Looking through my journal from the second summer of guiding, for information to back up a paper I’m writing, I ran across this particularly anecdotal day.

14 July, 2005

No guests at all today, after breakfast. Cleaned the stove and scrubbed and waxed the kitchen floor. A man and his two sons came to buy fishing licenses from Nelda. She introduced me as a local girl who just finished college back east.

“I went to the East Coast once,” the man said. “I got arrested.”

He told the story:

“I was just a kid and I drove across the country with an older man, our neighbor in California. He was a trucker. We got there and he was beat, so he was sleeping, and I went to go do our laundry; we’d been on the road for a while.

“This little black kid come in, and asked me to buy him a beer. I said, ‘I can’t buy beer, I’m sixteen.’ The kid said, ‘yeah, but you look eighteen.’ So I went over and I bought him a beer and one for me.’

“We’re doing our laundry and drinking our beer. I never drank before, I thought, ‘this is pretty good.’ I went back and I bought some whiskey, and I woke up in jail.”

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t go east of the Continental Divide now, that’s where people change.”

One his sons asked “What state was that in?”

“Buffalo, New York.”

I caught another fish and watched an ugly brown cloud of smoke roll across from Homer. The sun turned orange.

This time I brought home most the whole fish, less the tail intestines and the bloodline. Froze the fillets and boiled the backbone and head, picked the meat off, and threw the bones out, added onions and rice for soup.

Looking in the Cooking Alaskan cookbook, it said the Aleuts would mix salmon liver with berries and seal oil. I tried it with blueberries [without seal oil], but I don’t think I will again. The liver tasted okay (boiled intil white and mashed) and the blueberries tasted fine, but they weren’t a great mix. But you never know unless you try!

Had a chill time on the ferry.. saw humpbacks and Dall’s porpoises. Haines was lovely, as was the mother of a friend we stayed with, who had a big dog and an enormous cat. We drove to the river mouth there and saw a momma grizzly with twins catching fish, and some seals in the river as well. Lots of eagles around as well.

Drove up to Tok yesterday, passed through Canada. Saw a couple of cute and curious Arctic ground squirrels and a pair of coyotes (separately). I saw a black bear, but Alex missed it as the driver. We stayed in the Tok Motel, which was less run-down than I expected for a place behind a liquor store.

Today we’ve made it to Anchorage, passing through a lot of gorgeous, though mostly socked in, scenery. Saw the Matanuska Glacier, which was an impressive big pile of ice. Also went through some impressive road construction work. Saw a swan and a couple of rabbits.

Still haven’t seen any moose or caribou. We’re headed off to the Ressurrection Pass Trail, which will go through alpine lands and hopefully we’ll see some marmots and such.

That’s the wildlife update! Off to the wilds again…

Off to the wilds again!

I’m about to take off for a long trip to Alaska. I haven’t been home in over two years, so I am super overdue. I’ll try to put accounts and photos up here, but it seems like the more interesting things happen, the less time I have to report back on them. Funny how that works.

Rough Itinerary
July 25-28 – Ferry from Bellingham, WA to Haines, AK
July 29 – Haines
July 30-31 – Drive from Haines to Hope, AK
Aug 1-5 – Hike Resurrection Pass Trail
Aug 8 – Fly out of Homer to see BEARS!
Aug 16-22 – Probably hiking in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.
End of August – Denali
First week of Sept – Fairbanks
Around Sept 8 – Bonnie flies back to Seattle, Alex drives back to Haines & puts car on return ferry.

Safety
Yes, we each have a first aid kit, and bear spray. The trip to see bears is a guided trip in a place where guided trips go every summer day the weather allows. On our deepest back-country trip, we’ll be accompanied by my dad, who works for a fire department, has been an EMT for about twenty years, and does plenty of backcountry trips on a regular basis.

We’ve got a spot beacon, which links up with a sattelite and sends one of three messages to a select list of email addresses and cell phones. The options are OK, HELP and OH-SHIT-SEND-THE-MOUNTIES. Alex has got it figured out to have the messages go here as well, so you can check them if you like. Coordinates and a Google maps link are included in each message.

I wasn’t planning on bringing my cell phone, but I think I will actually do so, and maybe try to update my voice mail message when I get service, so if you call me you’ll get something along the lines of “Hi, you’ve reached Bonnie’s phone. It’s July 24 and we’re getting on a ferry tomorrow for three days to Haines, Alaska. Still alive, haven’t done too much packing yet.”

So far, (haven’t quite left yet) the only thing that has gone wrong is that my cat, overnight, pulled out my carefully prepared bag of bags of dinner food and chewed a hole in one. Zatarain’s Red Beans & Rice smells like something tasty, so maybe we had better eat that one in a campground rather than on a trail somewhere…

Oh, and there’s apparently a foot of snow in Wrangell-St. Elias, which might melt off or might become two feet of snow before we get there, but we haven’t made any reservations with the air company to fly in for our hike there. Maybe we will bail and go somewhere else?