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There’s gold in them there hills
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After a couple of days hanging around Anchorage stocking up on reading material and groceries, getting the brakes checked, the laptop rebuilt and the laundry done, we were keen to get out of the city. It’s a nice enough town – spacious and spread out between the broad tidal reaches of the Ship river and Turnagain arm on one side and mountains on the other, but as we have discovered a few times now, cities are no fun when you’re trying to navigate them in a 24 foot RV with three kids in the back seat.
We didn’t hit the road till late, so had only made about an hour out of Anchorage when we came across a sign for Crow Creek Mine – Hiking, Gold Panning, Camping. Sounded perfect. And as we pulled up in the small campground, a 6 year old girl spotted the kids bikes on the back of our RV and tore across the campground on her bike – ‘Do you have a daughter!?”. Well, as a matter of fact… (and when it turned out she had an 8 year old sister, the kids were in raptures.) It turns out that Crow Creek Mine was once the site of SouthEast Alaska’s most productive gold mining, and it has the historical remains of the old miners equipment and buildings in a picturesque setting along a section the original Iditarod trail – but the main focus of attention for campers here is the lure of gold. Apparently there is plenty still in the creek, and as we are discovering, Alaskans take their outdoor pursuits pretty seriously. While we turned up the next morning with a rented goldpan, shovel and a bucket, most of the locals had sluiceboxes (a long tray that you place in a running stream, shovel your gravel in one end and let the running water sort the rocks from your fortune in gold), and our new neighbours were fully equipped with a 1.5inch dredge (a petrol driven pump that sucks up your water and gravel into your sluicebox). Still, no matter how you approach the matter, it’s still a lot of hard work – digging and shoveling gravel and levering boulders – all in freezing river water. And without much to show for our initial efforts, the kids soon took off with their new friends to go exploring and clamber over rocks instead. But I’d seen enough tiny flecks of color to figure I was onto something, and stuck with digging in a deep hole behind a boulder in the icy running water – till the pain of the cold was gone and I couldn’t grip the shovel anymore… Back at the campsite, we compared the day’s haul – our neighbours had a little vial with their flakes of gold and a few ‘tingers’ (big enough to make a ‘ting’ when dropped into the bottom of the pan), and we had a couple of flakes to show for the dull burning ache in my forearms… Digby picked up the little plastic container with our treasures in it for a closer look, took the lid off and tossed the contents into the grass - “AAAARGH!!!!” (or something to that effect) we cried. And he turned, bottom lip trembling, a picture of innocent confusion, to face the shock and horror of his father and brother – “but I was just throwing the water out…” |
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The Alaska Highway
There’s a good reason that despite its natural wealth and spectacular scenery, Alaska is one of the least populated regions in the world – and it’s not the 9 months of winter, incessant rain, unbelievable cold or rambunctious Bears. When you take all that away (as we discovered on a quiet night mid-way between nowhere in particular on the Alaska highway) there’s the bugs. And the frost heaves.
We pulled over close to midnight on the aptly deadman’s lake – in the featureless taiga forest, a hundred mile short of Tok and a long way from anywhere. As we switched off the engine, instead of the silence of the wilderness you might expect, there was a noise – eerily like a formula one racetrack – of unimaginable swarms of mosquitoes, horse flies, the chiggers, midges and ‘no-see-ums’. All wildly excited to have company for the evening.
But while we’d experienced insects before, the frost heaves were entirely new. To get from the Alaska panhandle in the SouthEast up to the rest of Alaska, you have to duck into Canada – a few hundred mile through BC and the Yukon. While the highway is supposed to be entirely paved these days, somewhere, just out of Haines Junction, you start to hit patches of bitumen with flags marking sudden dips or rises in the road. Soon, you’re heaving about like you’re on the open ocean, with the only respite being incomplete roadworks breaking the bitumen entirely for stretches dozens of miles long. It turns out that beneath the swampy black spruce taiga forest is permafrost, and nobody’s really come up with a good way of building a lasting road across it. And that despite the US agreeing to fund the upkeep of the road joining the two bits of Alaska together, it hasn’t been reliably paying its bills.
The only way to get across it is to slow way, way down, forget about where you’d planned to get or when you’d planned to get there and flow with the undulations of the road. Hence, we found ourselves pulling up somewhere called Deadman’s lake in the middle of the night.
But eventually we made it – a slow three days on the road from Haines to Anchorage, and 14 hours on the road on day 3 (albeit with plenty of sanity stops). There were amazing highlights along the way – spectacular mountain scenery, bears, trumpeter swans, ptarmigan, arctic ground squirrels, camping at the top of a mountain pass and renacting the fateful crossing of the Chilkot (when the kids crossed a snowdrift in their crocs, only for the icy crust to give way and sink to their midriffs halfway across…), but unfortunately there were casualties – I think all the heave and ho took it’s toll on the laptop, and it gave up the ghost on the last day- and almost all of the photos of our trip were lost.
Well, at least we know we’ll get to pretty much see it all again – there’s only one road back out…
Petersburg
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Petersburg is a pretty little town – old Nordic style timber buildings around a spectacular natural harbour under snowcapped peaks across the channel, and with nearly as many deer roaming the streets as cars – but I’m not sure the locals would like you calling it that. For them, it’s a practical town with a Nordic work ethic and a local fishing fleet and processing facilities making it the fourth biggest seafood producer in the USA. Main street has an Elk Lodge, a Sons of Norway Hall, and a local chapter of the Loyal Order of the Moose. As for tourism, the local museum (think stuffed fish and antique fishing lures) runs a film that tells you “where once Petersburg had an ambivalent attitude to tourists, it now recognises them as a necessary evil”. (!?)
We arrived on a sunny Monday morning, a public holiday and the last day of the annual King Salmon Derby, so went for a wander around the docks to check out the fleet and grabbed some fish and chips from the local ‘hot food, fish processing, cold storage’ store while watching some of the catches being brought in for their weigh-in. Outside of the town, a network of roads fans out across Mitkof island to nowhere in particular, so we headed off to the 3 lake trail s on the far side of the island. It turns out that a ‘muskeg boardwalk’ is a euphemism for a long line of rotting planks laid end to end through a swamp – a lot of muddy fun. Each lake has a public use rowboat just sitting there (along with lifejackets for the kids), so we went for a late afternoon paddle chasing beaver. The evening was so fine that Angus, Evie and I decided to grab our packs and hike back to one of the lakes for an overnight camp – pitched our tent on the wooden dock and fished into the twilight (no bites except for the ravenous mosquitoes…). Fiona and Digby spent a quiet night in the RV together till three folk wandered past (with a pair of rifles – for protection…) . Turned out they had lost their car-keys at the lake and were facing the 20mile hike back to town – so Fiona ferried them back to civilisation and spotted a moose and a porcupine on the way back (much to Angus’s disappointment when he heard about it the next morning). With another night before we caught the ferry onwards, we headed down to the secluded South of the island on the suggestion of the friendly tourist information office (who had loaded us up with advice, maps, pamphlets, posters, stickers, on the island, local wildlife, even their lichen…) and struck gold. With the sun still shining, we found an isolated campsite on the beach with a broad view of the inside passage and the mountains, and a small island I reckon we could walk to at low tide. The beach is covered in mussel beds and enormous driftwood logs, with a couple of swings in the trees and a 30ft square of old fishing net strung up like the world’s biggest hammock. Angus and Evie spotted a couple of strange little animals amongst the driftwood, and on the evening lowtide we identified them – a family of Northern river otters feeding off the mussels. In the morning, the sea was so still I could hear dolphins breathing out in the channel. With no other souls around, the island to explore, the beach to comb, the hammock begging for a midday snooze, and my fishing technique to perfect (damn otters…), it’s clearly time to ring the ferry office and change our plans. |
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