Along the Frazier River

We've traveled east from Prince Rupert, BC, turned south at Prince George and are now traveling down the Frazier River Canyon heading toward Vancouver. I have downloaded a picture of the Frazier River canyon north of our night's stop at a tiny community named Boston Bar. This portion of our trip is very important to Garth as it is at Hell's Gate, (at the fish ladders installed there to aid the salmon migrating to their spawning streams) that Garth's grandfather, Senator Tom Reid was thanked for his years of service with a memorial plaque. We will visit there tomorrow and take many pictures.
After we visit for a day or so with Garth's cousins in Vancouver we head for home. IT HAS BEEN A GREAT TRIP!

Homeward Bound!

Here we are in Ketchikan, way far south along th Inside passage of Alaska. It is the totem center for the 3 tribes who made them. They were/are carved to tell a story, celebrate an event, or as a funeral totem. They were not worshipped and theyare not religious in nature. But they certainly are impressive. Ketchikan has several places where they are displayed along with many throughout the town.

To get into town from Wrangell we had to back the rig onto the ferry! Pictures tell all. The deck hands were very experienced and the 2 rigs went in rump first. I will try to upload a pic for you to see this! Well well, it worked!

We have spent our 3 days in Ketchikan and have come down on the ferry for our last trip to Prince Rupert, BC, Canada. We will separate from Jan & Walt tomorrow morning (our farewell BBQ is tonight) and we drive 900 miles in 3 days to Vancouver. After Garth has a couple of days to visit with his family there we drive for home, stopping only to pick some blackberries! Garth insists, he has such fond memories of this when the kids were small. No pies though as my arm is in a cast (doctor in Wrangell did a nice job on the cast. He was also very pleased to see an amazing amount of healing for 2 weeks).

So please come to the Clan picnic! Hope to see you there!!

Along the Inside Passage

The double eagle is on a Russian cannon atop Castle Hill in Sitka. It dates from the time Russia controlled this land. The ceremony concluding the sale of Alaska to the US is reinacted here on Caastle Hill each year. The original USArmy, the 9th Infantry, returned to Sitka 100 years later on the statehood year to participate again in ceremonies marking that momentous event.

As we work our way south down through the Alexander Archipeligo (named after Tzar Alexander of Russia) we are reminded of how much this land was influenced by the Russian-American Period. Place names, churches, family names... so many are Russian. Demetrioff is a very common family name here, and the Eastern Orthodox Church is alive and active in most communities along the Inside Passage. The town in the above picture is Sitka, grown a lot since 1965!

We have turned the corner of our trip and are on the homeward bound leg. This is a good thing as I am seeing a doctor today (we are in Wrangell, named after a Russian, what else?) to check on my arm. I suspect they will want to cast it, an event I hope to avoid!

Tomorrow we are on our penultimate ferry journey down to Ketchikan, and we will go through The Narrows, a water passage even more narrow than the one in the picture above! I hope to find internet again before we drop into Camp Pendleton for the Clan Donnachaidh Picnic.

Onto the Marine Highway

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As you can see we have begun a most exciting part of our trip! We have loaded both rigs onto the MV Malaspina for a 4-hr ferry trip to Juneau. This ferry was one of the 3 we were on in '65 when we came down the Inside Passage with my folks & 2 other rigs with family members. How exciting to be able to ride again on this elegant vessel!
The photo is of the rear of Jan & Walt's 5th wheel disappearing down onto what my 20-yr USN father insisted on calling "the tank deck".
And yet another glacier spilling down into Lynn Canal...
The less than exciting news is that in a hurry (there's a message there...) I tripped & fell inside the rig. Thinking to spare my knee I fell instead on my wrist and broke 4 bones in my hand & arm. Nice. Garth transported me 125 miles to the nearest Urgent Care where they decided the bones were nicely aligned, although quite broken, and I am the proud owner of a removeable-type cast, and a bottle of Make-Mary-Loopy Pills. It does allow me to unwrap it (well, it allows my RN mother to unwrap it!) so I can shower VERY carefully, with much help. All good for laughs. Well...maybe not.
I will not bore you with details, although there are certain elements of low humor.
We have really turned the corner here in Alaska. I said we were going to allow autumn to chase us out... and she is doing so ably! Temp overnight 2 nights ago was a very chilly 34 and days hover in the 50-60's. Gorgeous weather as the photos show but a decided nip is in the air indeed.
The bears gather at every salmon-spawning stream and our campground host in Haines said there were 20 bears living in the park vicinity. Makes you look carefully when you step out of the rig. And we don't leave the rig unlocked as bears can easily open the latch...and a bear would regard Pigs as a tasty alternative to a steady diet of salmon. Snack! Yum!
We are in a private park in the city of Juneau and the signs loudly state "Don't Feed the Bears!". Comforting, um?
In a day or so we will go as foot passengers out to Sitka (and Pigs will go to a Pet Nanny here in town) and we will stay overnight at a B & B there. We missed Sitka in '65 and are eager to see the capitol of Russian Alaska. Ghosts of cossacks and onion-domed churches.. how romantic!
Since this is all typed one-handed I will stop for now. We will be home in time for the Clan Donnachaidh Picnic. See you there!

Fishing Bear

This evening, before we shared dinner with Rob & Sue we drove over to the other side of the Sound, closeby the Alyeska Pipeline Terminal and we were fortunate enough to see a black bear come down and fish for salmon in a pond beside the road. This evening we saw a couple of seals, an otter, an eagle, and the black bear (Ursus Americanus, as opposed to the grizzly or brown bear Ursus Arctus). And as long as I'm talking naughty, let me say that I did not approve of the change from the species of browns: Ursus Arctus, Ursus Toklatii (the Toklat blonde grizzly of Mt McKinley Park, and Ursus Horriblus (the incredibly large grizzly on Kodiak Island)... lumping all those lovely names into just one genus & specie of Brown Bear, Ursus Arctus. But oh well, since they didn't ask me...

We will travel with Rob & Sue back north on the Richardson Highway tomorrow to the junction with the Glenellen Highway, where they will turn southwest and return toward Anchorage and we will continue in a northeasterly direction toward Tok.

Hopefully the weather will lift and we will have better travel sights along the highway!

Valdez was charming, and Garth really enjoyed his trip to the museum with Rob. Sue bailed on yet another museum and chose to do that wonderful female activity... shopping.

We are not sure when we will reconnect with Jan & Walt, but since there are limited road possibilities (there is only one road, not to put too fine a point on it!) we are waiting to hear from them about their repairs and expected date for leaving Anchorage area. One suggestion was that they drive down to Valdez and take the Maritime Ferry over to Haines and save themselves 600 miles driving. We are scheduled to board the Ferry at Haines on Sept. 2nd so we don't have a lot of options available. I'll keep you posted on this exciting (read: expensive!) challenge to their travel plans.

The picture of the glacier was one I thought particularly nice with the evening sun striking the glacier through the clouds. Taken from across the Sound, I believe it's Valdez Glacier, but it might be any one of 3 glaciers hanging over the area!

Dinner was delightful and for dessert we had a second round of slices from the Raspberry-Rhubarb pie I made yesterday afternoon. We picked the rhubarb at the Matanuska Borough Park and the raspberries from a site along the Glenellen Highway where they grow wild beside the road. Fresh-picked made the pie especially nice we all thought!

Down the Richardson to Valdez

We traveled today down the Richardson Highway to Valdez. This relocated city was the epicenter of the Good Friday Earthquake of 1964. At 9.2 the city was pretty much destroyed and the US Army Corps of Engineers said the land was unstable so 52 buildings were relocated. The ones unable to be moved, owing to the extent of damage, were burned clear the land. More than half of the city slid into the ocean during the quake. The new city is a bustling community, with tourism, fishing, and the Alyeska Pipeline Terminal providing income.
The photos are of Worthington Glacier and Keystone Canyon. Both are on the road down to Valdez. You can actually walk right up to the glacier, but it's not recommended as the face is unstable, of course! Keystone Canyon was the site of a gun fight, written about in the book by Max Brand titled The Iron Trail. The gun-fight came about when several railroad companies were trying to build a line up through the canyon to the copper mining region (called Copper Center now).
So many of the mountains, rivers, and lakes were named by various expeditions of the US Army. A promising young lieutenant, named William Mitchell, who built a road up Keystone Canyon, really pushed for Alaska to be a state, recognizing it's military importance. He said, "Whoever controls Alaska, controls the North America." He is more commonly known as Billy Mitchell and is the father of the US Air Force. He was posthumously awarded a non-combat Medal of Honor.
There is a Mt. Mitchell on the Richardson Highway, named after him.
We walked within a few hundred yards of the face of Worthington Glacier, pictured above. There is a small lake and a quarter mile of glacial moraine now where the glacier had been in '65 when we were here before.
In a few minutes we will leave with Rob & Sue and go over to the other side of the bay where there is a bear that comes every evening to fish for salmon. And there are bald eagles there, too, who eat the parts the bear leaves behind. It will be neat if we can see them too. We took Rob & Sue to see the grizzly bears hang out and fish on the Kenai but only one came that evening so we are hopeful that we will see more bears today.
Our next stop will be Haines where we will board the rig onto the Alaska Maritime system and begin our journey down the Inside Passage. I'll try to find internet access and send along more pictures!

Glaciers at Katchemak Bay

These pictures are from our week down io Homer on the Kenai Penn. The glaciers pour into Katchemak Bay across from us. We were camped out on the Spit at a city camp ground. It was incredible.

Garth's brother Rob and his wife Sue have joined us for 10 days. They are traveling in a rented RV and joined us while we were on Turnagain Arm at Portage Valley. The day we took Mary Kasenberg to the airport after her week with us, they drove in from a week up around Mt. McKinley.

We've come north today, stopping at the Russian Orthodox Church, the oldest building on the Penninsula, built by the Russians before Steward bought Alaska from the Russians for 7.2 mil. What a deal he got! A retired priest was there to meet us and tell us about the community of Kenai, a town of 5000 here on the Kenai Penn.

Tomorrow we leave the Kenai and return through Anchorage to the Palmer-Wasilla area. We will overnight in the same Borough Park (Alaska doesn't have counties, they have boroughs, instead) we stayed in when I went salmon fishing. Then we will leave and take a 2-day trip to drive to Valdez, traveling along the Richardson Highway, which is very scenic, we remember from '65.

Rob and Sue will leave us there and return to Anchorage to catch a cruise back down to Seattle and we will hook up again with Jan & Walt (who are traveling slower than we).

Tonight we will drive 7 miles away and see if the grizzly bears are still coming to the bank to fish for salmon. Rob & Sue would love to see them, so we have high hopes!