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.

The Place You Go to Listen

Chicken, Alaska

We are at 65 degrees North latitude. It’s a month after the summer solstice. The area has been losing 7 minutes a day of daylight since then, but there are still nineteen hours left.

It won’t be dark enough to see the Aurora Borealis until the 2nd week of August. The magnetic fields from the Aurora cause corrosion in pipes, including the Alaska Pipeline, which passes nearby.


The main tourist attractions in Fairbanks were the riverboat ride and the El Dorado gold mine. We do both and find ourselves surrounded on each tour by at least 30 cruise ship tour buses. It’s like déjà vu all over again, but we pan $16 in gold flakes anyway, visit a mock Athabasca native village, see some Caribou in a pen and see some sled dogs pull an ATV around a backyard lake.

We like the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska- Fairbanks campus. My favorite exhibit was “The Place You Go to Listen”. It is a small room that monitors the Sun, Moon, earth tremors and the Aurora Borealis. The Borealis sounds like little bells on the ceiling. The constant tremors come in like a bass drum. The sun has a constant high energy, new age sound.



We drive 300 miles east to Chicken, Alaska. Chicken has a year-round population of 17, but that swells to about 100 during the summer gold mining season. Robin runs the Post Office and Sue makes cinnamon rolls. I don’t expect much internet or phone coverage the next few weeks. Chicken boasts that it doesn’t have indoor plumbing. Legend has it that the locals wanted to name the place Ptarmigan, but couldn’t agree how to spell it. I buy a souvenir T-shirt for my son (not the one that says “I got laid in Chicken, Alaska”).

We gas up at Chicken at $3.50 a gallon before the 100 mile drive gravel road drive to Dawson in Canada, where prices are around $6.00. Before crossing the border we find a campground on a river, provided by the Bureau of Land Management. The fee for camping is negligible and I’m half price because of my Golden Age parks card.

In the 11PM sunlight, I sit in my lawnchair and finish the Michener book about the incredible two-year overland trek from Edmonton to Dawson of Lord Evelyn Luton, son of the Marques of Deal. .These old English explorers had attitude. I begin planning our next trip, a float north to the Arctic Ocean on the Athabasca River.

Here are some shots of Fairbanks and some Denali drive-by pix.