Alaska
June, 2010

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©2010 James Teitelbaum.  All rights reserved.
Use of text or images contained within this document is strictly prohbited.

Persistent prologue: I write these travelogues for myself, so that twenty years from now, I will be able to remember as much about these trips as possible.  I include as much detail as I can cram in, so as to get it all fixed in writing before the memories fade.  I share these with friends, family, and any complete strangers who find them, because people express interest.  I know that these writings do ramble on a bit, but I do not require an editor; these writings are here as aids to my own memory, not as attempts at serious travel writing -- although anecdotes from these journals have formed the core of my more formalized and proper travel writings, which have appeared in print and elsewhere on the web.

PART TWO.
Denali and Fairbanks.

Saturday, July 03, 2010

Got up at 9:00 am, took a shower, and headed down to the lobby for their “complimentary" continental breakfast. Oatmeal, fruit, muffin, orange juice. Renee was still sacked out when I got back. She had been having trouble sleeping. She later mentioned having had nightmares Friday night. While she got herself moving for the day, I compared my notes from the Kenai Fjords boat trip with the ones in her real-time scrapbooking / journaling project.

Once again, it is grey and a little rainy outside. We haven’t been poured upon during this trip, but it has been drizzly or misty more or less the whole time, and the FPRC has indeed already proved to be a good investment. Today’s mission was to make the 240-mile drive to Denali National Park, stopping for sightseeing along the way. We planned to make it to Denali in time for a short inaugural dinnertime hike, before making our major excursions into the park over the next few days.

Our first stop was to be Thunderbird Falls (mile marker 25.2 coming from Anchorage, or about ten miles from Eagle River). The mission to see a waterfall a mile into a forest was aborted due to a combination of increased rain and a $5 parking fee. Just didn’t seem worth five clams for a short hike in the rain. Near to there was to be our second stop, Eklutna Village Historical Park (mile marker 26.5). My notes said: “Dating back to 1650, the park is the area's oldest continuously inhabited Athabaskan Indian settlement. Snap some pictures of the colorful Spirit Houses build (sic) over the graves of the deceased - a custom that came from the melding of the cultures". Sounds interesting. I was rather keen to visit some Eskimo peoples living in a traditional way. I wanted to see some Tlinglit or Haida art in situ, as opposed to in museums, and especially as opposed to the endless ersatz totem poles in all of the Anchorage gift shops. When we arrived, we discovered that this Athabaskan village had been co-opted by Russian Orthodox missionaries. The admission booth-cum-gift shop was chock full of Christian propaganda. This “melding of cultures" mentioned above was not a melding of different Eskimo cultures, but the desecration of the Athabaskan culture by misguided missionaries, arrogant in their narrow-minded conviction that their religion is the only “right" one. Christians really piss me off sometimes. Jews and Muslims do too. Bickering over which of their fairy tales is most “right" is a pretty fucking stupid thing to do, and they all do it. Anyway, the mousy church lady in the shop wanted $5 per head to look at a collection of brightly colored dog houses. These were the spirit houses, and they didn’t look like anything that a Tlinglit or Haida had ever had anything to do with. They looked like they were made in Detroit. R3 said that the ticket woman was afraid of me. We passed. Zero-for-two on sightseeing so far today. Alaska Route 3, also called George Parks Highway, is the only road from Anchorage to Fairbanks, which is 360 miles north. The Denali National Park entrance is about two-thirds of the way up that single lonely road. The longest spur road along that entire route is the 15-mile detour to Talkeetna. I made good time, traffic wasn’t too bad. Passed the time by exploring safe opportunities to pass lethargic RVs on the single-lane highway. I was doing 70 mph for long stretches, until ending up at the back of a five-car snake crawling behind an RV doing 40 mph. Waited for a straight, clear stretch with good visibility, put two hands on the wheel, focused, gave it some gas, pulled into the opposite lane, passed the posse, and got back up to speed... until the next RV blockage. We must repeat. I wasn’t in any hurry, but I’d rather see nature and the open road ahead of me, as opposed to following a glut of slow traffic. I can have that experience daily in Chicago.

What is most surprising is that this route isn’t nearly as amazing as the road into the Kenai Peninsula and on to Seward is. Sure, it is pretty, with plenty of forests and some mountains in the distance. If I’d come this way before going to Seward, I might have been more impressed. But after the Seward drive, the Anchorage-Denali route pales a bit. That said, I drive from Chicago to Cleveland two or three times a year, and I’d give up just about anything to have that bland slice of tarmac be ten percent as interesting as the road to Denali is... it’s all relative!

11:50 am, 423.7 miles on the odometer, mile marker 98.7. Getting close to half way to Denali. Turned off the main highway to make a small detour to the town of Talkeetna. This “authentic pioneer town" is a staging area for flightseeing, fishing, and climbing expeditions. There are supposedly good views of Mt. Denali here, but not today. Skies are too cloudy. Talkeetna is sort of artificially quaint. It is a cultivated attempt at charming as opposed to a naturally occurring charm. All of the buildings here are relatively new, except for the Fairview Inn, built in 1913.
The quarter-mile long strip of shops, restaurants, and crafts galleries was crowded full of weekend sightseers waiting for clear weather. We walked to the uninspiring beach; covered with pebbles and gravel, with water as grey as the sky. Then, an antique store called Junque Lady. Bad name for a shop. If you’re trying to convince people that your old stuff is precious, don’t call it junk. This goes back to that marketing thing. People who are surrounded by so much natural beauty don’t really have much use for an urban vibe; they don’t know how to work it. So they call their businesses Train Wreck or Junque Lady. Another prime example: Edwin the Jewelry Man is set up on the prime street corner in town (ok, so it is also the only street corner in town), selling his wares from a card table with his business name written along the front edge of the table in Sharpie. Just not good marketing, people. You’re going to buy jewelry from this guy?  First thing you see when you roll in to town is the guy selling his supposed valuables from a card table?  Iron pyrite and cubic zirconia.

Stopped in the Wildflower Cafe because the salmon and mushroom bisque advertised outside looked enticing. We split a bowl of that for $6. Renee washed it down with a Pick Axe Porter from Sliver Gulch Brewing in Fox, Alaska. Too early in the day for me, plus I have to drive. I took a sip though. The porter was a little thin for my taste, but Renee liked it. The bisque was a little lukewarm. Total was $11.

Directly across the street is a new brewery, Denali Brewing Company and Tasting Room. They’ve only been open eleven months. Five ounce tasters are $1.50 and a full twelve-ounce beer is $4.00. That means you can get three tasters for $4.50, and at fifteen total ounces that’s a much better deal. And you get the variety that way. We weren’t staying that long, however. Renee got a taster of the Chuli Stout. Smoky, not too sweet, creamy.

Off the main drag is a small hangar that was once the home of Don Sheldon’s aviation business. Now it houses the Sheldon Community Art Hangar. When I first told Renee about the “community art hangar", she thought I was kidding. Out front, a lot of artists and crafty types were selling their wares from little white tents, like you see in crafty festivals all over the world. Inside, they have a movie about Sheldon once a day, and rotating exhibits by local artists. They also host live theater.
Laura J. Nutter was the best of the handful of artists who had each contributed a stack of little 5” by 5” paintings, all hung on the wall in a grid. Some of her lil’ paintings were of local fauna, others were slogans like “only calm submissive behavior will be tolerated", and “painting well is the best revenge". Next, we took photos of an old Alaska railroad train car, which may have been the highpoint of the Talkeetna visit. We climbed all over it and explored the inside through ancient cloudy glass.  By 1:30 pm, we were back on the Denali trail, having deemed our seventy minutes in Talkeetna to have been about thirty minutes longer than the trip was worth.

Made it to the edge of Denali National Park by 2:13 pm. We still had nearly a hundred miles to go before getting to the park entrance, and to the small cluster of shops and motels near the only spur road leading to the interior of the park. Until then, it was just more wilderness along the George Parks Highway, with no towns and no intersections the whole way. The quality of the landscape picks up here too. A vast, vast valley with mountains dozens of miles in the distance greeted me around one curve in the road; the huge expanse of landscape spread before me was probably large enough to fit the state of Rhode Island comfortably. Crossing the bridge over Hurricane Gulch further restored my faith in the majesty of the Alaskan landscape.

Denali is the Athabaskan name (meaning “the high one") for what many people outside of Alaska call Mt. McKinley. This is the highest peak in North America. It was named Mt. McKinley after a man who had nothing to do with the future president, but when certain Alaskan politicians needed the support of William McKinley, it was implied that the mountain had been named for him. Later, once McKinley became president, there was certainly no reason to change the name of this little hill. The name has stuck in the lower 48 states, but Alaskans of both Caucasian and Eskimo descent have always called the peak Denali. In 1975, the state of Alaska officially began recognizing the Athabaskan name exclusively, but thirty-five years later, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names has not yet ratified the change on a national level. Two million acres of land around the peak have been national park land since becoming earmarked as a preserve for Dall’s sheep in 1917. The preserve’s size was tripled to six million acres in 1980. Both the mountain and the national park are called Denali.

Renee and I were almost denied the opportunity to enjoy this piece of real estate -- or, for that matter anything else, at all, ever again. At 3:30 pm, mile marker 222, with 573 miles on the odometer, we were sixteen miles from our lodgings. Weather had cleared up - it was nice and sunny, finally, and the pavement was dry. I was coming up a hill and around a bend, driving safely and slowly, not concerned with passing anyone. It was then that I was confronted with a giant blue semi, carrying a load of huge logs. Problem was, the driver had apparently lost control of the truck coming down the hill and around the bend, and was in our lane. Moving fast. Because of the bend, I didn’t see him until he was terrifyingly close. I swerved, almost going off of the road, and hence off of a cliff, and narrowly missed being completely flattened.

It is not bears that I need to fear in Alaska.
People kill people.
Negligent, self-absorbed, irresponsible, unskilled people.
Almost no one gets to chose how we die.
But I’d prefer not to check out in the hands of a random stranger who couldn’t handle the responsibility of operating the machinery of their trade in a competent manner.

As we drove the last sixteen miles to our hotel, Renee and I were both very quiet.

A few minutes later we made “downtown" Denali. Two convenience stores, a half dozen motels, a gas station, a few gift shops, and a handful of restaurants.
Among all of this is a little tiny dirt road which heads up an incredibly steep grade.
A short way up that vertical road is the Denali Crow’s Nest cabins (mile 238.5 on Parks Highway, on Crows Nest Road, one mile north of the Denali National Park entrance). This was the most expensive of all of the expensive places that we stayed in, but it was also our favorite - although there were problems. For $372.36, we had two nights in a little cabin with its own bathroom, perched high on a hillside overlooking the edge of the National Park across the road. We asked, once again, for a quiet room, and were given the cabin all the way at the far end of the row of about ten cabins. Cool. Another row of cabins are perched a bit further up the hill. We were in cabin 411.
Last night in our hotel, we were in room 114.
Significance? None at all!
Signs in the room reminded us that the room was not squirrel-proof, so we took care to stow all of our chow supplies in plastic bags on a shelf high above one of the beds.

And then, finally, we headed to Denali National Park.

There is only small one road that leads from George Parks Highway into the interior of the six million acre Denali wilderness, and it only penetrates 91 miles into that vast wilderness. Private vehicle traffic can only travel the first fifteen miles. After that, it is shuttle busses only until mile 91. There are half a dozen bus stops along the road. By the time the road ends at a place called Kantishna, it has given access to only a fraction of the vast land. After that, one straps on a pack, and wanders off into the wild. From this point on - and for that matter, from more than a few dozen yards away from any point along the road in any direction - it is all nature, completely untouched.

Near the park entrance are a Visitor’s Center with a small museum, maps, and park information, and the Wilderness Access Center (WAC) where one meets their departing shuttle busses, and buys tickets for said bus. We spent some time in both buildings examining the sketch of a plan that I had assembled before leaving Chicago, and fleshing it out. We were going to do a short hike with the remains of today, but do longer and more intense day trips the next two days, coming back to our cabin both nights.

We started planning the next two days. We both took issue with the fact that even with two different buildings for people to get situated in, there isn’t a lot of organized information about what to do. We know that there are busses that as far as 91 miles into the park, but there is nothing to tell us why we might want to travel to any given point along that route versus any other point. We had to stop in the souvenir shop and read some third-party travel books in order to decide what we wanted to do with our time. I usually come on trips well prepared, having done a lot of research before leaving home. But this time, my planning was a little more loose. This uncharacteristically casual attitude was a mistake. Pre-research is imperative in the case of a Denali visit: do not expect to be able to wing it.

The first thing that we learned was that the bus to Kantishna takes a good six hours to travel the 91-mile road. That’s an average speed of about fifteen miles per hour. In addition to the few stops along the road, the busses also stop for wildlife viewing. The Kantishna journey is best suited for people who will be embarking on deep wilderness camping from that point. Otherwise your whole day is wrapped up in sitting on a bus for at least twelve hours (round trip).

I’m not experienced enough of an outdoorsman to have even considered deep wilderness camping, but I wanted to do more than sit on a bus. We’d originally planned to go as far as Wonder Lake, the stop prior to Kantishna. At mile 85, the name of this place sounds so magical, and the views of Mt. Denali are said to be great from here. But guess what: it was going to be cloudy and grey and rainy. We wouldn’t be seeing Denali on this trip, no matter what. I was told that only 15% of people who visit the park ever even see the mountain, even from Wonder Lake. Most people will only glimpse it on exceptionally clear days, or else will have to take a flightseeing prop plane, chartered at great expense. The lure of Mt. Denali is not a reason to visit the eponymous park.

Looking at a huge three-dimensional topographical map laid out on a table, I noted that shortly after the stop at Eielson Visitor Center at mile 66, the terrain flattens out a lot. I wagered that going further than Eielson would be a waste of both time and cash (naturally, the bus tickets are pretty pricey -- $46 to Kantishna, $42.25 to Wonder Lake, $30.75 to Eielson), and even the Eielson run meant we’d be on a bus for eight hours, round trip. That seemed like plenty. So we got tickets for Eielson.  We also had to pay $10 for a one-week park entry fee, so Renee and I each ponied up $40.75 for a 9:30 am ticket to Eielson the following day. The cool thing is that after departing at our scheduled and ticketed time, we can jump off the bus at any point to hike or explore, and then jump back on any other bus that we could flag down. The bus drivers will all stop for “hitchhikers", provided they have room. This would be our biggest excursion day; we planned to hop off the bus and walk into the wild for at least a few hours.

The day after that, we planned to drive the car to Savage River, at the fifteen-mile point (the furthest into the park that private vehicles can go), and hike along the river.

As for today, it was now after 5:00 pm.
Fortunately, the sun was many hours from setting.

Denali prides itself on having few established trails; this is all part of the wilderness preservation efforts. However, there are a half dozen relatively short trails near the Visitor’s Center. These would be a good introduction to our Denali adventure, especially given the lateness of the hour. We found a map of hiking trails, and decided to do the three-mile (round trip) Horseshoe Lake hike first, followed by the shorter Morino and Spruce Forest hikes, which form a sort of short figure-eight. The only problem is that in their anti-trail-centric viewpoint, the park service doesn’t make it super-easy to find the trails. R3 and I are both nerds who look at maps for fun. In fact, the first present she ever gave me was a freaking map, and I was thrilled by it. And still: neither of us could find the trailhead... which was like ten yards away. Nice.

The hike to Horseshoe Lake crosses the Nenana river, and has elevation changes of about 250 feet. The trail goes mostly through a hilly forest, but gets off to a questionable start: it parallels a parking lot for a while, which doesn’t really give one the illusion of being in the wild. By the time we got deeper into the forest, it had started to rain again, and by the time we got to the lake, it was coming down pretty hard. This was actually maybe the heaviest rain we had been stuck in to date. No matter, the FPRC saves the day once again. Travelers: bring your Fancy-Pants Rain Coat to Alaska, you won’t regret it. We pressed on with minimal discomfort. The trail looks down over the lake from a hundred or so feet above it, and then slopes down and around, until it reaches its end at ground level on the far side of the lake, right next to an amazing beaver dam. This dam must be forty feet long, and it completely blocks off a significant section of the lake, creating a swampy area on the other side. We didn’t see any beaver. I am sure that all of the foot traffic ensures that the beavers stay hidden. We encountered a dozen or so other people on the trail. After standing under a pine tree, trying to stay dry, and marveling at the dam for a while, we headed back just in time to see some jackass ignoring the sign advising people not to climb on the dam, by doing just that.

One other odd thing we saw was a little tiny path, maybe thirty feet long and only a foot wide, but obviously well-worn. At the end of it was an oval cleared of plant life with a lot of old bones in it. The bones had been stripped of all gristle. It was weird because it didn’t look natural. Why would a small perfectly cleared patch of land exist in the middle of this moderately dense forest, with a path to it from the main path, and why would an animal just happen to die there? And, the bones were old, bleached white by scavengers large and small, plus the weather. It was almost as if they’d been placed there on purpose.

The light here has a tiny bit of a strange purplish cast to it. I kept thinking that the exposure or color rendering on my new camera were screwed up (I spent a lot of time on this trip fiddling with and learning the new Canon G11). But no, it’s the midnight sun getting low in the sky and reflecting off of the grey clouds. The slight purple haze on the rocks and on the water contrasts the green plant life everywhere, making for a very subtle surreal look to the world.

We got back to the car at 8:20 pm. Renee announced that she was feeling nauseous, and could not go on the second hike. We still had plenty of daylight, and the second hike was short, but she said she’d been getting steadily sicker all day and had reached her limit. So, we went back to the cabin, and I gave her some of the antacid tablets I had brought. On the way out of the park, we saw a big porcupine waddling across the road.

I hung out in the room for a while after Renee laid down, but I was far too restless to remain there. At about 9:00 pm, I went down the hill to the cluster of commerce, and landed at Prospector’s Pizza. I’d told Renee that I would either be there, or at The Overlook, which is owned by the company who owns the cabins. Checking out Overlook first, I deemed it unremarkable, but I did notice that they carry Lambic ales there. What a coincidence. R3 had been saying earlier, before she got sick I guess, that she was in the mood for one of these (the Framboise, to be exact). I decided to save it as a surprise for the following night: July 4th.

Tonight was Saturday night, and the eve of Independence Day. The small enclave of business isn’t exactly a destination in and of itself, but it’s the only place for food or drink for many miles. The nearest excuse for a town is Healy, a dozen or so miles north of here. Thus, the small strip was packed with people enjoying ice cream and herding their kids around.

Prospector’s Pizza has declared itself historic, naturally. Seems that everything in Alaska that has been around longer than 1985 is “historic". The bartender told me they’d only been open for a few months. He also told me that they were owned by the same company who own Salmon Bake. There is a Salmon Bake here in the Denali area, as well as the one we tried near Seward. The walls at Propspector’s are painted deep maroon, the ceiling is quite high. An eye-level half-wall separates the bar area from the restaurant. Taxidermy adorns the place - one can’t escape it in Alaska - as well as many photos of historic Alaskan settlers and gold miners. After perusing the 49 beers on tap, but not ordering one, I asked for a large pizza with salmon on it. The pizza was surprisingly good (this is coming from a Chicago-based pizza snob), and salmon as a topping works pretty well. The salmon was shredded, looking not unlike what you’d expect from canned tuna. Of course it was fresh, not canned. Before the food arrived, Renee showed up, apparently feeling much better already.

The kid serving us was saying that the road into Denali beyond Eielson isn’t that interesting, confirming my suspicions, and he also said that there was no way we’d see McKinley in this weather, even if we did go to Wonder Lake. So, we made the right call in choosing our bus tickets and planning our forthcoming day.

We ordered a mixed green salad to share, plus one beer each, and (with the pizza) we were in for $43.80.
This.
Is.
Not.
A.
Cheap.
Place.
To.
Visit.


Sunday, July 04, 2010

9:07 am.
In the car, outside of Sled Dog Liquor / Canyon Market ("Denali's only grocery"). Renee is inside grabbing some lunch supplies: smoked salmon, cherries, cream cheese, and water. We’re going to add that to my trail mix and the wheat bread we got earlier in the week, for a nice tasty lunch. She woke up at 7:50 am; I followed at 8:30 am, only to discover that there was no hot water in the bathroom, at all. Not even slightly warm. The nearly freezing glacial runoff water was impossible to use for showering. I am not prone to hyperbole, I like to think that a tale is only worth telling if it can be told accurately and without exaggerating. So let me inform you all that this water was just shy of ceasing motion and turning into ice. Getting into the shower was not an option. Somehow, using a washcloth on my particularly stinky zones was marginally more bearable, so I did that. Renee talked to the desk clerk, who assured us that they were working on the problem.
Good thing I’d decided to be scruffy on this trip.

Another grey rainy day. Welcome to the 4th of July. This is not pleasant weather, at all. Made it to the park entrance (not even a mile away) by 9:17 am, and wandered into line for our 9:30 am bus by 9:20 am. We’d been given a tip about which side of the bus to sit on for the best views; we complied and were satisfied that our decision was wise. Our driver was Tina Pettit, a serious and well-educated Native American woman. She also appeared to be someone who could effortlessly kick just about anyone’s ass. She almost did, too (read on!). As a bus driver, she did not compare to the awesomeness of Anchorage Vinnie, but she was quite talkative, giving us lots and lots of interesting information about what we were seeing, or what we would have been seeing if it was a clear day, and if the bus windows weren’t getting coated with both mud and steam. I was surprised to learn that in the six million acres of Denali wilderness, there are only 350 bears, and 2000 moose. I reckoned the population density to be much higher. The people who count these things do not count bear cubs until they are two years old, because so many die before reaching that age. The bus seats 52 people, and about half of them were middle-aged Germans. I thought that I might try to learn some of their language, since my next big trip is to Germany, but that didn’t pan out much. We also sat near a few older French couples. No one told me that we were on the World War II reenactment tour. There must be a Brit or two on this bus too... but where are the Japanese? The main problem was that none of these Germans seemed to speak English.  This is understandable.  However, several times, when stopping for wildlife spotting, Tina would announce something like “I am just going to pull up a few yards for a better view", which would be followed, after sensing the bus in motion, by a chorus of plaintive or angry shouts of “shtahp!", “shtaaaaaahhhhhhhp!". This herd of people were bleating like constipated Dall’s sheep, not understanding that the driver was doing them a favor. A group that big really needs a translator with them. At one point, Tina told us that we were passing No Moose Pond, and that sometimes she likes to stop here because lynx can be spotted. We paused to see if any lynx were about, but with poor visibility and rain it wasn’t likely.  Ever seen a cat in the rain?  Nope, me either.  But, the Germans had only heard “moose" as the bus slowed down. When we continued, the cacophony of “shtaaaaaahhhhhhhp!" was unbearable. They all rushed one side of the bus to get a view of nothing; it felt like the bus was going to tip over.

By a little after 11:00 am, we had reached the first rest stop, at Teklanika River at mile 29 (meaning of teklanika: “a lot of gravel, and little water" - seriously).  Here are some mountains near there...

We haven’t seen any wildlife at all yet. The bus windows were fogged up on the inside, and covered with road mud on the outside. During the fifteen-minute stop, Tina cleaned every window by herself, and then the Germans complained that a few of the windows hadn’t been cleaned thoroughly enough. Tina’s temper was one degree past her maximum patience level by that point, and she got a little snippy about going outside to clean more windows instead of moving on. Meanwhile, a greasy little man sitting in front of us, maybe five feet tall, perhaps sixty years old, and with gnarly long fingernails, kept trying to open the emergency exit window, which set off an alarm. He did this repeatedly along the drive. All right, maybe he doesn’t speak English, but when you are sitting by the only window in the bus with a big red handle and a sticker on it that is clearly some sort of warning, you don’t pull the fucking handle. This sort of thing is pretty universal, and one should be able to figure that out long before this guy’s age.
So, Tina was getting pretty frustrated with the Germans. One guy couldn’t handle it: a hippie kid, maybe in his mid-twenties. He had been reading a field guide to the local mushrooms. At one point, he called out: “Stop the bus, I want to take a walk!". Tina complied, and the kid walked off into the woods to commune with the fungus. I do declare that I am surprised Tina didn’t follow him. Renee and I had some fun snickering at the tension building up: Tina Pettit was about to kick two dozen flabby German asses. I think she would have won!

After passing Sable Pass, a beautiful canyon, we entered an area of arctic tundra. The mud wasn’t so bad anymore, so we were getting amazing views of the landscape. There are few tall trees here. The ground is a peaty squishy moss, and is almost completely overgrown with knee-high bushes, perhaps miniature cousins to the taller ones we pushed through to get to Portage Glacier on Kenai Peninsula a few days back. From a distance, the greenery looks like grass or weeds, but up close it is a lot more dense. Shrubbery. This arctic tundra is prime bear country, and we were soon rewarded - finally! - with a sighting.

“Shtaaaaaahhhhhhhp!"

Two grizzly cubs and a sow, foraging for grub in the rain.

There are strict rules about this sort of thing: as the bus crept to a shtaaaahhhp, complete silence was requested. The bears don’t pay much attention to the busses, but if they start to get desensitized to human contact, they will also start to cross over into our habitat, and will then have to be shot. One would think that acclimating bears to humans might be a good thing, but the experts claim otherwise. Go watch the movie Grizzly Man if you need more proof (to quote Shriekback’s Lines from the Library: “He got... too close").
We watched the bears for a little while, and then it was time to move on.

Soon after that we saw some Dall’s sheep on Cathedral Mountain, but they were so far away that they appeared to be little more than three nearly-invisible white specks.

Still:
“Shtaaaaaahhhhhhhp!"

And after that we shtaaaaaahhhhhhhped to view some distant caribou, about eight of them, but they were also just little blobs on the horizon. At the east branch of the Toklat River, paleontologists have found therapod tracks, but we didn’t get to see them either. This one wasn’t quite as frustrating since these therapods have been dead for sixty million years.

Next, we passed through the area of Polychrome, with a rest stop at mile 47. Polychrome (as the name implies) is a widely variegated range of mountains, and is probably the most beautiful point in the park. The road reaches quite a high elevation here, and skims along the edge of the mountains. With no guardrail, the drop - directly next to the edge of the road - is a few hundred harrowing and steep feet. Creeping around blind curves, and with one wrong move spelling certain doom for us and our European companions, we put trust in Tina to get her job done right.
As the road finally descended in elevation, and as people started to relax their death grips on the seat backs and breathe normally again, Renee and I deemed this a great spot to disembark (on the way back) to explore on foot. When we were back on flat terrain, we kept our eyes open for suitable spots to jump off the bus.

 And wait... the weather is starting to clear up... a little.

12:45 pm.
At Toklat rest stop (on the west branch of the Toklat river; mile 53) a small book store had big ram’s horns and a bunch of antlers laying around for people to pick up and check out.
A ram’s horn is a lot heavier than I imagined.

Up in the nearby hills, there were two more groups of Dall’s sheep: one group of maybe a half dozen, and another group twice that big. But again, they’re just white dots.

Not far from there, at Highway Pass, we had a more substantial Caribou sighting.
First there was just one, silhouetted on a ridge. Then, passing the ridge, the rest of the family appeared.
Later, we saw some willow ptarmigans, which are Alaska’s state bird. They have feathers on their feet, and their plumage changes from brown-and-white to completely white in the winter.  Just after that, we saw more bears. Like the previous sighting, this was a mother and two cubs.

Finally, we arrived Eielson Visitor Center (mile 66). This Visitor’s Center is the last large structure on a road that is otherwise more or less free of man-made objects. The final two stops (Wonder Lake and Kantishna) are more rustic. From the park service web site: “A main goal was to design a low-profile building that blends into the landscape. The steep slope enabled the designers to partially bury the building, which visually screens the structure from the Park Road. The roof is literally ‘green’, as tundra mats salvaged from the construction of the site were relocated to planters dispersed on the roof terrace. These camouflage the roof deck, helping it blend into the landscape. The green roof also assists in storm water run-off reduction and thermal energy conservation."
And: “On a clear day, the entire area offers magnificent views of Mt. McKinley. There are two trails in this area, both well above tree-line. The Loop Trail is a very short, easy trail that winds in a circle just downhill from the visitor center. The Alpine Trail, meanwhile, runs steeply up Thorofare Ridge, which looms above Eielson Visitor Center. The trail is about one mile long, and gains about one thousand feet in elevation".

The Alpine Trail didn’t seem especially interesting. We could see people on it, climbing up a big, brown, dry, rocky mountain. Seemed like a lot of effort for little gain. I voted that we save our energy for the Polychrome adventure. We did the shorter Loop Trail. At its furthest excursion from the trailhead (maybe one hundred yards), there was a social trail (an unmaintained, unmapped trail) that led down the slope of the mountain towards a small plateau overlooking the vast valley below. We took that detour, and were back at the Visitor’s Center in about an hour.

Inside the Center, a window overlooking Mt. Denali/McKinley was marked with a graphic showing where Mt. Denali would be, if you could actually see it. Stickers on the floor suggested where to stand, based on one’s height, to align ones self with the line drawing of the mountain pasted to the window.

Thus, this was my only view of Mt. Denali on this trip ---------------->

I asked a dispatcher when the next bus was headed back towards Polychrome. He said three minutes, so I grabbed Renee, and we hustled over to the chariot. After us, a few more people had to wait for availability. We were the last two guaranteed seats. A few more people got on though. Beth, our new driver, announced that she liked to be quiet on the way back to the park entrance, but she turned out to be just as chatty as Tina had been. Beth, however, chose to tell us less about Denali and more about herself. We got to hear her life story in the hour-plus that it took to get back to Polychrome. Short version: she was a Delaware school bus driver. Her daughter moved to Alaska. While visiting her daughter, Beth fell in love with Alaska. She decided to leave her husband of decades and her secure job to drive a bus in Denali. Somehow, it took over an hour to tell us this.

Along the way, we saw the same family of bears and the same herd of caribou that we’d seen a few hours earlier. We also saw a wolf cub hiding in some scrub by a river. We waited a long time for momma to come out, but we never got a glimpse.

Finally, we came back to the spot that we’d selected as the one that would give us easy access to the tundra, just before the road up to Polychrome Pass got steep. The driver pulled over and let us off. It was after 4:00 pm by this point, so we had a bit under three hours to hike away from - and then back to - the road. We did not want to miss the last bus! Ideally, we would have liked more time than this, but at least we hadn’t blown another three hours going all the way to Wonder Lake.

And what: is that the sun coming out?
Is this BLUE we see?
Yes, I do believe it is!

This was our view from the road:

I thought that we might hike to the foothills of those distant mountains (in the above picture), but that was rather optimistic. We made it about half way there.  Distances here are so deceptive.  From the bottom edge of the picture to the bases of the mountains is probably six or seven miles.  We ended walking towards the farther river (visible as a thin line about two-thirds of the way up the picture, just under the mountains), turning left before we got to it, and walking all the way around the sort of big blister in the earth (left side of the pic, dominating the middle third of the image between the two rivers). We did make it to the upper river, at a point off of the left side of the picture, and on the other side of the "blister". For scale, that "blister" was a hill about twenty feet high. Most of the green seen in the plain leading up to the mountains is knee-high bushes (er, thigh-high on Renee!). It looks like grass in the picture, but it's all scrub. 

We’d hiked in several forests already, so it was nice to have a different landscape. Also, we had miles of visibility, so if there were any bear or moose, there would be little chance of surprise. All of the big mammals we’d seen on the drive today were miles from here anyway, so it felt comfortable. It was rather slow going through the foliage. Part of the time there were social trails, part of the time there were animal trails, and part of the time we had to just push our way through, making our own path.
 

After taking so many pictures of unimaginably large things - mountains and vast areas of landscape - I decided that I also wanted to take more pictures of very small things. The wildflowers have been in bloom in Alaska, everywhere we went. None of the flowers have been especially big; we seldom saw a bloom bigger than a quarter dollar. But we saw vast fields of flowers everywhere in Aslaska, representing dozens of species, each tiny, delicate, and just as significant in its own way as mighty Mt. Denali. I found the partial skeleton of a bird, and the mandible of a small mammal. Photographed one, collected the other. Renee was also interested in the mushroom species that we saw, there were a lot of those.

Small things...

   

Towards the second half of the hike, we got more into a swampy area. The peat became spongier, and we came across many micro rivers, little damp trickles oozing down from the distant mountains.

It wasn’t hard to navigate around them, but I did lose one battle with the big, main river. Renee went shoeless to cross it, but I figured I could leap it. A small running start, and I successfully planted my left foot on the shore... just after landing my right foot firmly in the water, instantly soaking shoe, sock, and foot. Fortunately, we were nearing the end of our walk, and the squishy hike uphill to the road didn’t last too long. While trudging up that hill, we saw a huge hawk or falcon circling overhead. It had big light colored spots on the underside of its mighty wings. For just a moment we did wonder whether it might consider us with prey, or deem us a threat to its nest. We had no idea where this nest was, but and didn’t want to stumble into that particular zone by accident. That bird would mess us up pretty good if it thought we were after its chicks or eggs. But it eventually stopped circling us, although it never got very far away.

With our four mile-ish circuit through the tundra complete, we sat on the roadside, me with shoe and sock off, waiting for the next bus.
It turns out that these busses are not run by the park service, but by a concession: the notorious Aramark, in fact, who run all of the food franchises in colleges all over the country. I did some math: 52 seats, times $30.75 (for the Eielson run) is $1599. Pay for gas, throw the driver a few hundred, maintain the busses, and the company is still probably clearing at least grand per run. Factor in about a dozen scheduled runs per day to each of the five possible destinations (some cost more), and we’re looking at probably $60,000 per day, at least, if all busses are sold out. That seemed to be the case today, as evidenced by the availability listings when we bough tickets yesterday. Lots of busses had been sold out already when we were in line. Kick the park service back their cut, and that’s still a nice chunk of change. Even if the park service is taking half, the franchise is pocketing about three million dollars between Memorial Day and Labor Day. And guess what: the same company owns the only upscale hotel in the commercial area outside the park, and they also own a few of the nearby restaurants.
Nice contract.
They probably own the bears too.
I imagine that the park service is getting the $10 per person admission fee. I wonder which entity maintains the Visitor’s Center and Wilderness Access Center?

Our third and final driver was named Travis. He was a sort of hippie guy, and he was not such a good driver. Those treacherous curves way up high at Polychrome Pass were pretty scary with Travis at the helm. He was a monotonous speaker too, but he had some insane stories to tell. Much better than hearing Beth’s life story. He was talking about his buddy who was hiking in the winter, and got his pants wet. They wouldn’t dry, so he decided to leave them behind. The guy had to hike pantsless across the tundra in the winter. More chilly willie, I guess!  Travis also told us about mushing sled dogs in the winter and having his dogs run away on him, leaving him stranded. And, about his friend who was stranded in the wilderness and was out there alone for days before being rescued by helicopter. The only way he kept sane in his state of loneliness and dehydration was by watching Seinfeld reruns on his iPod... until the batteries died.

We were sitting next to an Indian family (from India). A couple, a little kid, and a baby. At one point, now that the weather had cleared up, we were apparently able to catch a glimpse of a sliver of a part of a section of a little piece of Mt. Denali, wayyyy off in the distance. Travis pointed it out. He was pointing to a whole cluster of mountains though, with mountains behind the mountains, and other mountains behind those. I asked him which mountain Denali was. He pointed vaguely in the direction of a whole lot of mountains. I asked again, and so did one of the Indians. Travis just sort of pointed again, disinterestedly, and then drove on.

When we stopped to see some moose along the road, the Indian woman leaned over and stuck her ass right in Renee’s and my faces. Because of the way the bus seat was arranged with her seat, we couldn’t escape. This Indian lady’s behind was like six inches from my nose. She was so busy taking pictures of the moose that she didn’t even notice. I made a motion like I was going to spank her. Finally after seriously almost two minutes, she noticed. She said, “oh, I am sorry, was I in your way". Well, I could have acted like it was no big deal, but it was really self-absorbed and rude of her, and sometimes people need to be told when they’re behaving badly so that they might be more conscientious next time. I said something like “No I didn’t mind having your ass in my face, it smelled kind of nice". R3 seemed to approve. After looking confused for a moment, the lady actually apologized. You bet your bottom dollar she’s gonna be more careful about where she points her heinie in the future.

Anyway, these two moose were right in the road. A few minutes later, we saw another mamma moose and her baby, also chillin’ near the road. Of course, everyone on the bus hurled themselves to the side with the moose visible, and started taking pictures. After a few minutes of this chaos, the Indian kid suddenly seemed to notice that there was something going on. He got sort of excited, and said, “Look! An animal!".
Sharp one, there.
Then we saw another waddling porcupine, and ended the trip with a sighting of a huge rainbow.
Yes, a freaking rainbow at the very end of our nature trip.
This is so perfect as to be nearly mawkish, kitschy even, but hey, there it was.
And here it is:

We got back to the car at 9:16 pm, which is significant because I’d turned off the engine this morning at 9:17 am, making our adventure exactly one minute shy of twelve hours. In spite of the rain early in the day, and the fact that we didn’t have more time for hiking, it was a cool trip.

We cleaned up in the room, poured a quick Gimlet, and by 10:00 pm, we were on our way to The Overlook to get R3 a Framboise Lambic. I had a Samuel Smith’s Nut Brown. $15 with tip. For two beers. Ack.
We didn’t feel like we wanted to stay there, so I spontaneously decided - with tongue deeply in cheek -  that we were on a 4th of July Denali pub crawl, and needed to hit every bar in town. That was four, by our count. We went back to Prospector’s to put a dent in their list of 49 beers. I got the Moose Point Porter from Kassik’s brewery in Kenai, and R3 got a Breakfast Beer Oatmeal Milk Stout from Kenai River Brewing in Soldotna. $13 with tip. Unwieldly name aside, Renee’s beer was better.

A television above the bar was showing a bear standing in a river. Salmon were trying to leap up a small waterfall while swimming upstream. Most of them were rebuffed by the force of the water. A few leapt up and over the falls, and straight into the bear’s hungry mouth. The bear was just standing there with its mouth open, and fish were jumping right in. A few fish leapt up and fish-slapped the bear upside its head, mocking it in a manner no less comical than the Monty Python Fish-Slapping Dance.

We discussed our day:
This had been a fantastic adventure, and we saw a whole lot of mind-numbingly beautiful things.
Animals, rivers, mushrooms, flowers, plants, glaciers.
Life.
Death.
Nature doing what it does best.
But of course Renee and I are both critics at heart, and aside from the amusing/annoying people on our busses, we both had essentially the same take on what could have made our adventure better.

We agreed that here is no “median experience" in Denali. You’re either hiking deep in the back country, or you’re trapped all day on a shuttle bus. What can you do in Denali with rain gear, lunch, a camera, and six hours?  Probably a lot, but there is neither guidance nor infrastructure for helping to organize that sort of day. We wanted an experience that was more interesting and more about direct contact with nature than the bus ride was, but not something as challenging as camping all alone in the tundra overnight. We tried to create this ourselves with our Polychrome-area hike, but really we picked that spot arbitrarily because the scenery was beautiful there. It was successful to a degree and very much worth having done, but I think we could have picked a much better spot, if we’d had some direction. A thousand great social trails or uncharted routes towards fascinating destinations very well may be accessed from the road, but no one is going to tell you where they are.
As we noted yesterday, the Visitor’s Center isn’t really much help in planning this sort of thing. They’ll sell you a bus ticket, but they can’t really provide information on what exists at each stop (beyond the small buildings themselves) or tell you why a person would want to take the bus to any certain point along the road versus any other point. We understand that they want to keep human interference to a minimum, and that they want to keep things like trails and infrastructure to a minimum. This is good. They encourage small group, deep wilderness sojourns, and always with the great motto “leave no trace". But what about more scaled-back adventure? Nothing. A few published suggestions about why one would want to do day hikes from Polychrome versus Toklat River versus Wonder Lake would be really helpful.

So: Denali is sorely in need of more guidance for people who want to get their asses off of the bus, but who don’t want to pack serious survival gear and crawl off into the wilderness.  If I ever go back, I will do two things.  First, I will only take the bus to Toklat instead of Eielson.  This will shave an hour or two of bus time off of the day, while still allowing views of the very best parts along the road (Polychrome, etc).  The best scenery and virtually all of the wildlife was seen pre-Toklat.  Second, I will research private blogs, travel books, magazine articles, whatever I have to, in order to get some insider tips for great spots to discover and explore.

Anyway, back to the pub crawl -
All day I’d been thinking (as you do) about the song “Fourth of July" by the band X, for fairly obvious reasons. But now I was thinking about their tune “Hungry Wolf".
Time to eat!

The McKinley Chalet resort (the Aramark property) is the sole nicer hotel in the Denali area, segregated across the street from the rest of the cluster of commerce.  They had “hungry hour" from 11:00 pm to midnight at their Nenana View Bar and Grill. We were told they had half-price food, but in reality it was only four appetizers that were half-off. We split an acceptable burger and a pretty bad artichoke dip. Could have had that at home. Alaskan cuisine at its finest. I liked the tables in the lounge, with old game boards embedded under thick lacquer. Nothing else about this place was interesting on any level.

We were being friendly with the bartender, Sasha from Baltimore, a younger girl who (of course) works here seasonally. We were also talking to a yuppie couple near us, when Sasha offered up a free Margarita, one she’d made by mistake. I claimed it, R3 drank it. When our benefactor asked how we liked it, Renee said “this is terrible!". That was very true (it was vile), but I felt kind of bad because the bartender had been really nice and there was no need to hurt her feelings after she did us a favor (she could have been sticking her ass in our faces, in which case she would have deserved what she got!). After all, she gave it to us for free; she could have just dumped it out. Sasha’s co-worker was named Natasha. For the two appetizers and two DFT Oatmeal Stouts, I gave them $29.96, which included a slightly larger tip than my norm.

The cloudy sky made for a spectacular almost-sunset; this is about as dark as we saw the sky all week:

After this, we went to Salmon Bake, to complete our 4th of July Denali pub crawl. No fireworks, no barbecue. They had turned the main level of the Salmon Bake into a disco, playing lame hip-hop, really loud. All of the tourist kids were in there dancing. Upstairs was a little quieter. A little. I didn’t want any more to drink. Renee got a beer.


Monday, July 05, 2010

11:29 am. Making notes in the car, waiting for Renee.
Finally, today we have nice weather!
We were whipped from yesterday, so we slept in a bit. I hauled my ass out of bed at 10:30 am. The water in the shower was slightly warmer than yesterday. Almost bearable. I checked us out of the hotel. We were going to spend the day in Denali again, and then make the two-hour drive up to Fairbanks. We were due to spend three nights in Fairbanks, and then drive back to Anchorage, and then fly home. Although it seemed like a good idea when I booked the trip, three nights in Fairbanks now seemed like far too much, especially after discovering how uninviting Anchorage is.
We needed more nature time!

Renee called the hotel in Fairbanks and canceled the third night. After the second night there, we’d drive back to Denali and spend another day in the wilderness. This would be much better use of our time, and would also make for a shorter drive back to Anchorage on Thursday. Problem was, we had to waste some time finding a hotel for Wednesday night. Drove around a bit, and got some prices: $90 to $210. We got contact info for the ones on the lower end of the price spectrum. After last night’s bacchanalia, Renee wanted a proper breakfast. Or, by this point, lunch. We did get a gallon of water and two hardboiled eggs at the store for $5.20 (sheesh!), but we were up for a real meal. Having eaten in almost every restaurant in town already, we explored our remaining options. It all looked expensive and bad. Eventually we bit the bullet and went to the Salmon Bake. It was expensive and bad. The Bake was no longer the hip hop club it had been just twelve hours earlier; it was back to being a rustic family restaurant. We dropped $30.90 for two freaking sandwiches. My grilled salmon sandwich was rubbery and overcooked; Renee got halibut tacos with stale chips. We caved and went to the Bake and it was a mistake. There isn’t even a pickle barrel at this one! They claim to have the best burger in Denali, but they may also have the only one. It was after 1:30 pm when we made the park entrance. There is a free bus to Savage River, which is fifteen miles up the park road. This is also the furthest point that private vehicles may drive. I discovered that the bus takes an hour to go the fifteen miles, and that the next one wasn’t leaving for over half an hour. We’d screwed around long enough with brunch and sleeping in and finding a hotel for Wednesday; I was impatient to get somewhere interesting before our day completely evaporated. Back in the car, and we were at Savage River in twenty minutes. Saw a moose on the way. Our idea to start with the easy Savage River Loop trail seemed like a good one. From the parking area, and from the motor vehicle bridge over the river, Savage River is a braided river to the west. This means it is a series of small, shallow, calm streams that have run off from the mountains to form a complex if random collection of intertwining waterways. Like braids, they cross over each other and weave in and out of each other’s paths. At some point - in this case just east of the motor traffic bridge - the braids all come together to make one mighty river. The river is only perhaps thirty feet wide, but as we discovered, it is a lot more intimidating than it initially seems.

Here's the braided region of Savage River...

And here's the unified and much more savage part:

The eastbound trail follows the edge of the Healy Ridge, which is bisected by the unified river, for a half mile. Then the trail crosses a small foot bridge over the river, and doubles back along the other side. The walk was easy, and there were a fair number of people on the trail. We saw some more ptarmigan, a mother and some chicks, and a few marmots, or small rodents that are all over the place up here. Take a guinea pig, and give it a squirrel’s tail. Now make the tail hair no longer than the rest of the animal’s hair, instead of all bushy like a squirrel’s tail.
Marmot.

      

Even at a leisurely pace, we ran out of trail pretty quickly.
But then: fate.
A social trail presented itself, and we decided to follow it further down the river. We extended the hike by a few hundred yards, and then the social trail ended as well. A giant slab of rock, perhaps eighty feet high, prevented us from going any further. The rock was very steep, and plunged right into the river. There was no going around it, unless we waded into the river. That was not a wise idea, at all. All of those river braids a mile behind us were feeding this one flow now, and although it seemed relatively benign at a glance, anyone with any sense of nature’s power would think twice, or three times, before trying to cross this beast without specialized equipment. Neither of us were ready to turn back yet, and it was nice to be off-trail, with the casual hikers behind us on the proper trail. And yet, wading around this sheer cliff was not an option.

So, we decided to go up and over.

The left side of the rock plunged into the water at 90 degrees. But, the right side, a bit away from the river, was more of a hill. Although steep and high, it seemed manageable to scramble up it. Who knows what was on the opposite side, completely out of our view?  The slope was thoroughly covered with smaller rocks, from pebbles to boulders; no ground was visible. It was as if someone took a few thousand tons worth of a natural history museum’s rock collection, and poured it all down a hillside. This place was a geologist’s dream: every kind of stone imaginable was tumbling down this hill. We tumbled up the hill, picking our path carefully, looking for hand and footholds, keeping our centers of gravity low, and not looking down, much.
When we got to the top, we were on a little grassy plateau. We could walk to the far edge, where the rock was far more steep, and look straight down at the river. We could also look at the route we’d come up, and it definitely seemed like getting back down was going to be a problem. But looking down the opposite side, the side that we could not see at all as we were coming up, it was amazing. I beheld a beautiful waterfall, cascading down a cleft between two smallish mountains. It takes a real effort to get to this amazing spot, even though it is so close to the main trial. My suspicion is that there are a thousand more places like this in Denali... and once again, having just a few pointers towards them would be nice.  We were happy and lucky to have stumbled across this cool spot through some effort, some luck, and a little bit of risk.

We’d humped our way over one of the mountains, at one of it’s lower ridges.
Looking further up the rock we’d conquered, we saw this:

We weren’t about to climb all the way up there, so we decided that we’d explore the waterfall, and follow it down to the river. Hiking up the falls a bit, just next to the falling water, we came across a sort of mini-glacier. This was the only “glacier" (if this giant slab of ice may be classified as such) that we actually got close enough to touch on this trip. The waterfall had flowed under it, leaving a large part of the ice suspended three feet above the ground. It would have been very easy to explore the underside of it, but that didn’t seem quite safe. Crawling underneath several tons of eroded ice? No thanks.

We saw many wonders as we slowly navigated down to Savage River. There was just enough room next to the waterfall that we had places to walk or climb. The water had cut deeply into the mountains, and on either side of the falls, the hills were steep, and were covered with dense impenetrable foliage. We had just a narrow strip of accessible terrain along the edge of the water.

    

Finally, we made it to where the falls dumped into the river. We hiked down river a bit and then decided it was time to start thinking of making our way back. It was at this point that we discovered our problem: to get back, we had to go back up the waterfall, over the plateau, and then down the steep slope of loose geology. Or, we could just cross the river, which was not more than eight paces wide, and pick up the handy social trail that we spied on the other side. Neither of us particularly fancied navigating back up and over. It would be a lot of work, slightly dangerous, and we’d already come from that way; we both wanted a new route back.

So, we continued down river, looking for a suitable place to wade across. We spent at least an hour looking, and nothing seemed do-able. Either it was too deep, or we couldn’t see the bottom, or it was too slippery, or the rapids were too intense.
Or all of the above.
Nowhere did enough rocks line up to form a natural bridge. Renee tested one zone by wading in a little bit with a stick, but she reported hyper-cold water and an indeterminable depth. Another spot had a gravel bar and shallow water that extended at least half way across, but the second half seemed questionable. We screwed around with this problem for a long time before conceding defeat: we both agreed that it actually seemed like a better idea to go up and over the hill than to wade across thirty feet of water.
Thirty feet of cold, powerful water, full of potentially dangerous rocks at unknown depths.
Savage River, indeed.

Oh, and by the way, a man named McCandless once had a problem crossing a river here in Denali too.
You know the guy I mean.

And remember:
Death is always a possibility!

Nice.

So, long story longer, we ran into some problems getting back up the waterfall, overcame them, and then found that getting back down the geo-rama slope was less troublesome than we reckoned. We picked up the social trail to the main trail, crossed the foot bridge, and trudged back along the other side of the main trail to get back to the car.

For all of the hassle, this was among the best parts of the trip.
We were barely a mile from a parking lot and a group of rangers, but we still saw some amazing and hidden things, and had to overcome a very real and definitely dangerous situation that we found ourselves in. Coming back up the waterfall safely was not easy, and we did almost get stuck at one point.

So, given everything that I mentioned yesterday about wanting manageable single-day advenutres, the ancient axiom is true: be careful what you wish for.
We was plum tuckered out.
The whole thing took about four hours. We were back in the car at 6:36 pm. It didn’t end up mattering that we had a late start today; we were both too tired for further adventure. Even if we’d started at 7:00 am, we still would have been ready to call it a day after that trek.
Tired.
Hungry.
My brand-new boots are already trashed!

Fairbanks awaits...
Gassed up at a Tesoro station about ten miles north of the Denail park entrance (675.3 on the odometer), and made for Fairbanks, snacking in the car as we went.

Passed all sorts of common local oddities, like road signs that had been used as target practice.  Each were dented by a dozen bullet impact craters.
Those shot-up road signs are all over the place in Alaska.
Teenagers with guns.
Great!
Or, wait, maybe adults did this?
Nah, I don’t want to think about that.

Since it was the evening of the Monday after a holiday, traffic was light. We made good time, even while passing through a construction zone that had reduced the road (otherwise well maintained) to gravel for a few miles.
Fairbanks is a pretty uninspiring place.
Like Anchorage, but perhaps even more so, these people treat their city in a really utilitarian way. Nothing is spent on aesthetics. A small bit of Second St. downtown contained a few marginally interesting mid--century signs, but that’s about it for Fairbanks.

Well, there is also this:

And this...

Fairbanks is proud of their slogan: “Fairbanks, where the people are unusual, and the beer is usually good".

Driving to the opposite side of town from the highway, we eventually found the Regency Fairbanks Hotel (95 Tenth Ave.; $120.50 per night), to discover that after changing our reservation this morning, now we somehow had two rooms booked. It took the idiot on the phone at Travelocity a lot of time to sort it out, while Mary, the meek teenage girl at the reception desk, robotically did as she was told. “Initiative" is not in her vocabulary. She looked like the actress Jennifer Connelly, except with more acne and less charm.

The lobby was filled with taxidermy (this is Alaska, mister), but in this case each had a plaque with the animal’s name (as one would name a pet!), and the hunter’s name. Babe the ox, Blitzen the caribou, Fred the salmon, and Hercules the moose. Our room was large (and free of dead things), and it sported a kitchenette. It was also stinky, as if the carpeting hadn’t been cleaned.
Ever.

We needed food.

Mary wasn’t much help; we drove around the downtown area for a while and eventually got a hot tip about a place back past the highway, through the other side of town back out into the sticks. Pike’s on the Water was a large place, but was mostly empty at this late hour. Except for two rednecks drinking Margaritas out of half-gallon-sized martini glasses, all of the customers were out back on a huge redwood patio right next to a river.

The sun was casting the most amazing glow over everything.
The water was dazzling and the red wood was positively glowing.
Today has been the best weather we have had to date.
Where was this weather when we were on the Steller Sunrise or on the “trans-Denali express” bus?

If happy hour in this state lasted as long as golden hour, I’d be a happy boy.

We had our beer from plastic cups, and consumed yet another mediocre meal as E.L.O. played over the radio.

My mussels came in an old plastic bucket; Renee played it safe with a salad.
We paid an impossible $15.95 for this grilled salmon salad, and $16.95 for these mussles (see picture).

That and our beverages came to $51. Owie.
As we left, we saw this handy bit of information by the boat slip near the parking lot:

Late night, still light, time for a run to the local supermarket to refresh our supplies ($37). I was surprised to find out that my local Chicago grocery store was owned by the same company who own this one. I hadn’t brought my discount card, but was inexplicably tickled at the big map of Alaska on the temporary replacement card that they expediently issued me.

I found the the idea of Moose’s Drool beer (from Big Sky Brewing in Montana, actually) to be amusing. In the room, Renee sipped one and watched Mad Men on television (the first and only time the tee-vee was on during our whole trip), while I checked my email in the lobby. The insides of the Moose’s Drool bottle caps have dumb slogans on them: Freebird!, Born Here All My Life, You Don’t See That Every Day, Hell Bent for Leathers, and one that explained the others: Authentic Frontier Gibberish.

In the sack by midnight; it looked and felt like 7:00 pm when we crashed.
The sunny days mean sunny nights; at least on the bad weather days it felt a little darker at night.


July 06, 2010

11:19 am.
Quesadillas and PBJ in the room for breakfast. Again.
Must conserve our cash for bad food at dinner!

Today’s first mission: the University of Alaska Museum of the North (907 Yukon Dr., $10).
This edifice contains the state of Alaska’s largest collection of gold, and (yes!) a mummified bison, exhibits on Alaska's Russian heritage, and an art gallery. So, like the Anchorage museum, it is natural history, cultural history, and art, all under one roof.

This is a hyper-modern building, which is completely out of place in Fairbanks, or anywhere in Alaska for that matter.
It exists on the University campus, which is scrubbed and well-manicured, which is also unusual around these parts.

A small art gallery on the ground floor is called Alaska Classics.
It includes more of the work of Sydney Laurence (including the painting seen below to the right), whom we discovered at the Anchorage museum, as well as the outsider-ish William Yanert, and work by Harvey Goodale (a genre scene of Eskimos skinning a walrus).

The bigger portion of the ground floor is the Gallery of Alaska, a sort of cultural, natural, and historical museum, divided into five sections. Each section represents an area of Alaska, and the people who live there: southeast (Tlinglit, Haida, Tsimshian), southcentral (Eyak and Alutiq), etc. The European settlers to Alaska are featured as well, including a conspicuously large number of displays on the women of Alaska. 
Klondike Kate and Anna Degraf had especially interesting lives.

The southeastern peoples had big ceremonial dinners called potlatch. Each clan contributed something to the meal, and (this is my theory) the word potlach is the root of our word “potluck". There is a cool totem pole in this area (photo above left).

In the southcentral area is a display of mastodons and mammoths, including skulls and other remains, which is especially interesting.

The display on the interior (Athabaskan people) featured the mummified remains of an ox that was several thousand years old, and a cool documentary on the aurora borealis. Sadly, this video footage was as close as I came to seeing that amazing phenomenon.
No night in the summer equals no aurora in the summer.
Got it.

The western arctic coast display (Inupiaq and Yupik Eskimo) is home to a whale skeleton and some interesting miniature carvings.

Southwest (Aleut and Alutiq) is most notable for a display of over a dozen taxidermy seabirds, complete with gallons of (artificial) guano all over the place.
I also marveled at some really cool geodes and minerals, as well as the promised collection of gold: nuggets, dust, pyrite (fool’s gold), jewelry, and other things made with gold.

Of course, you can’t escape the taxidermy in Alaska, nor the things made from dead animals, like this fine chair (photo, right):
Yeah, that's a musuem piece 'round these parts.

The second floor is dominated by the Rose Berry Alaska Art Collection, a big and vaguely oval-shaped area featuring art from the 18th century to the present. Both native and Caucasian artists contributed paintings, conceptual art, photos, installations, textiles, clothing, scrimshaw, baskets, utensils, masks, and sculpture, all arranged in no particular order. Some of it seems arranged thematically, but only loosely.  I noted another digital collage by Stephen Grey, the artist who had been censored in the Anchorage museum.  I wish I could say that I liked his work.  I guess if you don't have talent, make up for it by being shocking.  Then again, he is in every museum in the state, so read what you will into that.  I also noted an elaborately decorated outhouse that took up far too much space in a room that also contained some heartfelt photos of Eskimos trying to adjust to living a contemporary lifestyle.

Next we made for Creamer's Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge, a two-thousand acre preserve on the site of the historic Creamer's Dairy. It's no Denali, but we had a nice little walk there.

Lots of little kids were there, wrapping up their day of summer camp. They were oblivious to the three dozen cranes poking around in the tall grass (left photo).

We hiked a mile-long loop trail through a dense boreal forest full of nasty mosquitoes, cool birch trees, and joggers. A dozen informational signs provided context to nature, discussing the role of fire in the life cycle of the forest.  A burned area was slowly recovering, and was being observed, over decades, as a way to study how nature uses, and even needs, fire.

The (non-burned) birch trees had layer upon layer of the thinnest possible bark, which peeled off of the tree like the most delicate tissue paper.

We stopped for bird sightings, still looking especially for an owl, the only major genus of wildlife that we haven’t seen yet. We also wanted to see a wood frog, one of the only amphibians in Alaska. We'd seen whales, bears, caribou, puffins, jellyfish, sheep, porpoises, eagles, sea lions, salmon (just a few), marmots, ptarmigans, falcons (I think), otters, beers, and mosquitoes, so we really couldn't whine about missing the owls and frogs.

The mosquitoes kept us from lingering long if we remained in one spot however, since they became worse if we became stationary.
We need more of those wood frogs here to take care of these mosquitoes.

As the afternoon came to a close, I drove past the Alaska Pipeline visitor’s center (at mile marker 450). A big section of pipe isn’t all that interesting, but I did learn that the pipeline runs 800 miles from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. It runs underground part of the way, and above ground part of the way.

There’s a kiosk here where you can buy your souvenir Alaska Pipeline polo shirt, your souvenir Alaska Pipeline cloisonne pin, or a postcard that I found funny: a picturesque view of pine forests with majestic mountains and blue skies towering in the distance, with “Alaska” written in one corner in romantic cursive calligraphy... and the industrial pipeline snaking through the center of the picture, extending miles into the distance. Nature and industry, hand-in-hand.
Or fist-in-ass, take your pick.

Across the street is a three-story tall building that looks like a giant golf ball. Out front is a hand-lettered sign that says “Canada my ass, it’s Alaska’s gas”. Next to it is a century-old house on a giant trailer bed with six-foot-tall wheels.
I don’t know what any of this means.

And now, the grand finale.
I planned to take it easy on Wednesday night (tomorrow), because I had a lot of driving and flying and traveling to contend with on Thursday.
So tonight was the last night to partake in any customary vacation indulgence.
Conveniently, there was one last brewery on Renee's list, the Silver Gulch Brewing and Bottling Company “In Beautiful Downtown Fox". The joke here is that Fox is about twenty miles north of Fairbanks, and has a population of 350, according to the 2000 census. Driving up the road, I passed right by Fox, which is literally nothing more than a crossroad with a gas station on one corner, plus a dive bar and the brewery across from each other, a hundred yards down the road. That is it, for real. The population all live along small residential roads in the area. One of these little dirt roads is called Chicago Bear Lane. But the town, all of it, is seriously three businesses near a small intersection. “Beautiful downtown Fox”, indeed.
Oh, and there is a guy selling blueberries out of a truck for $10 per pound.

I actually shot straight past the “town" entirely the first time, and continued a number of miles up the road. My strong and nearly infallible navigational intuition kicked in, and I suspected that I had missed Fox. I stopped into a little roadhouse diner called Hilltop Stop to confirm my suspicions. The friendly old lady at the counter set me straight; the intersection a few miles back was indeed Fox, Alaska. Turns out that the Hilltop Stop is famous for the size of their pie slices.  Good to know.  Back on the road, I realized that the parking lot of this diner was as far north as I have ever traveled in my life, and is probably as far north as I am likely to get for quite some time. Silver Gulch Brewing and Bottling Company (2195 Old Steese Highway), “Where beer comes first". This large and modern restaurant is really out of place around here; it seems designed to accomodate the entire popultion of Fox, and is actually kind of nicer than anything I saw in Fairbanks. For a Monday night, they were doing quite a business. We eschewed a table and sat at the bar. The special tonight was a half-price appetizer with any entree. The Boiled Shrimp was really good (I wrote “wooooooo" on my copy of the menu), and at half price, it was even more delightful. It was spicy, messy, and necessary. We really needed a nice cut of salmon, especially one prepared properly. We’d been denied this privilege all week. We dropped $28 to split the Alaskan Seared Salmon. It was pan seared, and served over spinach, garlic, cherry tomatoes, and a huge wedge of artichoke. It was rockin’. About freaking time. The lesson here is that you’re going to pay a bare minimum of $24, and probably closer to $30 (or more) for a nice cut of fish in Alaska. Don’t expect a bargain just because it comes from here. But there is really no escaping it: sooner or later, the rubbery salmon burgers (usually around $15) are going to get old, and there is no choice but to drop the cash for the real deal. For beverages, we skipped their Flagship Beers, and went straight for the Seasonals. There were seven of them on the menu, and by the time we’d had three rounds each, we realized there was nothing for it but to split the seventh. Renee went for the 40 Below Stout (very good, burnt and solid), the Lowbush Cranberry, and the Sweetwater Blonde, while I did the Epicenter Ale (heavy on the honey), the beer simply called Smoke (strong taste of the cherry wood smoked malt), and the AKIPA (Alaska IPA). We finished the list by sharing the Golden Heart Wheat, which tasted of clove, clove, clove, and clove. We also made note of the Pick Axe Porter, which we’d sampled in Talkeetna. Seven beers, an entree, and a half-price appetizer (plus a tip to Kim the bartender) came to $69.

Hitting the parking lot at 10:00 pm on a bright and sunny northern evening, there was only one thing for it: we had to follow up our ironic Denali pub crawl with a downright hilarious Fox Alaska Pub Crawl. That meant hitting the scary-ass dive bar across the street.

Howling Dog Saloon is a dusty, stinky place. It was nearly empty, but I could tell that on the weekends it would be packed (today was the Monday after July 4th, after all). The live music stage was empty, the volleyball court out back was empty. The trashy bartender was named Jessica, and she has a tattoo of a Japanese kanji that she thinks says “karma”, but she isn’t sure. But her dog is named Karma also, so that must be some sort of proof that her tattoo is accurate. Jessica only had a few other customers, and she had nothing the least bit tasty behind that bar to serve us.
When in Rome:
I haven’t “done a shot" in years. Yeah, I have sipped Chartreuse VEP, and savored some fine whiskeys served “neat", but chugging a shot of crap liquor? Nah, I don’t need to get wasted like that (uh, well, not usually).  But the Howling Dog Saloon in Fox, Alaska is exactly the sort of plce where people do shots of especially scary booze.
When in Rome:
Of all the rotgut on the rotting old shelves, I deemed Black Velvet to be the most ridiculous. There were better ones (marginally) and worse ones (definitely), but that one called to me as being appropriate for the moment. If nothing else, it’s Canadian. That’s closer to here than Kentucky, Ireland, or Scotland anyway.
R3, who I have never known to refuse a drink, hesitated.
Wisely.
...and then relented.
When in Rome:
Down the hatch.
This is the sort of place where there are furry bras hanging from the walls, and where people write messages on dollar bills and staple them to the acoustic tile on the low ceiling. Or in many cases, they just write on the ceiling with Sharpie. Or in many cases, they carve their names into the stucco on the outside walls of the building. We refrained; it was time to march out of Rome.
We split an Amber beer from Alaska Bewing to chase the Black Vomit, paid our $18, and hit the road.

So, I have had a fair amount of beer this week.
However, I am also six-foot-four and 220 pounds.
I’m a big person, and also, my tolerance was fairly jacked up.
I also know my limits.
When I can’t drive, I don’t.
However, the law doesn’t take personal accountability, or lack thereof, into account. The law, by necessity, has certain rules about who can and can’t do things. So even though I know and respect my own limits and limitations, and even though I am absolutely not the macho guy who will boast about being fine to drive if I am not, the law may dictate that I have to adhere to other people’s limits, even if those people’s limits are less than mine.
Point is, I was fine to drive.
Seriously.
But if that cop who pulled up behind me, and followed me for two long, long, long miles, had pulled me over, he might have disagreed when he smelled that Black Velvet on my breath.
So this is Jessica the bartender's beloved karma in action, instantly:
I drink a random shitty shot of cheap whiskey for the first time in like a decade, just becasue it seemed ironic and funny, and this is the night that a random police patrol decides to crawl up my ass?
Ironic, not funny.
After the copper decided not to stalk me anymore and pulled away, a guy in a pickup truck pulled up next to me, and made a show of wiping his hand across his brow, in the universal gesture for “wheeeewwwww – close call!".

OK.
Now we were just determined.

A stop in the historic Mecca Bar, a place mentioned in one of my books, was kind of scary: it was full of alcoholic Eskimos who clearly didn’t want us there. The bartendress gave us indifferent service, and we were getting some shady glances and cold shoulders. A block away, the Northern Lights Hotel, another location of some notoriety in the distant past, was closed and boarded up. Exploration of the perimeter yielded no new data, other than a “sold" sign.

A determination was made that we might be better off in the stinky hotel room.
Tonight, we had Moose’s Drool beer and crappy gin waiting for us there, but in the morning, we did not.
This was not nearly indulgent enough however. 
At 11:00 pm, Renee decided that we needed champagne.
Another venture into the wild: I waited in the Safeway parking lot watching a family of sixteen Eskimos take family portrait photos.
In the parking lot.
Renee emerged with Freixnet and Framboise Lambic.
Mixed together it was surprisingly effective.

R3 hates being photographed, but the pic to the right is sufficiently anonymous that I think I can get away with posting it here. 
It was taken near midnight.

In the mean time, we had our biggest “you had to be there" moment on the whole trip: R3 spilled most of the wasabi peas all over the moldy old carpet. I said: “That’s why I can’t trust you with the squid balls". It was hilarious and sent us into fits of laughter. As I type this, it isn’t especially funny at all. But in the moment...

We also had a brilliant plan to invent a service as in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but this one would just erase all memory of all the shitty music that one just can’t seem to escape from.  Then, you'd never get the bad songs stuck in your head all day.

Then we got into a war of throwing each other’s shoes out the hotel room window.
Fortunately, we didn’t have this genius idea while in the car.

It might be time to go back to Chicago.

Still life with squid balls.

Wednesday, July 07, 2010

Breakfast.

There might have been a few throbbing heads this morning. We needed a greasy diner, and we found one. The AW Restaurant (1704 Airport Way). I got a Farmer’s Skillet, R3 went for the 2x2x2 (eggs / bacon / pancakes) and a V8. $23.20. Back down to Denali. Sure... Renee and I are totally in the mood for hiking today. But: it is last call for such activities. We’re in it to win it. Power through. The road back south was a disaster: the construction crews were back on the job, having been off for the holiday when we came this way on Monday. Delays on the road were ridiculous. Only one direction was open at a time. Vehicles were backed up for a mile as the traffic from one direction used the road. Then the lane switched and the other direction got to go. There were like three of these blockages. It took hours to get back to Denali. We called the cheapest of the hotels we’d researched earlier in the week, and got a room for the bargain rate of $84.53 at the Denali RV Park and Motel (2451 George Parks Highway). This is near the town of Healy, about a dozen miles north of the park entrance. Staying ten miles closer to the park is a minimum of fifty bucks more. I’ll drive ten miles to save fifty bucks. Problem is, this room was easily the dumpiest of all the dumpy rooms we stayed in. That, my friends, is saying a lot. Renee couldn’t handle the strong smell of what she called cat piss. I was too tired to care, but yeah, it was offensive. She decided to kick some ass and take some names. We got another room, this one slightly less smelly. Slightly. This place is a small and cramped RV park, with a dozen motel rooms erected almost as an afterthought. Flimsy pre-fab buildings.

So, back to Denali for our last day of hiking.
With no bus tickets, and deathly afraid of Savage River, we decided to just do some of the other trails near the visitor’s center.

We made a loop of the Meadow View trail, to the Rock Creek trail, to the Roadside trail, which all lasted a few hours.
There were no massive adventures this time.  We didn't drive in a bear-watching bus, or hike off into the tundra, or go over a mountain and get stranded by a savage river; we just walked in nature on gentle trails for a few hours.

We witnessed two tall and skinny trees sharing a gigantic tumor.

Another mighty tree had fallen, decades ago, and sunk into the earth over the years.
After rotting from within, it collapsed, leaving a long woody trough in the landscape.

 

Views of the meadow were amazing.

And, there are small things too:

Dinner was a redux of Prospector’s, and another salmon pizza.
Beer?
What, are you fucking kidding me?
No.
Way.
There was a long wait to get into Prospector's.  We definitely weren't in the mood to wait around, but we also knew that we weren't going to do any better.  So we waited.  Renee said that the hostess was the prettiest girl in Alaska.  That's not saying much, but she was kinda cute.  I wonder who the cutest boy in Alaska was (aside from me, of course)?  She didn't say.

In the bright sunlight of the late evening, with long shadows and golden highlights illuminating the RVs parked outside of our shitty room, R3 drank our last beer from our food stash (What? No, really! This girl is made of iron, I tell you.  Get that shit away from me!) and pasted souvenirs into her journal, while I cleaned out the car and got ready for tomorrow’s journey home.


Thursday, July 08, 2010

We were out of the stinky room at 9:45 am. Gas in Denali was $4.05.9, compared to nearly a buck less just a few miles away in Healy (or anywhere else in the state, for that matter). Ack.

Traveled back to Anchorage. Just south of the Denali park entrance, we hit 1000 miles on the odometer. During the first half of the drive, we experienced more traffic delays and a redux of all of the scenic beauty.  The second half brought us into easier traffic and less amazing scenery.  Cold leftover salmon pizza made the trip bearable. At 1:38 pm, most of the way back to Anchorage, we parked and did a short hike at Thunderbird falls, which we had skipped when passing it the previous Thursday. We did the quick hike, a mile each way, on a fairly crowded trail in under an hour. The falls were nice. Yeah, just “nice”. That’s all I’ve got left. Nice. Getting closer to town, I observed a huge road sign warning people to watch for moose. Plastic numbers on the sign tallied the moose killed to date: 225. I wasn’t sure if this was for 2010, or for all-time on this stretch of road. With just a little time left before we had to return the car, I parked by Cook Inlet, and we walked a short and uninteresting trail into the industrial part of Anchorage. Doubling back, I paid my respects to Cook at his monument. Gas in Anchorage was a more reasonable $3.43.9. Filled up for $29.27, and delivered the Nissan back into the hands of Avis, while R3 waited in a nearby cafe. Final mileage for our Alaska road trip was was 1241.4. A bottle of seltzer water that we never even opened (it was theoretically to help that long-gone crappy gin) became a gift to the guy at the rental counter. It was time to get a Reindeer dog ($5) from a street vendor. Just because. Just because. Just because we now had like four hours to kill in Anchorage, a town we’d bailed out of earlier than we needed to last week, out of sheer lack of interest.

Across the street from the Captain Cook Hotel is the Corsair restaurant. It looks rather uninviting from the outside, as it is located in the basement of a virtually windowless concrete box that passes for the annex of a Beast Western hotel. Inside, it may as well have been an annex to the Cook Hotel. Decorated with a nautical motif and sporting a jazz duo in the corner (a guy on piano and a woman on bass and vocals), the only customer was an octogenarian woman in a booth. And what do you know: their cocktail menu looked pretty impressive. In addition to the detailed and proper Sazerac, the selection here includes such Alaskan rarities such as V.E.P., Fernet Branca, Lemon Hart, Diplomatico, R. L. Seale’s, plus extensive lists of wine, port, brandy, cognac, armagnac, and calvados. Ports are all decanted.

Dinner here is pricey, even by Alaskan standards (no, really), so we just got appetizers. A small plate of smoked salmon lox, a French onion soup, a glass of Malbec, and a Sazerac were all very good, and set us back $37.50 plus a $7 tip for Andy the bartender. He claims to be the longest standing bartender in Anchorage, having been at the Corsair for about thirty-three years. He says that Stan at Club Paris is 2nd longest-standing, but that Stan is “a little rough around the edges".

Andy does know his stuff, that’s for sure.
But he’s clearly an Alaskan: at one point, he pulled out a photo album and showed us pictures of various moose and bears that had visited his front yard.

The Corsair was a nice discovery to end the trip with.
And now, it is time to head to the airport.
But wait: not so fast!
Our flight has been delayed for two hours!
Now, it is not leaving until nearly midnight.

We got on the #7A bus for the airport, and guess who was driving it?
VINNIE.
I kid you not.
Renee and I literally cheered when we saw him; this poor guy had no idea who we are.
Why would he remember two random customers like us?

Fortunately: “Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport is adorned with hundreds of pieces of traditional and contemporary artwork. The pieces represent the five major indigenous cultures in the state.”
Most of it is in a gallery on a balcony that also allows viewing of the flights taking of and landing.
With lots of time to kill, I looked at every piece of art.
In detail.

   

All week, we had been pondering the idea that most of the taxidermy here is created to show the animals in really benign positions. 
Not only in the animal's posture, but its facial expressions. 
The preserved corpses of bears and wolves actually appear to be smiling more often than not. 
This surprises me a little bit because of the very nature of this craft. 
The people who go hunting for sport are clearly somewhat macho types. 
It takes a certain sort of person to stride out into the woods with a bow or a gun, with the intention of shooting an animal that has not previously intruded into the hunter's life, and which the hunter may or may not actually intend to eat. 
It seems to me that the sort of person who has something to prove by being a sport hunter would also very likely be the same sort of person who might want to display their trophy in a manner that would further feed the hunter's ego, namely a posture indicative of danger or ferocity. 
A snarling bear is certainly a more satisfying kill than a smiling one, right? 
The hunter's skill and nerve are certainly challenged more by a vicious and angry killer beast than by a cuddly little furry thing, right?
If I were the sort of person who thought it was clever to go out and kill things for fun, then I suppose I'd also want to display my kill in the very act of the combat (or murder) in which it died.
But no, the vast majority of the taxidermy in Alaska is sort of smiley and warm and fuzzy.

Except for this beast!

Raaaar!
This bear is huge and ferocious and will definitely eat you (at that point: fight back).
It is snarling because it is pissed off (or at least it was, before it was shot).
Now it is in the airport, scaring the tourists.
Yes, in Alaska, even the airport has some rather copious displays of dead animals.

Why is there never evidence of the kill in taxidermy?
No bullet or arrow wounds, no blood staining the fur.
So many delusions.
Almost always, the taxidermy says: this animal is benign, and it died without violence.
Neither are true.

If my flight doesn't leave soon, I am going to be more annoyed than this bear, if slightly less dead (hopefully).

Friday, July 09, 2010

Arrived in Chicago at something like 9:00 am.
Train to Renee’s, and then a drive home.

When it got dark that night, it was strange and novel.

My total trip cost (including Timba'land boots and FPRC, but not the new camera):
$2402.07

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