Tuesday, July 28, 2015

I: On to Valdez


The city of Valdez is one of the two Alaskan ports that do not freeze solid in the winter.   The Bay of Valdez is a major commercial fishing area for salmon.  The original town of Valdez was completely destroyed/condemned by the 1964 earthquake and subsequent Tsunami.  The town and port moved to its current location after a thorough survey by the Federal Government, where it has flourished.  The town is also known for being the final point on the Alaska Pipeline, and the infamous oil spill from the tanker, Exxon/Valdez.
 
The town of Valdez got on the map during the gold rushes at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries.  On Good Friday, in 1964, an earthquake of 9.4 on the Richter scale lowered the land in and around the original city by some three feet.  The epicenter was out in the Bay and it produced a 30-foot high tidal wave that echoed off the walls of the bay to produce three successive surges eradicating the buildings, and killing nearly all of its inhabitants.
Valdez is beautiful now.  It is a major attraction for tourists ("Nature's Playground"), a burgeoning seaport and a center for sport.  This and other sea arms that connect to the Prince William Sound allow access to glaciers, fish, and wildlife unmatched in the world.  It reminds one of Milford Sound (New Zealand) on steroids!

The Richardson Highway is the only way into Valdez by land.  It traverses over Thompson pass, past glaciers on the Thomson Ice Field, and right by the Horseshoe and Bridal Veil waterfalls before it meanders down to the seaside.  



The Bay of Valdez is filled with wildlife and wonders.  Salmon return here to spawn from the largest salmon hatchery in Alaska.  The roiling salmon-fish shown below did not originate from a river, but from this dead-end hatchery.  The hatchery thus captures the fish, harvests and incubates their eggs, and then transfers the fingerling offspring to remote sites around the Bay to continue nature's cycle.

Sea lions live here year-round and happily rut on the rocks surrounding islands in the bay.   Several thousand sea lions cavort, and procreate on these rock-bound shores with great glee, judging by the intensity of their barks.

The sea lions thrive on the fish in the bay and are especially blessed by the annual surge of salmon returning to the hatchery - where they and the bears hunt regularly at high tide.

Sea gulls also enter into the act, picking up spoils from the sea lion catches (and perhaps, re-depositing them into the bay) from their unique rooming house.

The 2-legged fishermen in the area also capitalize on this process.

Whales enter the bay on their annual trek up and down the pacific coast.  Many spend the summer in the bay

Other animals include deer, fox, sea otters, porpoises, eagles, and those cute little flying penguins - the puffin.   All of these critters can be seen on a day-cruise, during the season.

Two major glaciers reach the sea along this coast: Colombia glacier is receding (pulling away from the shore).  Ice-floes are shucked into the inlet at an astonishing rate.

The Meares glacier more spectacular, as an advancing glacier.  It is over a mile wide at the base, 6 miles long, and extends some 90-feet above the water.  It moves several feet a day.   With great cracking sounds, it calves blocks of ice the size of a house into the bay every hour or so.

You are Here: Trip Miles 2170-2503 (Chicken to Valdez)

Monday, July 27, 2015

H: Gold! And Chicken Alaska

The Top-of-the-World Highway from Dawson City to Chicken is the Bottom-of-the-Barrel Roadway.  But the stopover in the mining town of Chicken was educational and the population was delightful.  Chicken makes an ideal entry point into Alaska and metaphor for GOLD and its influence on the Great Northwest.  Chicken is conveniently located near other poultry-posited-posts around the world
  Chicken Alaska has two large RV parks, a General Store and a Post Office.   Chicken has 115 square miles in it's city limits - about 60% larger than Plano, Tx.  In the summer, Chicken fills the town with residents and tourists; and the creeks and valleys are full of prospectors working their various "claims".  At the last Census, Chicken's population was listed at 7 year-round residents (vs Plano at 269,776).  Only three of these seven Chicken residents live in the urban area of the town: the Postmistress, her husband and an old-timer who …"refuses to leave".

Mike and Lou Busby are proprietors of the Chicken Gold Camp RV park.  She operates one of the most interesting and diverse Gift Shops in the Klondike, and Mike is a Gold-Bug.  He was World Champ gold-paner in 2012, and lists his largest, single pan at 10.75 Oz Troy.   The Busby's have earned their sourdough credentials, but now winter just one state away (alphabetically) in Arizona, about 25 miles north of the Mexican border.  The namesake statue for the city was designed and built by students of a friend of theirs in the Shop and Art classes at a regional high school (fashioned from materials salvaged from their recently replaced school lockers).

Gold was discovered in Chicken in 1894, two years before the Dawson discovery.  But, Dawson was on the Yukon and Chicken was in the boonies.  Mining for gold is still a way of life in Alaska - although Nevada is the largest producer today.  Mining shifted from individual prospectors to major companies just after WW-I.  Big corporations swept into all the major producing areas, bought out all the small claims, and mechanized the process with millions of dollars of capital (a'la Dredges for valleys and Water Cannons to blast away at hillsides).  There are still a dozen or so major companies in the NorthWest, but there are also thousands of individuals operating small claim-sites.   Alaska gold production today is a couple thousand ounces of Gold per year, down from a peak of over a million ounces per year just after the First World War.
In the 80's, Mike Busby took advantage of the downturn in gold production, He bought a Dredge from a defunct company in Fairbanks, purchased claims in and around Chicken and then started digging when the price of gold got high enough to pay back his investment.  Running a dredge takes a tremendous supply of water, a crew outside to prep the ground, and enough fuel to run two 250KW Diesel generators around the clock.  This 80-ton Dredge now sits idle, and Mike gives wonderful tours of the plant, inside and out.   But, Mike tells us that his daughter and her fiancé  are showing interests in re-opening the dredge… see how they run!


Names of cities in the Last Frontier are strong indicators of the spirit, vigor and humor of its citizenry.    
  • Chicken is an interesting name for a town, and the way it came about is even more notable.  Many of the original settlers wanted to name their town after the Ptarmigan, an indigenous prairie chicken.  But, they couldn't agree on the right way to spell Ptarmigan , SO…
  • Not so different is the naming of the port town of Valdez (pronounced here as ValDEEZ).  The Bay of Valdez was named in 1790 by a Spanish explorer, Fidalgo, for the Admiral who was then head of the Spanish Marines.  During the gold rush in the 1890's, the town of Valdez sprang up.  In this case, the townspeople clearly knew how to spell the name they wanted to give the town; but they couldn't agree on the pronunciation.  SO … they voted.
 
Finally our You are here map: As an exercise and an indication of the quality of roads, ask google maps to plot you a driving route from Dawson City, Yukon to Chicken, AK…  See if you get the map for walkers that is shown below.  Tour Miles 2062-2170
 

Thursday, July 23, 2015

G: AlCan Mile 887: Breaking to the Klondike Loop (Whitehorse to Dawson City)


The Fantasy trip diverted from the Alcan Highway at Whitehorse to take the Klondike Loop up thru Dawson City then across into Alaska.  I don't know whether the detour was to give us an impression of what life on the frontier is like, or just to let us see some of the roughest roads on the continent.  Either way, I'm impressed by the hardiness and resourcefulness of the people who inhabit this beautiful but inhospitable region. 

WHITEHORSE is the Capitol of the Yukon Territory (not a Province) of Canada. We had the privilege of spending Canada Day, July 1, there.  The city had the usual parade and a day-long festival appropriate this federal Holiday.   Principal attractions to Whitehorse, (other than the usual Cultural Center and gift shops) are three golf courses, the Klondike Steamship (now land-based, shown in the previous article)  and an amazing fish-ladder.  Mind you, it's airport's having a DC-3 mounted on a pole that actually serves as a wind-vane is rather unique.
  The Whitehorse Rapids Fishway is the longest wooden fish ladder in the world (about a quarter mile).  It was erected in 1959 to allow salmon migration past the hydroelectric dam that provides a large part of Whitehorse's electric power.   This ladder is in continuous usage to conduct research and to inventory the migratory patterns of Salmon and other fishes thru a large viewing/recording window as the fish pass this window.  The fish choose the ladder as an alternative to jumping an eight-foot weir that protects them from the spillway and turbine above it.
DAWSON CITY :  A neat little town just downstream from the confluence of the Yukon river and the Klondike rivers.  At this point, the river is so wide and fast that the only way across is by ferry. Population is now about 1350, down from 30,000 at the peak of the 1890's gold rush.  Two great names you know came from there: Jack London (Call of the Wild) and Robert Service (The Cremation of Sam McGee).

Jack London came to Dawson City from San Francisco in his late teens, intent on making his fortune in gold.  He stayed here just over a year, including their intolerable winter, working his own claim and others along side a number of other miners of like intent.  He left Dawson City with a serious case of rickets and a clear understanding that this occupation was not what he was cut out for.  However, the characters he worked with and the ethos of the gold-rush society provided him with enough material to publish a dozen books and over three dozen articles - which were his path to fortune.
Jack London's cabin was found in the hills near Dawson City by some folks in the 1930's, who identified it by Jack's handwritten signature on the mantle.  Understanding that this was a place of significance, to both Alaska and San Francisco, funds were raised to put a replica (using the original logs from the bottom half) of the cabin in Dawson City, and another (using the top half) in San Fran.  This compromise was of course done without the guidance of the American Historical Society.  Neither replica has the mantle - it's in another museum.  These replicas both still exist, and are maintained for promoting and providing a clearing house for research into London's work.
Robert Service was born in Scotland and came to the North West at the age of twenty one, as a bank employee.  After 2-years, he wandered from BC to California to Mexico and back to Vancouver working at a number of menial jobs and basically living hand to mouth.  Ultimately, he got a job at a bank in Whitehorse in 04.  He'd written poetry off and on over the course of his life, and one of his pastimes was reciting contemporary poetry at local concerts.  It was for one of these that he wrote and recited "The Shooting of Dan McGrew".  Then a month later, he produced "The Cremation of Sam McGee".  These ultimately lead to his first collection of poems "Songs of a Sourdough" which was wildly successful and profitable.  Service was transferred to Dawson City in 08 where he quit the bank and took his money to travel Europe. The returned to Dawson in 12, wrote his third book and left town for good.  He died at the age of 102, a wealthy man from the unheard of feat of profitable sales of his poems while still alive.
Dig the typewriter.

Dawson City picks up the tab to run a ferry across the Yukon river 24/7 all during the summer season (vs the other season, winter - when the town essentially shuts down).  The ferry makes a round trip about every 15 minutes carrying up to 6 cars or 2 RV's/trucks.  This is the only access to the road north to Alaska on the "Top-of-the-World Highway".  Susie, Zoe and I used this on our way out of town.  Our friends Pamela and Terry took photos of our crossing while they hooked up their towd (towed vehicle) on the far side.  Our RV was clean when we left Dawson, but by the time we reached the end of the Top of the World, a thick layer the finest dust known to mankind could be found on every surface, in each compartment, and thruout every nook and cranny of our vehicles.
The tidy little town shown in the first photo above looks significantly different as you go about 2-miles south-west of town.  A Google-Earth screenshot of a patch of land along the Klondike river is typical of what you'll see all along the stream that Bonanza Road follows southward from the tract in this photo.

These weird mounds of rock bring to mind the worm-holes described in Dune.  They are the tailings (piles of rock) from a gigantic gold mining device called a Dredge.  Bottom line, they are an artifact of a single human condition… Gold Fever.

Gold Fever is alive today in the Yukon and Alaska, although perhaps not so well as it was in 1896.  If you zoom in on the west (right) end of front street in the photo of the town shown earlier, you'll see some bleachers beside a fenced-in area between the road and the river.  This gathering is the World Panning Championship, held annually, rotating every 4-years between gold-towns from Dawson to Scotland.   More on this later.

You are here: Tour Miles 1726-2062




 

Monday, July 20, 2015

F: The Yukon to Teslin at Mile 776.5

   On 6/28, we entered the Yukon Territory at Watson Lake and spent the night near the Sign Post Forest. Their motto is The Yukon, Larger than Life.  It is large, just a bit larger than California … but with only one-thousandth the number of people in that 3rd-largest state.

 The next day, we moved on to Teslin: a town of 450 permanent residents, and with rich history in First Nation Culture.  There, we learned about George Johnston: a member of the Tlingit tribe in the early 20th century who was a trader, a photographer and a respected member of his community, and a man whose philosophy has a lot to offer the world today.


  Watson Lake is in a hunting/fishing region.  About the only thing of note in this community is the Sign Post Forest: about an acre of community erected 12'-high posts that visitors use to attach street signs and other customized mementos of their origin.  Of course, our Tour Group added our own signpost.
Teslin is situated at the confluence of Nisutlin River and Teslin Lake: tributaries to the 3rd longest river in the world - The Yukon River.  Teslin began as a trading post.  Capitalizing on the 35mile long lake that allowed ready connection for the Tlingit and exploratory trappers to commerce at Whitehorse - by barge in the summer and over the ice in winter.  Beginning in the late 1890's a sequence of paddlewheel steamers traveled up the Yukon from the West Coast, then on to Whitehorse and eventually to Teslin by rivers and lakes.

The hunting and trapping skills of the Tlingit made them abundantly successful in selling furs and flesh to into the burgeoning marketplace that grew along the river in the early 20th century.  One of the most remarkable of these was George Johnston.  He was an entrepreneur and an early technology adaptor of the first magnitude.  One of his earliest interests was photography.  He photographed and developed photos and movies of his people, their work, their art and their heritage.  These form a significant element of the George Johnson Museum.
  George Johnston also brought the first automobile to Teslin, a 1928 Chevrolet, hauled by paddle-wheel into town some 13 years before the AlCan Highway.  George used the vehicle for hauling during the summer, on short roads he paid his friends to help build.  Gasoline was scarce so he often used naphtha from the druggist for fuel.  In winter, he took the Chevy onto the lake as a hunting transport.  Since it was black, it often kept the animals away … so he painted it white with housepaint as a form of camouflage against the snow.  He used a number of colors for various seasons, just painting over the last version.  This car now resides in the Museum, restored (they hope) to it's original color.


 
A significant feature of the Museum is an excellent documentary film by Carol Geddes* that depicted much of the work and activities of George Johnston.  Unfortunately, I can't find any part of this on YouTube for you.  But, I loved the tag line  ...  In 1951, when George was notified that the Parliament had recently passed significant and favorable amendments to the Indian Act, George responded to the effect … Thanks, anyway - I've got my own Act.

* Picturing a People: George Johnston, Tlingit Photographer, Nutaaq Media Inc.

 You are here; Tour Miles 1327-1620