Back in the Lower 48

Last time you heard from us, we were in BC having just visited Hyder, Alaska. We have traveled a long way since then...currently we are parked in Rapid City, South Dakota, visiting the Black Hills and Badlands.

Hyder Sign

Our last view of Alaska was this sign just as we crossed the border back into Canada. You can see where Hyder's dirt road turns into pavement and you can see the Canadian Customs office (the US doesn't have one at this border crossing).

And so south through BC to Vancouver.

Old Totems at Kitwangak - located at the end of the Cassiar Highway.

That was the beginning of a gradual return to civilization. We stayed at Smithers, BC, in a Safeway parking lot. Then in Prince George and in Hope before driving into Vancouver, where we spent about an hour in a traffic jam on a 4 lane highway. That's almost as stressful as driving an hour on frost heaves but much less interesting.

Double vision? This Starbucks is across the street from

this Starbucks...

We stayed at a park in West Vancouver, across the Lion's Gate Bridge from Stanley Park. Karin & Glenn got to do a lot of sightseeing. We all ate well - returned to a couple of our haunts from when I worked in Vancouver. Rodney's Oyster House, Jester's, Komi's (for sushi). We also went to the Sun-Yat Sen Gardens and ate a great dinner afterwards in Chinatown.

The next day we headed south across the border. This was our longest border crossing - we waited in line for at least 45 minutes. At least the crossing itself was uneventful.

We stayed in Tacoma two nights and visited family and friends. Darlene and Tony are packing up to move. We ate with them on the night they heard that their house sale was final - a celebratory meal at Warthog's Barbecue. Very good ribs. We also ate dinner with a work friend of Sally's from Seattle.

One goal in the area had been to get the RV fixed - we have several nagging minor problems. We didn't have any luck with the RV, but while we were driving down I5 we spotted Mt Rainier and I managed to get a picture from a Camping World parking lot. Not as scenic as our Denali pictures, but we did get to see the mountain.

Rainer from Camping World in Tacoma

The past three days we spent driving across Washington, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. It's beautiful country - lots of mountain passes, ranch and grassland and now the Black Hills.

We stopped at what was one of the largest ranches in Montana in the first half of the 20th century - Grant-Kohr's National Historic Site. And we also visited Prairie Town State Park (it's a little pull off beside the highway where a prairie dog colony live).

Grant-Kohr's Ranch House

Prairie Dog

The weather has been fine so we cooked out in rest areas and just enjoyed ourselves. We plan to spend the next few days here in South Dakota visting Mt Rushmore, the Badlands, DeSmet (where Laura Ingalls Wilder lived as a girl and teenager and married Almanzo).

It won't be long till we are back down south, hopefully it will cool off and fall will arrive with us.

See you soon!

More fun on the way home

Last time we posted we were in Tok, AK, planning our travels home. Since then we have come a long way south and are finally saying goodbye to Alaska for 2007.

From Tok we traveled to Haines Alaska where we traveled through a bald eagle sanctuary. Unfortunately, there were only a few eagles around in September. There are thousands in late October and November. Seems there is one last salmon run near Haines and all the eagles get together for a fishy Thanksgiving dinner.



Juvenile Eagle near Haines, AK

Next we returned to Whitehorse and caught a couple of sights we missed the first time through. See Tom steer the riverboat SS Klondike (not really - it's permanently dry docked and serving as a museum). We also visited Muktuk Kennels where we got to pet 2 week old husky puppies and pet the other dogs, both young and old. Sally's favorite was Panda - he took a liking to me too.

Tom "steering" the SS Klondike


Sally in her Panda shirt petting Panda the sled dog

Next stop was Skagway - the 17th busiest port in the world. All the Alaska cruise ships stop here and the place was much more crowded than anywhere else we've been (except the Walmart in Fairbanks). We toured the historic district that was built during gold rush days in the early 1900's. The National Park Service offered a fantastic free tour of the historic area.

Tom just had to add to his garter collection, so we toured the "cribs" above the Red Onion Saloon.


Then south down the Cassiar Highway to Stewart, BC and Hyder, AK. Hyder officially has a population of 80 people and many more bears, we suspect. The Forest Service has built a boardwalk with very high rails so that people can safely watch brown bears and grizzlies catch salmon on Fish Creek right out of town. We saw two male black bears and a momma with a first year cub. We also saw one very large grizzly. They just ignore the people snapping pictures and go straight for the fish!


Black bear searching for a good fishing hole

Grizzly eying dinner

And enjoying the catch

Hyder is quite far south - we have driven south of fall for the time being. It's also the last place in Alaska that we'll be able to visit this time. We sorry to say goodbye and plan to come back as soon as we can.

Next, on to southern BC and Vancouver before returning to the US.

Keep checking on our progress! See you soon.

Circling Back - On the Way Home

Well folks, here we are again in Tok Alaska. You might remember, we have been here before. It is a town on both highway entrances into interior Alaska from Canada.

We have had an incredible two weeks since the last posting. We spent two nights in a Fred Meyer parking lot in Wasilla. We did maintenance on truck and motor home. We traveled to Anchorage for restocking as we headed to the coast. A night in Portage allowed us to closely inspect a glacial iceberg, albeit in a lake. It is a wondrous sight. We hiked up to see a glacier in the raw. It, too, is impressive.

The Exit Glacier - Close up and Personal

Seward

We moved on to Seward, a coastal town known for its fishing and tourism. Both nearly got us, as they were having a fishing derby and tourists on the last weekend before school started in a lot of systems. We did manage to get rv sites near the water, but we got two out of the last three. We did the touristy thing and got on a tour boat to view wildlife and hopefully see a glacier from the water, but it was rough sailing, so the bay’s wildlife was our limit. Fortunately, we got to see a very cute sea otter at length (several commented that it looked like he was enjoying looking at us!), many puffins, kittiwakes and the endangered Stellar sea lion. The highlight of Seward was the Sealife Center. It had several aquariums; in one we could see diving birds “catch” their dinner 30 feet below the surface. It is an amazing sight.

Stellar Sea Lions in Resurrection Bay near Seward

Juvenile Puffin at Sealife Center in Seward

Downtown Seward

Homer

The next port of call for us was Homer. It is a quaint village best known for its sport fishing. We parked the rig facing the water, so our view out of the windshield was the bay. We took another tour boat out to an island city called Seldovia. On the way we stopped to view a small island called Gull Island to view, you guessed it, gulls. But there were many other seabirds nesting on the island, including Puffins with their colorful mating beaks. Another extra was a sighting of five black oystercatchers.

View from our campsite on the Homer Spit

Seldovia Harbor

The Gulls, Kittiwakes and Murres on Gull Island

Four Sand Cranes Flying at Sunrise in Homer

We traveled back for another stop at Portage to go to the Wildlife Conservation Center. It has fenced animals, including bears (black and grizzly), wood bison, sitka black tail deer, and others. They have two main missions: to increase the size of the wood bison population in Alaska and rehabilitate injured animals back into the wild.

Anchorage & the Fair

We spent two days in the Anchorage area. One day we went to the Alaska State Fair which is famous for the VERY large vegetable contest. The day we were there they weighed in a world record kale (106 POUNDS!). And we saw the Kenai Racing Pigs (they race for oreo cookies!)

The Alaska State Fair

World Record Kale - 106 pounds

We also “toured” Earthquake Park, a small park dedicated to the devastation caused by the Good Friday earthquake of 1964. The epicenter was near the port of Valdez, which was our next stop.

Valdez

We viewed a film in Valdez on that earthquake; the documentary was filmed in 1964 at the time of the quake. Some of the footage was shot by sailors on a ship that had just that morning docked and was being unloaded. The ship apparently bounced off the bottom of the bay 3 times, surged into the downtown area and ended up back in the bay – floating! It is an impressive and moving film. The effects on the southcoastal part of Alaska was tremendous. Even today, you will hear “it was different before the earthquake” about lots of natural and manmade features – Valdez was moved four miles to be safer should there be another quake, the Home “spit” where we camped is 6 feet lower than before, the industries of all the towns in the affected areas changed significantly. Before they were big ports and industrial areas; today they survive mainly on fishing and tourism.

More Glaciers - Worthington (near Valdez)

Valdez, like Homer, is a fishing village. It is also the terminus for the Alaskan Pipeline. We stayed in a city RV park close to the terminal where ships are loaded. The area was crowded with fisherpersons trying for the heaviest fish which carries a $15,000 prize. The salmon are spawning, so many of them die at the stream and river feeds into the inlet. There was discussion of trying to find a large dead one to see if we could win the prize. That idea was nipped in the bud. We also took another cruise, this time getting to see the Columbia Glacier from about a mile away. We could not get any closer because of the ice that had calved off the glacier blocked the water route. It is wild going through such large ice remnants in a boat.

Glacial Ice near Valdez

"Campsite" in Valdez

We stopped for two days at a crossroads town called Glennallen, visiting the Wrangler-St Elias National Park and Preserve. This brings to mind, we have seen at least 7 active volcanic mountains (a couple of times we thought we saw steam, but who knows with the clouds in the area.)

Now we are at Tok, planning our trip through Canada. There are stops in Haines, Stewart/Hyder, Whitehorse and Watson Lake planned. Sometimes we will park off the side of the road for a night. This has been an exciting trip so far, with more excitement to come.