhabit the park, constitutes a Grand Slam, something our bus driver said only happens about once every 3 weeks in his 6 years of experience. The “big five” are: moose, caribou, grizzly bear, Dall sheep, and wolves. In addition to those, we also saw Golden Eagles, Hoary Marmots, and Red Fox.

We’re told that visitors have a one-in-five chance of seeing Denali (Mt McKinley) during a visit. Based on that, we were told that seeing it at all was “luck”, so our partial view of the summit of Denali through the clouds counts.

All the sightings of caribou (more than a dozen) were so distant that even with a 300mm lens we couldn’t get a picture worth posting. Luckily we have reasonably good binoculars, so we saw them quite well anyway.

We also saw more than a dozen Dall sheep, a pack of 3 wolves, a mama and her 2 grizzly cubs, and numerous moose, including a mama with two calves.

During the return trip the clouds got quite a bit higher and the sun came out frequently, in addition to the temperature rising quite a bit. We returned to camp about 8pm tired but satisfied. It was a good day in the park!

Denali: No Fly Zone

Well, the weather didn’t clear up, so we didn’t fly tonight, so we did not see this view. We’re disappointed, but stuff happens. Tomorrow we go on the bus, 95 miles into the Park. Hopefully we’ll get a glimpse of The Mountain, some male moose, and Dall Sheep close up. And maybe a wolf.

After we learned we weren’t flying, we went back to the visitors center and took a short hike from there.

In the land of the midnight sun, you can start a hike after dinner and not have to worry about running out of daylight. We’ve decided to call it the moose hike; we saw three females, two within about 20 feet of us, and one at quite a distance!

Denali: Finally a Reason for all the Warm Clothes and Gortex

We spent time yesterday afternoon at the Denali Visitors Center which has some excellent exhibits, loads of information about what to see and do, and a great little bookstore and gift shop. It was sunny and 68 degrees when we sat outside for a beer just before dinner. We’re in a nice campsite surrounded by plenty of trees and privacy.

And then it rained all night! This morning dawned (though it doesn’t really do that here) with heavy clouds and 44 degrees, but the rain abated. We’re told the mountain is obscured by clouds 2 out of 3 days during the summer, so it appears we may have a fairly traditional visit to Denali. 

We headed out in the truck to the Savage River Loop Trail at the very end of the paved road in Denali Park, the last point private vehicles are allowed to go.  Any further and you’re required to ride a park shuttle or tour bus. We took a beautiful hike along the shore of the Savage River through a glacial valley lined by rocky tundra, and terrain rising steeply on the east side, and less steeply on the west.

 

We saw our first two caribou feeding not far off the roadside, and 4 more Dall Sheep (3 female, 1 horned male) high on the rocky slopes above the trail.  Sadly, too far away for good photo’s.

We also saw a woodchuck, a Willow Ptarmigan (a bird which turns solid white in winter, but is cinnamon, brown and white this time of year) and one rabbit. Of the “Big 5” animals people are supposed to most want to see in Alaska, we’ve now seen all except a wolf; the others include a moose, grizzly bear, caribou and dall sheep. Just as we were completing our hike, it began misting and the temperature dropped further.  So we headed back to camp to warm up and have an early dinner. Next, if it doesn’t get cancelled due to weather, we’ll be off for a flight tour of the summit of Denali and a glacier landing.  We checked with the flight operator a few minutes ago, and this morning’s flights were cancelled, but  at least it’s getting brighter this afternoon, so we remain hopeful.

Another Systems Check

Two weeks ago, Bob could barely walk due to a set-back with the back injury he sustained just before we left home.  It was so bad we considered aborting the whole trip. But we decided to try the prescribed pain meds Bob was given by Dr. Kevin in Smithers, B.C., and that did the trick.

 

Today, Bob accompanied Cathryn on the first two miles of her run.  He stopped at that point, not due to back problems, but out of an abundance of caution. He wanted to make sure the problem didn't get aggravated by running too much.  Guess what? “All systems are go”.  Who would have believed it? Not us.

Land of The Midnight Sun

We wondered before we left home how our solar panel would perform in keeping our batteries charged, as we visualized having grey, cloudy weather and campsites with views of the sky obscured by trees. The reality has been quite different. We haven’t had more than an occasional brief shower or hailstorm.  After the first couple of days, mostly sunny skies. We hope that continues for the next few days at Denali!

Taken at our campsite with no electrical hook-up, this picture is of our solar panel controller after we’d already been charging a computer battery for a 30 minutes.  A full charge is about 13.5, a “you’re in trouble” charge is anything less then 12.0.  When we went to bed last night at 10:30, the controller read 12.6.  The battery actually re-charged overnight, and this is the morning reading above.  Now that’s not something we experienced in sunny Baja!

There’s no power shortage here. On the other hand, the season is short this far north, and we suspect during the rest of the year, solar power is of limited utility. Being able to move your home 1000’s of miles seasonally does have it’s advantages.

Fairbanks

We made the 200-mile journey to Fairbanks this morning, passing through 5-10 miles of freshly burned timber. We saw a number of active fire crews in the area, and understand there are crews here from all over the country, including our son-in-law Matt’s brother Greg (an Oregon forest service fire fighter), who is fighting the Eagle fire, very near Chicken where we stopped Monday on the Top of the World Highway. On the way in we passed through the town of North Pole. Can you guess what their theme is?

When we got to Fairbanks we proceeded directly to “All American Tire” to buy 3 new tires for the trailer. While sitting outside at our campsite last night we both noticed there wasn’t much tread left on 3 of the trailer tires. The fourth was much newer, having been replaced in Baja last March due to a sidewall failure. OEM trailer tires are notorious for their short life span, and ours lived up to that reputation, having gotten less than 10,000 miles out of them. While we’ve been extremely pleased with the quality of our Arctic Fox, it appears they didn’t break the mold when it came to tire selection.

We’re now in a state campground right in the middle of Fairbanks. There’s a Safeway and Fred Meyer only one block away! We’ve decided to move on to Denali, 119 miles away, in the morning. It appears the Yukon Territory, SE Alaska and now central Alaska, have primarily two things to offer: the great outdoors and Gold Rush kitsch, and we’ve been way over-exposed to the Gold Rush kitsch already (don’t take this personally Terry and Greg – nothing to do with your boat by this name!), and for a variety of reasons we haven’t got enough of the outdoors (except through the windshield) yet.

By the way the Musher Omelette at Fast Freddie’s in Tok this morning was in fact very good, and verrry big. First time we’ve had omelettes with gravy?

Wildlife count for the day: one moose, too far away for a photo.

Geo-Caching

On another topic, we didn’t previously mention that we placed a geo-cache at the Arctic Circle on the Dempster Highway. “Geo-caching” for those who don’t know, is a hobby undertaken by fans (or fanatics) of using a GPS. Geo-caching is the electronic version of a treasure hunt. There are caches all over the world, though mostly in North America. You can go to the Geo-cache website, type in your location, and it will give you a list of caches within a certain distance. You’re then supposed to use your GPS to find the cache, and add your name to the log, both at the cache and on the website. The difficulty of finding them is rated on a scale of 1 to 5 based on both the difficulty of finding the cache at the site, and the difficulty of the terrain to get to the site. Bob was given a traveling coin (a variation of a cache) by a friend, Linda, in Quilcene, WA before we left. The coin’s goal was to travel as far as possible across North America. So Bob took the challenge. The coin’s identifier is PCXH5V. You can go to the Geo-cache site to find out more if you’re interested

Websites on our Side-bar

Some of you may read our blog and not have a clue who the folks are whose blogs have “rated” inclusion in the list of blogs on our sidebar. We’d like to introduce them.

Aventura Paraguaya: This is our youngest daughter’s blog. She’s 20 years old and accepted an internship in Paraguay for the summer, working in micro-finance. She attends the University of Colorado where she’s double-majoring in Spanish and International Affairs. She started this blog purely for the purpose of chronicling her time in Paraguay, where she arrived yesterday.

Mackenzie and Matt: The Traveling Sullivans: This is our older daughter’s blog, 23-year-old Mackenzie. She and husband Matt live in Seattle and post to their blog mostly only when they’re traveling. They’re currently in Peru and Bolivia for a couple weeks.

The Charmed Life: This is our son’s blog, 30-year-old Ryan. He and girlfriend Jaime live in downtown Seattle, and he blogs about urban life, design and style, travels, food, social events in their life, and found” photos of interesting subjects, plus periodically on topics that fit into no other mentioned categories. He was the first in the family to begin a blog, and the rest of us followed later.

Valerie and Lance: The Chisum family: These are Mackenzie and Matt’s close friends who write a blog about their travels, life, and to keep in touch with family and friends.

Z A Photo a Day: this is the blog of a photographer Bob stumbled across and particularly admires his work. Everyone in our family is a “photographer” of sorts except Cathryn, who is known mostly for telling Bob things she thinks he ought to photograph periodically.

We note the fact that all 5 of us have blogs begs the question: WHY? Perhaps we have large egos, thinking others are interested in so much detail about our lives or thoughts. Perhaps we like to write, or view it as journaling about items of interest to us. Or . . . we’re not sure why else

Dawson City, YT to Tok, Alaska

We left Dawson City this morning for Tok, Alaska via the Top-of-the-World Highway. The journey began with a ferry ride across the Yukon River at the edge of town, during which the enormous (40+ foot) RV parked next to us took up the full length of the ferry and caused it to tip to one side.

The road continued along a series of ridge lines rising from about 2,200 feet at Dawson to 4,200 at one of the summits. You could look down on both sides of the road for 1,000 to 1,500 feet into the valleys to the north and south, hence the name: Top of the World. The road was about one-third paved and two-thirds gravel in the first 70 miles from Dawson City to the Canadian Border. After that, all gravel.

We crossed the border at what must be one of the most remote locations there is, 70 miles from Dawson, and 40 miles from Chicken, the first settlement in the U.S. (if you can call it a settlement; the summer population of Chicken is 22, the winter population is 6!) We have to say, based on at least this road, the Canadians know how to build a better gravel road than does the U.S. We were able to drive 45 to 55 while in Canada, but were lucky to get up to 35 after we crossed into the U.S.

 

The temperatures today were mostly in the low 70s although we had one cooler section between Chicken and Tok.  For about 15 minutes we were in the middle of a heavy hail storm. It dropped from 72 to 39 degrees in just minutes.

It’s  another 80 miles back to the Alaska Highway from Chicken to the metropolis of Tok. We’d planned to stay at a state campground 20 miles west of Tok, but 5 miles out of town we were stopped and told they were escorting cars through the next stretch of road because the fire we’d been hearing about was still blazing away, and the campground we were aiming for was closed. So we turned around and found a nice spot here in Tok. This means that we will, after all, be able to have “Musher” omelettes at “Crazy Eddie’s” in the morning, something our blogging friend Gene spoke highly of.  Next it’s on to Fairbanks for a couple of days and then Denali!

A Puzzler

When coming down the Dempster Highway the other day, we noted two locations where there were a number of white patches, not snow, about 50 feet off the road. We stopped at the second one and found the white patches were pieces of fur!? We picked one up, and it seems to be some sort of animal pelt still attached to skin, but without any bones, other tissue or odor – it’s completely dried. The puzzler is: what kind of animal did it come from, and how did it come to be separated from said animal? Here are a couple of pictures. What do you think it is? There is no head or paws to give a clue.

When we passed through Customs into Alaska, the border patrol agent asked that we open the rear door to the truck cab. He spotted the “pelt” and asked about it. We explained its origin and asked what they thought it might be. They speculated it could be a portion a caribou hide, and that perhaps a bear had killed it. Who knows? Cathryn speculates it might be a Pika.