The cruise company minibus pulled up to the campground office at 10;30, and eight of us climbed in, festooned with daypacks and extra jackets. We went aboard the Glacier Spirit at precisely 11:30, off for a six and a half hour cruise of Prince William Sound - that ended up being a seven and a half hour cruise.

In the beginning, I stood on the upper deck behind a wind shield, and watched the steep mountainsides that plunged into the sea. But when the captain said we were coming up on some Steller sea lions sleeping on the deck of a buoy, I rushed with everyone else to find the best vantage point to see them. The Glacier Spirit paused by the lime-green buoy for some minutes, and everyone got a close-up look. The sea lions were snoozing, and other than occasionally opening one eye to see us and promptly closing it again, they flopped like so many sausages in the warm sun and dozed.

Steller sea lions! I'd only seen them in National Geographic. These were real! That whetted my appetite for more sightings, and I took to roaming the boat hoping for excitement. Where was Bob during all this? He was doing the same thing, searching for sightings. It's every tourist for him/herself at times like this.

The next up was a bald eagle on a rocky beach, tearing at something to eat, probably a fish. He hopped up on a log where we could see him better, and spread his wings. People with long lenses fought for camera positions, others with binoculars stood on tiptoe to see over and around the crowd. Bob and I both tried to see out of the binoculars around his neck. We got a good look at the eagle as he got a good look at us.

Several more eagles were sighted in high trees or soaring over the cliffs. I didn't always try to find them; they were so far away that with binoculars like we have, cheap ones, you can't really tell a lot about them. Later on two eagles posed on another rocky beach, and the boat floated close enough to get a real good view of them for everyone.

Salmon seiners clustered near the neck of a narrow spot in the Sound and then dribbled away out into the wider waters. The Alaskan fisheries tells these boat crews when they can fish, and for how long. Today they had twelve hours to fish, from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

The captain of the sight-seeing boat knew the seiners, and talked about them by name even before we got close to them. He explained the whole process of using purse-seine fishing as it unfolded in front of us. What an object lesson! We were extraordinarily lucky to happen upon one seiner that had closed the purse and was hauling in the nets. We waited as the net dragged slowly up over the pulley. Crew members dashed around making sure nothing tangled and that the net folded properly for the next release. Would the “Bag of Gold” at the bottom of the purse have fish? Would it have a lot of fish? We waited.

Slowly the net came up and up, then suddenly sparkles of flopping silvery salmon glinted in the sunlight.

“Fish!” someone on the boat shouted, and the call was taken up by others.

“Yes, fish!” I cheered.

“They try to roll the whole purse into the boat,” said the captain. “Let's see if they can roll this one. If they can't, then they have to use hand nets to take out the excess so the purse can be rolled.”

I don't know how they did it. The edge of the net full of fish draped over the gunwale of the boat, and then the whole shimmering Bag of Gold literally rolled over the edge and into the seiner.

Once a seiner's hold is filled with fish, they would need to go all the way back in to Valdez and unload it, then return to the fishing grounds, which would lose valuable hours of their allotted fishing time. Not to worry. There were two larger fishing boats that we saw, there may have been more, lingering on the fishing grounds. They were tenders, boats big enough to hold the fish from several seiners. The tender sucks the fish out of the seiner hold with a big vacuum, weighs it, and dumps it on ice. The seiner is paid off immediately, or given credit for the fish, and goes back to spreading its nets.

The captain did add that the tenders cannot make a living just sucking up salmon. In the winters they drag for shrimp. Valdez is the farthest north port that's open in the winter; Prince William Sound doesn't freeze over. That's why the great Alyeska Alaska Pipeline runs into here. Tankers can haul out oil all year around.
Things went quietly for a while after that, so lunch was served. It was supposed to be served at one, but so many sights of interest had come up that it was two before a crew member plunked a cup of vegetarian gumbo, a bagel with cream cheese, and a little package of Oreo cookies on a tray I held on my lap. Manna for the starving!

I had been out on the windy front deck earlier, but kept hovering near the cabin door and checking to make sure I wouldn't miss lunch. After that business was taken care of, I established myself at a spot on the rail on the port side of the bow for the indefinite future. My big puffy red winter coat was zipped and the hood up. I tied the hood down with a scarf against its being blown off by the wind, and put on my red one-size-fits-all gloves. I was ready for the duration.

People rushed out on that deck when there was a sighting, then vanished back into the warm cabins. I wanted to see everything we passed, to immerse myself in the wildness of the water and mountains. Bob stopped by all hooded and bundled also, but preferred to mosey around the deck and talk to people rather than hang by the rail. There were some tourists from Israel, and a few Americans that also stayed along the prow rail. Others came and went.

Along the way we had seen a couple of sea otters, one quite close, and clusters of guillemots skimming over the water with their little wings fluttering. I was amazed at the size of the sea otters, expecting them to be about like our river otters. A male sea otter can get to seventy pounds! The otter did his otter thing, lying on his back and floating around, teasing and playing. I snapped off about twenty photos of him before he dived and disappeared.

But I didn't' get a picture of the humpback whale. He didn't breech or show his flukes or do anything spectacular like that. He just snored. It was a young one. We could see the gray curve of his back above the ripples, and occasionally the top his head when the sea pulled away. Every now and then a spray of water shot into the air, but that was the only sign of life. We waited a while, but he just kept snoozing. We moved on.

The captain announced our arrival at a Steller sea lion hauling-out beach. It was like stepping - or boating - into a National Geographic photo. Hundreds of sea lions sprawled on the gravel and on each other on rocks at the base of a soaring mountainside. They burped, grunted, mooed, and bellowed, slid into the water and pulled themselves out of it. The tide was high, so the beaches were narrow and teams of them just frolicked in the sea. Eight or ten together swam up to the boat, bobbed and rolled, and exploded out of the water. They grinned at us as they slid by to dive, turn, and come back to play again. I would swear that one of them winked at me when they glided by. As we slowly moved away, we could see them behind us breeching and bobbing in their endless games.

Hard upon the sea lions came the puffins. We had seen them as little fluttering spots skimming over the water before and taken the captain's word that we were looking at puffins. The boat glided up to some shallow sea caves at the base of a cliff. Puffins were floating on the swells and standing in the caves - briefly. They were in constant motion, so it was hard to get a good look at a single puffin. The front deck was crammed with people trying to see the little birds, and Bob and the binoculars were nowhere to be seen. I didn't want to give up my railside place to find him, so I had to do with what I could see with the naked eye, which wasn't much. Then I got lucky. A tufted puffin landed in the water quite close to the boat and floated around long enough for me to get a good look at him. I thanked him for that.

It wasn't long after that we entered a bay where big blocks and little chunks of blue ice floated, calves and debris from the Columbia Glacier, the climax of our trip. The bay was sixteen miles from the glacier. The currents were such that ice floating away from the glacier gets shoved into this bay and eventually ends up in jumbled heaps along the shoreline.

Once through the bay it was clear sailing, so to speak. The captain revved up the Glacier Spirit and headed for the glacier. The wind blew those of us on deck right back. You couldn't even open your eyes into it, and I was wearing sunglasses. I had worked my way up to the point of the prow to be in position to get approach shots to the glacier and I wasn't moving. Those of us at the rail turned our backs to the wind and held on. It had never been warm out there, and now the temperature dropped with each mile. My red polyester-stuffed flea market coat again proved its worth. The wind didn't penetrate it. I can't say I was toasty-warm; but I wasn't cold, either, in the frigid stiff winds.

After a half-hour or so, we came within sight of the ice-studded waters before the glacier. Glassy azure icebergs and white chunks of floating, melting ice dotted the clear blue sea. Peaked white mountains thrust into a blue, blue sky. I stood at the prow and snapped pictures as the ice came closer to the boat. I got a couple of good shots, then when I pressed the trigger, nothing happened. I looked at the screen. In red words it said “Card Filled!” Did I have a spare card in my pocket ready to shove into the camera? Of course not. The spare card was in my backpack sitting on a bench seat in the upstairs cabin. Bob was nowhere to be seen.

In times of great stress like that, one does what one has to do. I left my rail position at the point of the prow and plowed through the mass of humanity gaping at the ice floes to get to my backpack. Once there, I dug out the card, sat down with the camera, and forced myself to work slowly and think about what I was doing so I wouldn't lose precious time to stupid mistakes. The new card went into the camera, and I carefully placed the filled card in a plastic box and returned it to the camera bag. I picked up the camera and slid open the shutter to test the new card. The window was black, and in the upper left-hand corner was a little red battery symbol. The batteries were dead. More precious time lost. Stress level was up to ten and counting.

The air had that sharp, crystalline feel of winter when I got back to the front deck. I worked my way through the crowd and as someone moved, was able to slip up to a side rail. The world had become an ethereal land of blue and white. Icebergs, chunks, and floes surrounded the slowly moving boat. An eagle sat on one small iceberg, and sea otters played on another. The glacier flowed into the long pure white snowfield before us from among now immense white mountain peaks.

The front of the glacier was a many-faceted pale blue and white wall. The boat drifted through the sea of ice from one side of the bay to the other. People took pictures of each other with the glacier as a backdrop. A gal from Israel took a shot of Bob and me together for us. Ice chunks bumped against sides of the boat or thunked on the bottom as we slid over them. In slow motion the boat turned away from the glacier and made its way out of the ice-studded bay. I hung over the rail and studied the floating ice chunks, some riddled through with melt-holes, and tried to comprehend that they were 2,000 years old. I knew the fact, but couldn't grasp the reality.

After we left the bay, we had the long ride back to Valdez. Some folks flopped on the bench seats and slept. Most of the others, though, continued to sit or walk around and enjoy the scenery and the ride. Except for the regulars, the front deck was pretty much deserted. Free coffee and tea was available all day, but I had been too busy to get any. Now I went to the galley counter for a cup of Earl Grey tea. I took it out to my bench by the rail and sipped on it as the mountains slid by. The lemony-spicy taste of bergamot was a fit accompaniment to the exotic frozen landscape. Bob came along and sat with me, and together we drifted through the magical world of the far wild.

When we got back to the fishing grounds, the seiners were finishing for the day, and turned to follow us back to Valdez. It was a silent parade, all bows pointed home. We passed the lime-green buoy, still draped with sea lions. They showed even less interest in us than they did before. We had no part in their lives.

The tour got back an hour late, we had spent so much time with the fishermen and wildlife. For that we thanked the tour company. We walked from the docks to the restaurant where we ate last night. Last night the halibut was lightly breaded and quickly cooked, almost greaseless. They must have changed cooks. Tonight the he fish was heavy with batter and greasy, as if the fryer hadn't been hot enough. We both had heartburn from it. An imperfect end to to a perfect day.

Valdez, Alaska

We woke up to sunshine, but soon an overcast moved in. After a leisurely breakfast we walked to the Valdez Museum. Local museums are always fascinating. Much of what you see in them you will never see anywhere else. Exhibits on the Alaska Pipeline, the earthquake of l964, and photos and displays of local history and tales of the Gold Rush kept us occupied for over two hours.

Valdez, in Gold Rush days, was heralded as the only All-American route to the Klondike. Rather than the long trek and float to Dawson through the Yukon, gold seekers could sail to an Alaska Territory port and take a shorter route over the Valdez Glacier and across Alaska almost to Dawson in the Yukon Klondike. Even though they ended up in Yukon Territory anyway, hundreds of hopefuls in California and Oregon were sold tickets to the Port of Valdez to take the American route.

When the gold-seekers stepped off the ship at Valdez, all that was here was a cabin and snow. There was no town, no lodging, no food, nothing. Nearly all of them stayed, anyway, mostly because they didn't have the money to go back. Many took the route over the Valdez Glacier to the Klondike. Others stayed in Valdez and mined gold and copper here with limited success. Bob and I passed the Valdez Glacier this afternoon on our way to go fishing. In over a hundred years it has receded, but still the idea of hauling 2,000 pounds of goods at 150 pounds a sled load up it -thirty or forty trips to get it all to the top - seems Herculean. And that was after you had already hauled all your kit up the steep mountain trail to reach the base of the glacier.

We walked from the museum down to the docks for a restaurant lunch, then back to the camper to organize for Bob to go fishing. He had found the local hot spot for shore fishing, got his Alaska license, and bought a couple of the lures that locals use. The time to fish is a couple hours each side of high tide. High tide today was at 4:34 p.m. At 2:30 we were on our way. The directions were simple. Go out Richardson Highway; turn down Dayville Road. You can't miss it. There'll be trucks and motor homes parked all over.

Were there ever! Trucks, truck campers, motor homes, van campers, were parked in any wide- enough space between the road and the mountainside along a two-mile stretch of rocky beach. Bob found a little spot and backed the van in right into the underbrush. He crossed the road, clambered down the rocks, and settled himself in to catch pink salmon. I meanwhile settled myself in the van with my computer on my lap and a view of the bay and mountains, and wrote.

In about an hour and a half it began to sprinkle. I kept on working. It sprinkles a lot in Valdez, but seldom amounts to anything. This time it persisted, so I closed up the van and clambered down over the rocks with Bob's raincoat. He was ready to wrap it up, anyway. It had not been a good afternoon. He had two salmon hooked and they got away, one of them practically on shore. His reel didn't work right and tangled the line. He'd had to change poles. He had lost a lure, not on a salmon, but on an underwater rock. So? Sounded to me like what fishing is all about.

As soon as we got back to town, we went to a fish shop where he bought new line, several lures, and a fileting knife. He is going to get serious about this fishing. For the next hour, in the camper, he worked on reels and strung poles. I made five-bean salad and watched campground staff haul picnic tables up in their truck and arrange them across from the office.

When we saw a couple of ladies with covered dishes walking towards the tables we grabbed some plates and the five-bean salad and headed for the tables ourselves. Two fellows spilled oil on a grill and a huge frying pan, and the complimentary campground fish fry was on! It was gray, chilly, and occasionally sprinkly. Misty clouds drifted across the mountainsides. Nobody cared. The tables quickly filled up with campers savoring blackened Cajun-style fried salmon and all the good homemade dishes on the long table near the fryers.

“Where are you from?”

“Have you been to Homer yet?”

“We were delayed for hours by smoke at Chicken.”

“Did you drive The Highway?”

The dishes on the long table emptied, and new ones came to replace them. The gal next to me from Arkansas lamented that a hot dish of stewed okra with tomatoes had just been brought, and she had already eaten her dessert. We ate and laughed and talked for a half hour or more, then left the table so others could sit down.
The fish fry started at 6:00 p.m. It neared 7:00 and still people were dribbling over to the tables, bringing their dishes and eating the fish. Shortly after seven it began to rain in earnest.

From our camper's vantage point right across from the office, I can see all as I sit here writing. The fish fry-cooks are under the office building's wide eaves, so they are unaffected by the rain as they clean up the cooking apparatus. A half dozen people still sit out in the rain at the picnic tables and carry on with their meals and gossip. Another four folks continue to clean their today's fish catch at the fish cleaning tables right behind the office building. None of them have rain gear on, and it is only sixty degrees and going down. They are obviously not from Florida.

Little Tiger, the ceramic heater, purrs away in the camper. I just poured us a glass of wine, and we are locked in for the night. Let it rain.

Valdez, Alaska

Sun here in Valdez is a sometime thing. The mountains that surround the town and bay trap moisture from the sea. Mists drift across the faces of the mountains, and there is often a high layer of clouds through which the sun shines here and there. Most of this day qualified as a sunny day, since there were blue rifts in the overcast and sometimes full sunshine.

Today our cultural outing was a series of videos at Prince William Sound Community College. We detoured to the docks on our way to the college so I could get a photo up close of a battered and rusty salmon seiner. Today was not a fishing day. The docks were full of seiners waiting for the word from Alaskan Fish and Game that they could go out fishing again, so I got a good photo of one.

The videos at the college were shown in a comfortable little auditorium. Coffee and cookies were available at the back of the room during the showings, a nice touch. As soon as the gal announced the refreshments, Bob was back there pouring coffee and choosing cookies.

As part of the college's ongoing education series, these videos are shown three times a day, seven days a week. The room was full for today's 11:30 a.m. showing, so they must have quite a good response to the offering over the summer. There were four videos, one on the building of the Alaskan Pipeline, one on the newest breed of tankers being built to avoid another tragedy like the Exxon Valdez oil spill, one showing actual photos of the 1964 earthquake, and one on the glaciers and wildlife of Prince William Sound. The whole show took two hours, which sped by.

A late lunch, a bit of food shopping, and then it was time to go fishing again. The reason that fishing is possible only a couple of hours on each side of the high tide is that when the tide goes out, the exposed mud flats are like quicksand and too dangerous to walk on. High tide today was at 5:04 p.m. We were out there by 3:00 p.m.

We went to a different spot along the shore, one that had a little easier access than climbing down rocks with arms full of fishing gear. Bob got himself all established and starting casting. I took a couple of pictures, then went back to the car. My view today was lovely. Right beside the car was a cluster of tall fireweed, still in full blossom. Through the fireweed I could see the Sound and its mountainous background. I set up the laptop on my lap and began to work.

After a couple of hours, it began to sprinkle again. I picked up Bob's raincoat and went down to the shore to give it to him. He had landed one salmon onto the rocks, but it flopped back into the water before he could grab it. He had a second one almost to the shore, when the line went over a sharp rock and broke. Goodbye salmon.

I went back to the computer. Not long after I saw Bob's mustard-colored raincoat coming up the walkway from the shore. I went back to work, and suddenly he appeared at the car window beside me, holding up the two pieces of his fishing pole. He had reeled in another salmon, a big one, almost to the rocks - and the rod broke. The salmon, on a loose line, flipped its tail and dove back into the sea.

Bob went to the back of the van. There were some rattling noises. Then he called that he was going to give it another try. After he left, I made a trip to the pit toilet, then down to the shore.

“Look in the bucket,” said Bob.

“Did you get one already?” I grabbed the plastic bag in the bucket to take a look.

“No.”

A couple from Gladwin, Michigan, was fishing from a canoe just offshore and saw Bob lose the two fish. They came up on the stony beach to clean their many fish, and were there when Bob's rod broke and he lost the third one. They offered Bob some of their fish; and he took two, already cleaned. Fish is fish, however you get it, I say. I carried the bag back to the van for safekeeping.

It wasn't much longer that he gave it up for the day, and we came back to the camper in light rain to fix a late supper. The rain continues as I write this. We've signed up at the campground for another day. One more time, Bob will take on the salmon of Prince William Sound.

Valdez, Alaska

Rain pattered on the roof all night and streaked the windows in the morning. Mist that matched the sky hid the mountains. The whole word was a pearl grey. I set up my computer and prepared to spend the morning writing letters.

Soon after I started to write, the rain slowed to a drizzle and fishers appeared at the long aluminum fish-cleaning table. From my vantage point near the main building, I watched the life of the campground as I wrote. A fellow came by my window foaming with toothpaste as he walked and brushed in the rain. Ladies in bathrobes and tousled hair dodged around the fish cleaners to get to the door of the shower room. Laundry in bulging pillowcases or bright-colored plastic bags was hauled around the corner to the laundry room. Campers left the park, others checked in.

Bob appeared in the window, made a face at me, and then stomped into the trailer. He had been to the fishing supply store for lures, now he was going back. A fellow cleaning fish told him that wire leaders would help keep the line from being cut by rocks. Off Bob went for wire leaders. Around noon he stuck his head in the door and said he was going to the tackle shop for the third time. They must have loved to see him come in their door. This time he came back with a new rod to replace the one that broke.

The Maxine and Jeffrey Whitney Museum is at the airport and on our way to the Allison Point fishing grounds, where we have been spending our afternoons. High tide today was at 5:30 p.m., so there was time to visit the museum after lunch, before the mud flats covered and the fishing started.

Like so many private collections, the Whitney assemblage had some of this and some of that, depending on the whim of the collector. The museum is billed as an exhibition of native artifacts, but there were also stuffed animals, geologic samples and historic photos. Everything was described in a free catalog and carefully displayed in clean, bright rooms.

There were a fair number of folks in the museum studying the displays and chatting, not always in English. I struck up a conversation with a fellow at the stuffed bull musk ox as we shared the sheets of an interpretive bulletin. He wanted to be sure I read that musk ox fight by ramming foreheads together at speeds up to seventeen miles an hour. That really impressed him. All the interpretive signage on the large exhibits was in great detail, and the smaller exhibits of multiple objects were described in the catalog.

Two coffee pots and a large plate of commercial sandwich cookies on a long table among soft chairs gave the main display room a homey welcoming feeling, especially on this rainy day. You could carry a cup of coffee with you as you perused the exhibits or sit down on a soft chair and read the interpretive materials.

We lingered at the museum until the magic tidal hour, then drove through rain and random billows of mist to the bay. The parking spot, which was just a cleared patch between road and mountain, was almost full when we got there. Bob did a quick brake and backup to snatch the last place. The rear end of BlueVan ended up shoved into the dripping underbrush and standing in water, but the car off the road. We pushed away the wet wilderness enough to pull open the back doors of the van. Bob got his fishing gear and I dug my gloves out of the pockets of the big red coat.

Bob crossed the road, stepped up on a rock someone had placed as a booster, clambered over the guardrail and disappeared down the rocky slope to the water. I zipped up my rain jacket, pulled on my gloves, and headed up the road. I hoped to get an hour or two of walking in, maybe more. Tide crest was an hour and a half away. Bob usually fished until after the turn, so I could do well.

First I went west. Fishers, men, women, and children, were spread out along the rocky shore. There were other grubbed-out parking spots like we were in, and there were two Day Use areas that weren't much different except they had pit toilets and drinking water. “Day Use Only” meant that the lots were closed from 1:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m., so people couldn't camp there overnight for free. For ten dollars, though, you could rent a place on a gravel parking lot overnight, and a number of people were doing just that. All these facilities were scattered along the road at any large enough flat space between mountain and road or road and water to be useful.

I walked as far as the signs that said; “No firearms, No alcohol, No illegal drugs, No smoking,” and essentially, “You can't come in here anyway.” The signs marked the boundary of a 500-yard buffer zone around the terminal of the Alyaska Alaska Pipeline. Huge storage tanks sat on mountainside ledges and tanker-sized docks thrust out into the bay. Twenty-five per cent of American's oil-based energy supply passes through here. I watched it for a while, but there was no activity I could see from that distance, so I turned around.

My intent was to go past the van, check on how Bob was doing, and walk the road east. When I got within a block of our parking spot, Bob popped out from behind the car, walked to the road edge, and signaled me to come to the van right away.

Was he done fishing already? It had been less than an hour and the tide wasn't even at the crest. He kept wiping his hands, looking down at them, and wiping them again as I cut across the road and hurried towards the car. I thought maybe he had cut himself. Or, better, maybe he had got a salmon and had sticky hands from cleaning it.

When I got up to him, he said, “I fell in the water. I'm wet, cold, and muddy. Let's go.”

He was wet, all right, and a sorry sight. His hands were dirty; his jeans and hiking boots were soaked with water and smeared with mud.

“Did you get any fish?”

“Two of them. They're in the back.”

He jumped into the car and I did, too. I really wanted to see the fish, but sensed that I shouldn't insist on it. My raincoat and hat were dripping from the rain, but he dripped from all over himself on the way home.

“I hooked ten or twelve fish all together. The first one I landed fell off the hook onto the rocks and flipped all over. I tried to catch it, but it was so damn' slimy, you know, that I couldn't hold onto it; and it got back into the water. The next one I caught went fine. I had the last one up to the shore, and thought I should get in a better position to land him. I stepped on a slippery rock, and down I went into the drink. But I held onto the rod and reeled him in!”

Bob cleaned the salmon at the campground fish-cleaning table outside our camper window. He was still wet, standing in fifty-four or five degree drizzle, and loving every minute of it. Some passers-by stopped to talk, and he got to tell his fish stories over again to them and to a couple of other fishermen while they cleaned fish. This evening he cut up and packaged the salmon while I washed the muddy clothes. We will leave Valdez tomorrow with our little camper freezer full of nice pink salmon filets.

On the Road

Light rain and mist still blanketed Valdez this morning as we pulled out. A mile out of town we stopped at U. S. Fish and Wildlife exhibit on a salmon spawning stream. The rain had quit, though the mists continued to drift. We saw salmon struggling in their last great effort to get upstream to their spawning beds as we read interpretive exhibits about them, and I took some pictures of the misty bogs and mountains.

We drove again into Keystone Canyon, and into sunshine. There is only one highway in and out of Valdez, like Haines, so you get to see all the scenery twice. It's worth it.

At Glennellen we filled up with gas and turned west on the Glenn Highway towards Palmer. The trip through upland bogs and meadows was beautiful in the sunshine, and the last sixty miles into Palmer were again spectacular mountains, tundra, and glaciers. You run out of adjectives. The scenery up here is so fantastic that you're overwhelmed by it. Photos can't do it justice. Videos can't do it justice. You have to be here and stand beside a river or on a mountainside to experience the impact of the farness, the immensity, and glory of the Alaskan wilderness.

We got to study some of that scenery in great detail. A long section of Cliffside mountain road was under construction. We were lucky; we only sat in line to wait our turn to go through the construction for about five minutes, when the line began to move.

Heavy equipment worked on the outside lane, the one hanging over the abyss, building up the roadbed and pouring a cement guardrail. Traffic moved slowly along the inside lane tucked against the soaring mountainside. I do mean slowly. The trail of mud and rocks was incredibly rough and we bounced along it forever. It seemed like about forty miles, though it wasn't. When we got to the end of the construction, there were a couple of miles of vehicles lined up waiting for their turn to bounce forever. We'll have to go back that way on our way out of Alaska, but not for a month. Things should have improved by then.

We're camped tonight near Palmer. I am finishing this “postcard” sitting on the campground office porch, cluttered with benches and old chairs that apparently no one uses. There is a public phone on the wall with a datajack. I'm plugged into the world at ten cents a minute from my seat on a rackety green wooden bench in the Alaskan countryside.

Getting Started

Michigan
Mackinac Island
Sault Ste. Marie

Canada
Wawa
Schreiber
Kakabeka P P

Alaska
Cantwell
Denali
Kenai
Soldotna

International Falls, MN

North Dakota
Icelandic State Park
Willston

Malta, MT

Alberta, Canada
Fort McLeod
Wetaskiwin
Valley View

Alaska
Kenai
Soldotna
Homer
Seward

British Columbia, Canada
Dawson Creek
FortNelson
Muncho Lake

Yukon Territory, Canada
Watson Lake
Whitehorse

Alaska
Seward
Palmer
Tok

Yukon Territory, Canada
Whitehorse

Alaska
Haines
Skagway

Yukon Territory, Canada
KluaneLake

Alaska
Tok
Valdez

Yukon Territory, Canada
Whitehorse
(and Skagway, AK)

British Columbia, Canada
WatsonLake
FortNelson
Dawson Creek

Alberta, Canada
Whitecourt

Havre, Montana

North Dakota
Williston
Medora

Valdez, Alaska

Medora, North Dakota

Wyoming
Spearfish
Devil's Tower NM

Rt. 20 across Nebraska

Des Moines, Iowa

Branson, Missouri

Jackson, Mississippi

Tallahassee, Florida

Home!