This view shows the Homer Spit with mountain and glaciers in the background. The view is from our four bedroom apartment on a cliff in Homer.
Mrs. Phred, Danny and Doris took this float plane over Cook's Inlet to land in a lake and watch bears trying to catch salmon.
On the bus for the 14 hour ride though Denali National Park.
Resting place for a Japanese mountain climber who was lost on Denali. His grave is in Talkeetna.
Les and Sue had an oversize companion in the middle seat on the flight from Houston to Anchorage.
Dip netters on the beach in Kenai scooping up their 25 allotted sockeye salmon.
Fishing bear.
Same bear?
Where are they?
This humpback whale jumped about 14 times. There are many theories to explain this behavior, but the whales aren't talking in a language that we can understand. The day trip out of Seward explored some of the fjords and glaciers of Prince William Sound.
I achieve my lifelong ambition of landing a 10 pound sockeye in the Kenai River...now I can hang up my waders for good.
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.
We are about 100 miles north of Anchorage, on the way to Denali. The Montana Creek is clear and swift. It empties into the Susitna River about ¼-mile downstream. We are parked next to a highway bridge that spans the creek.
The first morning sign of fall is a thirty-pound red salmon carcass in the creek. Against all odds, he has been born, escaped predation, run in the ocean for five years, grown large and swam upriver two hundred miles to spawn, turn red and die. He reached the creek in which he was born and returned. He was the lucky, (1000 to 1), son of a line of a million lucky sons.
You can fish for trout here on a catch and release basis. Trout strike at anything that looks like salmon eggs. Fishing for trout, you might use a small bobber with a lure resembling a small bunch of salmon roe.
The season for King Salmon is closed here (catch and release only), but you can still keep Chum, Pink and Silver Salmon. Reds are not here yet. Above the bridge you must use a lure with a single hook, but across the road you can try one with a triple-gang hook.
Mrs. Phred and I walk down the bank of the Creek toward the Susitna River and come to a railroad bridge over the creek. Several passenger trains cross the bridge while we are there, carrying tourists from the cruise ships to Fairbanks.
I wade into the swift current to my knees. You could easily lose your footing on the slippery round river rocks. There are large red shapes swimming motionless in the current. One appears to be four feet long, certainly a King, at least forty pounds.
The trick is to cast out a weighted fly (weights must be at least eighteen inches above the lure) and let the line sink into the fish’s mouth in the swift current. The fish strikes on the first cast and jumps clear of the water. Whatever it is, it’s big. It runs downstream, stripping 50 yards of line off my reel in five seconds. I tighten the drag and the ten-pound test line snaps.
A fisherman from Canada come over and gives me a two-minute lesson on the proper amount of “drag” to have on my reel. He’s fishing for trout with plastic salmon eggs. He tells me about a 57 pound world record Mackerel he caught in the Florida Keys. He’s using six-pound test line.
The fish comes back and I hook it again. It fights hard for a minute and the hook and weights come loose when it jumps and they snap back at me like a bullet, catching me in the forehead. Blood streams down into my eyes. Lesson two is to hold the pole off to the side when fighting a big fish.
I hook and lose several more. Mrs. Phred gets bored and walks back to the RV. Lost in thought, I lose my way on the return trip and spend a few anxious minutes stumbling in the underbrush. Fortunately, I’m a trained navigator, so when I find the creek again, I follow it upstream to the RV.
Denali is 20,320 feet high. Robert Kennedy climbed it. I remind Carol that you go on oxygen at 12,000 feet. She remembers. She did that the last time we circled the mountain and waved at the tiny climbers on the summit.
