A Dog Named Pat

Valdez, Alaska – July 9, 2007

On the way to Valdez, we meet a lady in Slana. She is about 75, we guess. Her art is done with bits of elk and moose antlers. Her dogs are all dead and the three log cabin dog houses stand empty. I imagine them chained up in the deep snow and huddled inside on the straw. The rusty chains and straw are still there. A nameplate says that one dog was named Pat. Pat was probably a Husky.

The lady has outlived three husbands and many dogs in this place over a fifty year period. She collects camping fees at the nearby State campground and tries to operate a lodge and RV park by herself. She also operates the Slana Post Office. She makes the beds, mows the lawn, burns the trash and cleans the salmon that she catches in her fish traps. She seems lonely now. Everything is hard. It's a 100 mile trip in to buy gasoline for her generator so she can have electricity.

She no longer has time to sell the art that she makes in the winter since she has no help. We are her only guests. It's a slow summer. She built the lodge with her own hands. There is no Home Depot here, but I see three trailers to haul things in the yard. She talks to strangers like us. Mrs. Phred feels sad for her. I tell Mrs. Phred that there are a million stories here and we can't even change the outcome of our own.

The drive into Valdez is though jagged mountains capped with glaciers that come down to the road. We go fishing for pink salmon and catch eleven that are about four pounds each. We eat one for dinner and freeze the rest. The bay is surrounded by snow-capped mountains. You can see bears in the meadows with binoculars. We see a seal next to the boat catch a salmon for lunch. The fish here are released from a hatchery and have no place to spawn. They just mill around in the bay looking for a stream that doesn’t exist.


We see a purse seine boat catch about 15,000 pounds of salmon in its net. The sea otters and seals on buoys float in front of the oil tankers next to the refinery tanks at the end of the Alaska pipeline.


This morning we will take a water taxi for a two hours ride to kayak under a glacier in the icebergs.

glacier

 Valdez, Alaska

 After the incident with the Romulan spy Selok in 2357, Commander William T. Riker stated: "Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you."

I think that Commander Riker was trying to explain something about the bipolar nature of life...sometimes it's just ok, sometimes it's really great....I went fishing for pink salmon at Allison Point but the salmon weren't running yet..however we did get some seagull and eagle pictures....

We saw a little bear and a bunch of bald eagles in Valdez.

Yesterday we drove 30 miles to the summit so I could race down to sea level...

Unfortunately, the process of removing my front tire to get it into the back of the CRV broke the bicycle front brake...

I'm ashamed to admit that I wimped out and elected not to make the steep downhill run with only a rear brake....when I was 16 my motorcycle had no brakes and I dragged my heels to stop...how our values and risk tolerances change as we age.....

So for fun  I dug out the 2007 Pics of our Kayak trip to the Columbia Glacier ice field near Valdez....

We saw an Orca....

Mrs. Phred (white hat) is dressed to go kayaking....

The water is cold...

What a memory...'

The ice is blue....

Fireweed 400 bicycle race....

The end.

Valdez, Alaska

The captain of the Lu-Lu Belle takes her steaming into the Columbia Glacier ice field at 30 knots, skimming past the icebergs by mere inches. I think Titanic. I think cold...

Mrs. Phred knows Beth from her Women's RV Forum. Beth drives the Lu-Lu Belle in the summer. Sometimes she makes brownies and lets the Captain drive the boat.

Icebergs can be s beautiful blue or a dirty gray depending on the part of the glacier from which they came.....

The season opened today for the commercial fishermen to catch salmon. There are dozens of boats catching "pinks" and "silvers". several million of these try to reach the fish hatchery in Valdez from which they were spawned every year....

The approach to Valdez reaches a summit 30 miles north of town and turns into a long downgrade. I daydream about coasting in on my bicycle...

The sea otters are making a big comeback after having been hunted almost to the point of extinction. There is a big "raft" of them floating near the Exxon oil docks....Exxon must be doing a better job with pollution control...

The Alaska Pipeline terminates here in Valdez.....

A Holiday card?

Stellar Sea Lions on the beach eat lots of the salmon....

The ice field has changed dramatically since we kayaked here in 2007.

The water temperature is 30 degrees F. or minus one Centigrade
.

I went to the fish hatchery this morning at 5AM. It doesn't really get dark this time of year. It just turns into a strange twilight in the early morning hours and then gets light again around 3 AM...There were about ten sea lions milling about in front of the hatchery to greet the returning salmon...

The "pink" salmon are the smallest of the five types of Alaska salmon. They average about 4 pounds and about 2,000,000 of them  try to swim back into the hatchery every year after spending two years in the open ocean. These are also called "humpies" because of the shape of their backs.

The "silver" salmon weigh about 10 pounds. They are less numerous here and are also called "coho" salmon....

There is a place near the hatchery called Allison Point where you can fish from shore....I understand that the silvers and pinks will hit on a small spoon.

If that doesn't work, the local fish processing plants sell fresh salmon...

I added some hamburger to my vegetarian chili this time....I liked it...adding cheddar cheese, sour cream and chipotle hot sauce as toppings was good too....