Thursday, August 25, 2016

Haines

Well, this road trip is about to turn into a boat trip.  After Valdez, we headed up the road toward Haines.  It took a few days of driving to get here.  We stopped for one night in Tok, which sort of completed our Alaska circle.  Tok is the town we were in after our adventurous drive over the Top of the World highway.  After Tok, we headed east back toward the Yukon and spent a couple wonderful nights at the Cottonwood campground on Kluane Lake.  We didn't have any hookups, but the view and the folks were fantastic.  Then, it was on to the end of the road in Haines.  This little port town is pretty quiet, only one cruise ship comes in each week.  We took the passenger ferry over to Skagway for the day, and it was a madhouse.  They had 4 huge cruise ships in port, and thousands of people walking around.  It was a bit of a shock.  We also toured Steve Kroschel's wildlife park.  This guy is an animal whisperer like we've never seen.  He has wild Alaskan animals that are so used to him that he can take them out in the wild for filming, and they'll come back when he calls.  It was neat getting so close to so many (mostly) wild animals.  This morning, we get on the big ferry for a short ride down the sound to Juneau, another large cruise ship port, but we have a nice spot at the state park outside of town reserved.  Here are some pictures since Valdez.

Kroschel's porcupine

The Bald Eagle Preserve.  We saw several flying around, but in October they gather by the thousands to feed on the late Chum Salmon run.

Rainbow Glacier from Chilkat State Park, just outside of town.  That waterfall is a couple hundred feet tall.  Again, pictures don't capture the majesty.

Our campsite on Kluane Lake, YT.  Beautiful views, nice weather, and great folks.


Visitor's center in Skagway.  That's all bleached natural wood cut into cool geometric patterns.

The White Pass and Yukon Railroad tour.  We spent the majority of the 3 hour trip standing on the platform outside.  The stove inside the car was keeping it a little too toasty.  Great views, and hard to believe men used to hike this canyon to get to Whitehorse to catch the paddle wheeler up to Dawson City.  Seeing Skagway was interesting, in no small part because we'd heard so much about it being the port that the gold rushers came to prior to starting the epic journey to the gold fields in the Klondike.

Kroschel's wolf.  He gets in there and plays with the thing.  Respectfully.

Steve Kroschel.  He's all over YouTube.  The most amazing animal interaction I've ever seen.  This is a wolverine.  He's been raising them for years.  The problem is that they're really just a large weasel, not all that smart.  They don't know their own strength.  Their bite has been known to crack the jawbone of a grizzly, for example.  This thing wasn't declawed or defanged at all.  He's got on several layers of clothes but the kiss is something else.




Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Valdez

The only context I had for Valdez, AK was the Exxon Valdez disaster.  It's a lot like the other port towns we've visited up here, rugged and more about work than tourism.  The drive down to Valdez is a spur, so we have to retrace our path for about 115 miles to get back on track, but it was worth the drive.  From our campsite, you can see at least a dozen separate glaciers.  We hiked up to the base of one, awesome.  Here are some pictures from the area.

Bridal Veil Falls in Keystone Canyon, AK.  About 10 miles outside Valdez.  It's a couple hundred feet tall or so, hard to tell in the picture.

This makes the scale of Horsetail Falls a little easier.  That's Laurie standing right at the base in the bottom left corner.  This is right across the highway from Bridal Veil Falls.

So we were told, an eccentric old woman kept bunnies as pets and when she died, they were turned lose on the town.  They're everywhere, blond, brown, gray.  They're not exactly scared either.  Reminds me of the chickens in Key West.

Worthington Glacier.  I turned up the blue color a little, still doesn't look as good in pictures as it does in person.  We hiked right up to the base.

Intrepid travelers, glacier side.

Don't try this at home!  I'm sure the ice from this glacier never breaks off in huge chunks and crushes tourists...

A pretty canyon by the salmon hatchery.  They were trying to return to this stream, though they were actually born at the hatchery just to the left out of frame.  More on that below.

The group campfire at our campsite.  It's a cement truck back end with big holes cut into it to make a fireplace.  That's our motorhome in the background.

These salmon are also from the hatchery, trying to make it back up an impossible waterfall from the stream they think they were born in.

These 2 eagles were at our campground the whole time we were here.  I caught them in an interesting pose here, cool reflection in the water.

This is the hatchery.  When they started the process, there were some salmon spawning naturally just upstream on the right.  They have a fish ladder so that some salmon climb into the blue building.  They take the sperm and eggs from some of the fish to breed a few million little salmon every year that they grow in pens just offshore until they're big enough to survive the ocean, then they release them.  The hatchery is close enough to the original natural stream that they think that's where they're supposed to go.  It might have been able to hold a few hundred, maybe a thousand salmon originally.  They grow so many roe now and release them at a maturity level where hundreds of thousands, millions now return to the area every year.  Most are caught in the bay, but these "left overs" are still trying to repeat the natural cycle.  There were dead salmon everywhere, and still thousands trying to cram their way up stream.

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Land's End, Homer AK

Homer, AK is the end of the road, a port city at Land's End on the Kenai Peninsual south of Anchorage.  We had to go.  We stayed at basically a fish camp on the southernmost spit of land in this area's southernmost city.  We still have some undiscovered country to cover between Anchorage and Haines, but in Homer we basically turn around and head home.  We only stayed one rainy, foggy evening, just long enough to eat some fresh halibut and take a couple pictures.   We're back in Anchorage now, enjoying civilization's charms for a few days.

This past Sunday we went to shop for groceries at the commissary.  This moose was grazing beside the road, right by the flightline where the jets take off.

The little peninsula on the left side of this picture is the Homer Spit, where we camped at the last campground before the ferry landing.  In this neck of the woods, that's the end of the line.

An old wooden homestead on the spit converted to a famous landmark, the Salty Dog Saloon.  The lighthouse is for atmosphere, the rest of the place is original 1890's construction.

We've only been here a couple weeks and they want us to run for office.  I don't know if it's me or Laurie they want to govern this place.  They elected Palin, why not one of us?

The coastline by our campsite.  That water out there is chock full of halibut and other fish.

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Seward - Kenai Fjords National Park

Seward – Kenai Fjords National Park

Seward is another cool seaside town, on the east side of the Kenai Peninsula, a few hours south of Anchorage.  We pulled into a commercial park the first night to do laundry after our blissful 2 days dry camping in Portage Valley.  After that, we moved waterfront (something about a waterfront site) for 3 nights.  It’s a city park, so only $20 a night.  No hookups, but man, what a view.  We took a day long boat tour out to Kenai Fjords National Park.  It turned out to be much more than a glacier cruise.  The glacier was epic, no doubt, I got a minute-long video of a couple hundred feet calving into the ocean.  But, the wildlife was just epic.  On one 8 hour cruise, we saw…humpback whales, Orca, fin whales, sea lions, harbor seals, sea otter, Bald Eagles, 2 kinds of Puffin, and bunch of other nesting sea birds I can’t even name.  And to boot, the weather was spectacular, absolutely the nicest day we’ve seen in Alaska.  A wise man used to tell me “Sometimes you’re the windshield, and sometimes you’re the bug.”  Today, we were definitely the windshield.  Here are some pics…


Standing at the grill cooking up some pork chops, I thought, gosh this is a lovely place to make camp. 

Intrepid travelers at the Aialik glacier.  200 feet tall and 2 miles wide.

Pictures just don't do it, even in panorama mode.  Not a cloud in the sky.  We were so lucky.

Pretty classic Bald Eagle pose, coming in for a landing.  Lucky shot.

We saw a pod of at least 3 or 4 Orca.  This young Killer Whale was showing off killer form in the jump up and impress tourists contest.  He probably jumped completely out of the water half a dozen times.  Who needs captive whales when you can see this in the wild?

An adult Orca, pretty sure it's female.  The dorsal fin is supposed to be even more prominent on the males.

Harbor seals hanging out on an ice floe from the glacier

One of several dozen seat otters we saw hanging out.  The fur is so dense they just float like a cork.  They're big too, like 4 or 5 feet long.

Humpbacks were everywhere.  Here's a cool picture of the dorsal fin right after the blow, you can still see the mist.

I got a lot of humpback tail fluke shots.  Here's a good one.

Tufted Puffin were everywhere.  Cute!

The Captain said this was a Fin Whale.  They're a lot more skittish than the others, and we were out at the mouth of the bay near the open Gulf of Alaska.  They prefer open water, so we were, again, very lucky to sight a 3rd whale species so clearly.  These are the 2nd largest, behind the Blue Whale.

Common Murre.  One of at least half a dozen nesting seabirds we saw.

A lone Puffin standing vigil.

We saw plenty of Sea Lions as well.  You can see the new pups at the left of the picture, down by the water.

A view of the RV from the water.  I put a gold star above it to make it easier to pick out.  Nice back yard, right?