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kate_schaeferAlaska by arbitrary category
I said I'd write it up in an organized fashion; I didn't say how I'd organize it. What follows is probably far more information than anyone else wants about my summer vacation, while at the same time far less information than I'll want in later years.
The trip outline: We loaded up our VW Eurovan with people (me, Glenn, Glenn's daughters Sam and Ruth, and their children) and stuff (clothes, food, books, and camping equipment for seven or eight, stashed in the back, in a rooftop car carrier that Sam bought for $7 at a thrift store and Glenn spent far more time refurbishing than was available, under the seats, between the seats) and drove from Seattle to Bellingham, where Glenn's daughters' mother, grandmother, uncle, and grandmother's significant other met us at the park across the street from the ferry dock to feed us a swell picnic before we got on the ferry. The Alaska Marine Highway System (I like it that the Alaskans insist their ferry system is a highway) did all the traveling work for us for the next three days moving us from Bellingham to Haines, Alaska, while we ate, slept, played cards, read, and looked at the fabulous scenery. From Haines, we drove to Fairbanks, passing through British Columbia and Yukon Territory on the way, because you can't drive from that part of Alaska to any other part of Alaska without going through Canada. In Fairbanks, we were joined by Sam's partner, Shandra, for a week of visiting Glenn's parents. After that week, the junior generations flew home. Glenn and I stayed in Fairbanks for another day and a half, then drove the Eurovan down the Richardson Highway to Delta Junction, then drove the entire Alaska-Canada Highway to Dawson Creek, British Columbia, followed by an extended side trip to the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, via the Icefield Highway from Jasper to Lake Louise, and then on home.
Wildlife seen: A lot, okay? Sam kept a running count of moose she had seen, which I think was around 20 by the time she left. I didn't see every moose she saw, but I saw other and other moose after she left. I miss the moose; I miss the idea that at any moment, a moose could amble into view, huge, preoccupied with its own concerns, and dangerous to tamper with. The most entertaining moose was the first one, when Sam was driving and I was navigating. I saw it a fraction of a second before she did, and called out, "Moose, moose, moose." She didn't hit the moose. I wrote it down on the Milepost. Later, she didn't hit a ptarmigan, even though the ptarmigan tried its damnedest to be hit. The van has a high enough clearance and the ptarmigan was short enough that we didn't strike the bird. I hope the ptarmigan didn't die of a heart attack from having the van pass over it; Sam said it was visible in the rearview mirror, still standing upright, after we went on.
Coolest thing I saw, wildlife division: A red fox which darted across the road in front of us, glanced at the car, and kept going. Many of the animals we saw did that: crossed the road in front of the car, glanced at us, and kept going. It must be an irresistible pedestrian impulse, but it must also slow them down just a tiny bit. The fact that they look means that one has an illusion of connection with the animal. When driving, what one wants the least is the actuality of connection with the animal, but the illusion of connection was strong at that moment, as though the only living creatures in the world right then were that red fox and me, and the fox saw me and knew me. It's the only fox I've seen in the wild except for a pathetic half-tame fox that hung around the kitchen at Paradise Inn on Mount Rainier, eating garbage.
Dead animals: There was a large taxidermy collection at the 1202 Motel in Beaver Creek, Yukon Territory, so named because it's at the historic 1202 milepost of the Alcan (there are many references to the historic fill-in-your-number milepost all along the Alcan. This is not because something of historic significance took place at those mileposts; it's because the mileposts may have been incorrectly measured when the road was first built, and the road has been greatly altered in the intervening years to eliminate dangerous curves and route around scary hills, resulting in the actual mileage and the historic mileage differing by varying amounts depending on where you are along the road). We stayed at the 1202 Motel because the small grandson had come down with a cold, the campground we intended to stay at looked unpleasant, it looked like rain, and one of the guidebooks had recommended the family suite at this motel. It was a hoot. There are some number of rooms in standard motel arrangement, and two family suites upstairs from the restaurant and general store (nearly all commercial establishments in remote towns along the Alcan sell everything: gas, food, lodging, clothes, cleanliness, booze, propane, gold and jade jewelry.
Border crossings: Four, of which two were the same border in opposite directions. Canadian customs personnel were uniformly pleasant; US customs personnel were, too. The far northern borders just don't seem to be ones anybody spends time worrying about, nor ones anybody really needs to worry about, either. At the southern Canadian border crossing, at Sumac, customs was still pleasant, as I suppose one could expect if one were so obviously part of a middle-aged Caucasian couple returning from a vacation. We had added up what we spent on stuff we were taking home with us, and we knew we were way under the dollar limit as we cheerfully said that we had purchased a sweatshirt, some books, a bottle of whiskey, and four six-packs of beer.
Family visiting: Lots. There was a great deal of pleasant time with the daughters and the grandchildren on the boat going up. We played Flinch for hours, since it's a game that remains competitive and entertaining for adults while being simple enough for the six-year-old to grasp. We played Munchkin for a good deal less time, since one of the granddaughters understands the competitive concept without understanding the social function of the game, making her temporarily less than fun to play that particular game with. She's fine with games of chance and games where one maximizes one's own opportunities, but when a game also contains an element of actively hampering one's opponents, she concentrates on that aspect way beyond what's fun to be around.
We spent lots more pleasant time with Glenn's parents in Fairbanks, but I won't write much about that. Family time that goes well makes for dull narration. Fortunately we didn't have the kind of family time that makes for fascinating narration and high therapy bills later in life, as far as I could tell. Glenn's parents are both sweethearts.
Northern lights: Glenn and the daughters had seen them before; the rest of us travelers hadn't. I knew when I saw them the first time what they were, even though they didn't look the way I expected them to. I was looking for the spectacular bright colors you see in the most impressive photographs; what I saw at first was a thin, bright, white cloud-like streak in the sky, that moved in a very uncloud-like manner. As time went by, the streak writhed and contorted in an even more uncloud-like manner. We went back in and fetched Sam, Shandra, Ruth, and the oldest granddaughter, but the younger grandchildren could not wake up. Glenn and I saw the northern lights many more times during our part of the trip, most notably at Mungo Lake, where half the sky was covered with writhing lights, curtaining and uncurtaining across the stars, reflecting in the lake.
International nomenclature shortage: After a while, Glenn and I realized that we should have kept a running log of all occurrences of Beaver Creek, Cabin Creek, Coal Creek, Bear Creek, Big Creek, Little Creek, Mosquito Lake, and North Fork Chena River. Also, everyone who ever named anything in the far north had way too many warm feelings about George Mercer Dawson, Paleontologist and Chief Geologist, Geological Survey of Canada, resulting in Dawson City, Dawson Creek, Dawson Range, Mount Dawson, the Dawson Highway, and (I swear) a street named Dawson in every city and town from Seattle to Fairbanks, inclusive (okay: I just checked this assertion and found that there is no Dawson Street in Fairbanks, but there is a Dawson Road in North Pole, Alaska, just twelve miles south of Fairbanks. Close enough for barroom statistics). George Mercer Dawson does seem to have been a hell of a nice guy, as well as being the first person to discover a dinosaur in Alberta, and it never hurts to name something after the head surveyor, but really, a little more variety in nomenclature would have been fine. I expected to find lots of places named after Jack London and Robert Service, but mostly what we saw were streets rather than geological features; they arrived in the far north after the permanent things were named, or re-named. Some variety in nomenclature could have been achieved if the surveyors had just kept the existing names without translating any of them into English. There would the enough variety among the Native American/First Nations languages that all the creeks could have been called after whatever fish was most commonly found therein, and the creek names would have more distinction than Beaver Creek, Beaver Creek, and Beaver Creek.
Best culinary innovation: My mother-in-law made blueberry-rhubarb muffins with quinoa flour. They were fabulous, and Glenn and I could eat them (we have many allergies and food intolerances, most though not all overlapping; they make us irritatingly difficult to cook for).
Worst culinary innovation: S'mores made with rye crackers instead of graham crackers. I hoped that the sweetness of the marshmallow and the chocolate would cut through the wryness of the rye; it did not. The grandchildren laughed at me as they ate their standard-issue s'mores.
Most successful aspect of camping with the grandchildren: chopping wood. If you had asked me what would be the thing young girls would most like to do with their grandfather in the great outdoors, chopping wood would not have led the list, but I'd have been wrong. The younger granddaughter was especially enthusiastic, working through the challenges of holding the hatchet just right, using the hatchet to lift and drop the wood without losing control while chopping it, splitting off kindling wood, then graduating to the big axe and feeling how different chopping wood with an axe is from chopping it with a hatchet. The older granddaughter didn't want to be left behind, so she put in her time splitting wood as well. The grandson was mightily peeved that he was judged too young, at six, to wield big edged tools. Glenn tried a preliminary lesson with the hatchet, but it will take a few more years before there's enough hand-eye coordination and simple strength for this task.
Biggest disappointment: We didn't get to Denali. We had hoped to do so. We located campsites we could reserve over the Internet, made sure we had enough warm clothing and sleeping bags, and then checked the weather. The prospect of cooking in the rain, hiking with wet (possibly whiny) grandchildren, one of whom had a cold, and then striking a wet tent before driving the lot of them to the airport lost all appeal. Instead, we reserved a cabin on the North Fork of the Chena River over the Internet and spent one very pleasant night there. We saw more moose and the only beavers of the whole trip. Glenn and the girls chopped enough firewood to keep the cabin going for weeks, and Glenn stacked wood on the cabin porch from floor to ceiling. We burned three or four pieces of the wood they chopped and used the fire to roast hotdogs and marshmallows.
Miles: 3,250 on the trip meter, starting from a few yards after we drove off the ferry in Haines. That means we didn't include the 80 miles from Seattle to Bellingham, nor however many miles the ferry traveled. To keep it all in perspective, of that mileage, about 650 occurred in getting us to Fairbanks; 2,124 occurred getting us home from Fairbanks without the intervention of a ferry; the rest was driving around Fairbanks and vicinity for a week. For comparison, driving across the US, from Seattle to Boston, is about 3,080 miles; driving all the way across the US, from Neah Bay to Bangor Maine, adds another 400 miles; really driving all the way across the US, from Hawaii to Bangor, can't be done according to MapQuest, although it does give some hilarious directions to get from Dutch Harbor, Alaska, to Bangor, involving an incredible number of times you drive on the ferry, no times that you drive off the ferry, and 5,970 miles.
I'm ready to go again.
I said I'd write it up in an organized fashion; I didn't say how I'd organize it. What follows is probably far more information than anyone else wants about my summer vacation, while at the same time far less information than I'll want in later years.
The trip outline: We loaded up our VW Eurovan with people (me, Glenn, Glenn's daughters Sam and Ruth, and their children) and stuff (clothes, food, books, and camping equipment for seven or eight, stashed in the back, in a rooftop car carrier that Sam bought for $7 at a thrift store and Glenn spent far more time refurbishing than was available, under the seats, between the seats) and drove from Seattle to Bellingham, where Glenn's daughters' mother, grandmother, uncle, and grandmother's significant other met us at the park across the street from the ferry dock to feed us a swell picnic before we got on the ferry. The Alaska Marine Highway System (I like it that the Alaskans insist their ferry system is a highway) did all the traveling work for us for the next three days moving us from Bellingham to Haines, Alaska, while we ate, slept, played cards, read, and looked at the fabulous scenery. From Haines, we drove to Fairbanks, passing through British Columbia and Yukon Territory on the way, because you can't drive from that part of Alaska to any other part of Alaska without going through Canada. In Fairbanks, we were joined by Sam's partner, Shandra, for a week of visiting Glenn's parents. After that week, the junior generations flew home. Glenn and I stayed in Fairbanks for another day and a half, then drove the Eurovan down the Richardson Highway to Delta Junction, then drove the entire Alaska-Canada Highway to Dawson Creek, British Columbia, followed by an extended side trip to the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, via the Icefield Highway from Jasper to Lake Louise, and then on home.
Wildlife seen: A lot, okay? Sam kept a running count of moose she had seen, which I think was around 20 by the time she left. I didn't see every moose she saw, but I saw other and other moose after she left. I miss the moose; I miss the idea that at any moment, a moose could amble into view, huge, preoccupied with its own concerns, and dangerous to tamper with. The most entertaining moose was the first one, when Sam was driving and I was navigating. I saw it a fraction of a second before she did, and called out, "Moose, moose, moose." She didn't hit the moose. I wrote it down on the Milepost. Later, she didn't hit a ptarmigan, even though the ptarmigan tried its damnedest to be hit. The van has a high enough clearance and the ptarmigan was short enough that we didn't strike the bird. I hope the ptarmigan didn't die of a heart attack from having the van pass over it; Sam said it was visible in the rearview mirror, still standing upright, after we went on.
Coolest thing I saw, wildlife division: A red fox which darted across the road in front of us, glanced at the car, and kept going. Many of the animals we saw did that: crossed the road in front of the car, glanced at us, and kept going. It must be an irresistible pedestrian impulse, but it must also slow them down just a tiny bit. The fact that they look means that one has an illusion of connection with the animal. When driving, what one wants the least is the actuality of connection with the animal, but the illusion of connection was strong at that moment, as though the only living creatures in the world right then were that red fox and me, and the fox saw me and knew me. It's the only fox I've seen in the wild except for a pathetic half-tame fox that hung around the kitchen at Paradise Inn on Mount Rainier, eating garbage.
Dead animals: There was a large taxidermy collection at the 1202 Motel in Beaver Creek, Yukon Territory, so named because it's at the historic 1202 milepost of the Alcan (there are many references to the historic fill-in-your-number milepost all along the Alcan. This is not because something of historic significance took place at those mileposts; it's because the mileposts may have been incorrectly measured when the road was first built, and the road has been greatly altered in the intervening years to eliminate dangerous curves and route around scary hills, resulting in the actual mileage and the historic mileage differing by varying amounts depending on where you are along the road). We stayed at the 1202 Motel because the small grandson had come down with a cold, the campground we intended to stay at looked unpleasant, it looked like rain, and one of the guidebooks had recommended the family suite at this motel. It was a hoot. There are some number of rooms in standard motel arrangement, and two family suites upstairs from the restaurant and general store (nearly all commercial establishments in remote towns along the Alcan sell everything: gas, food, lodging, clothes, cleanliness, booze, propane, gold and jade jewelry.
Border crossings: Four, of which two were the same border in opposite directions. Canadian customs personnel were uniformly pleasant; US customs personnel were, too. The far northern borders just don't seem to be ones anybody spends time worrying about, nor ones anybody really needs to worry about, either. At the southern Canadian border crossing, at Sumac, customs was still pleasant, as I suppose one could expect if one were so obviously part of a middle-aged Caucasian couple returning from a vacation. We had added up what we spent on stuff we were taking home with us, and we knew we were way under the dollar limit as we cheerfully said that we had purchased a sweatshirt, some books, a bottle of whiskey, and four six-packs of beer.
Family visiting: Lots. There was a great deal of pleasant time with the daughters and the grandchildren on the boat going up. We played Flinch for hours, since it's a game that remains competitive and entertaining for adults while being simple enough for the six-year-old to grasp. We played Munchkin for a good deal less time, since one of the granddaughters understands the competitive concept without understanding the social function of the game, making her temporarily less than fun to play that particular game with. She's fine with games of chance and games where one maximizes one's own opportunities, but when a game also contains an element of actively hampering one's opponents, she concentrates on that aspect way beyond what's fun to be around.
We spent lots more pleasant time with Glenn's parents in Fairbanks, but I won't write much about that. Family time that goes well makes for dull narration. Fortunately we didn't have the kind of family time that makes for fascinating narration and high therapy bills later in life, as far as I could tell. Glenn's parents are both sweethearts.
Northern lights: Glenn and the daughters had seen them before; the rest of us travelers hadn't. I knew when I saw them the first time what they were, even though they didn't look the way I expected them to. I was looking for the spectacular bright colors you see in the most impressive photographs; what I saw at first was a thin, bright, white cloud-like streak in the sky, that moved in a very uncloud-like manner. As time went by, the streak writhed and contorted in an even more uncloud-like manner. We went back in and fetched Sam, Shandra, Ruth, and the oldest granddaughter, but the younger grandchildren could not wake up. Glenn and I saw the northern lights many more times during our part of the trip, most notably at Mungo Lake, where half the sky was covered with writhing lights, curtaining and uncurtaining across the stars, reflecting in the lake.
International nomenclature shortage: After a while, Glenn and I realized that we should have kept a running log of all occurrences of Beaver Creek, Cabin Creek, Coal Creek, Bear Creek, Big Creek, Little Creek, Mosquito Lake, and North Fork Chena River. Also, everyone who ever named anything in the far north had way too many warm feelings about George Mercer Dawson, Paleontologist and Chief Geologist, Geological Survey of Canada, resulting in Dawson City, Dawson Creek, Dawson Range, Mount Dawson, the Dawson Highway, and (I swear) a street named Dawson in every city and town from Seattle to Fairbanks, inclusive (okay: I just checked this assertion and found that there is no Dawson Street in Fairbanks, but there is a Dawson Road in North Pole, Alaska, just twelve miles south of Fairbanks. Close enough for barroom statistics). George Mercer Dawson does seem to have been a hell of a nice guy, as well as being the first person to discover a dinosaur in Alberta, and it never hurts to name something after the head surveyor, but really, a little more variety in nomenclature would have been fine. I expected to find lots of places named after Jack London and Robert Service, but mostly what we saw were streets rather than geological features; they arrived in the far north after the permanent things were named, or re-named. Some variety in nomenclature could have been achieved if the surveyors had just kept the existing names without translating any of them into English. There would the enough variety among the Native American/First Nations languages that all the creeks could have been called after whatever fish was most commonly found therein, and the creek names would have more distinction than Beaver Creek, Beaver Creek, and Beaver Creek.
Best culinary innovation: My mother-in-law made blueberry-rhubarb muffins with quinoa flour. They were fabulous, and Glenn and I could eat them (we have many allergies and food intolerances, most though not all overlapping; they make us irritatingly difficult to cook for).
Worst culinary innovation: S'mores made with rye crackers instead of graham crackers. I hoped that the sweetness of the marshmallow and the chocolate would cut through the wryness of the rye; it did not. The grandchildren laughed at me as they ate their standard-issue s'mores.
Most successful aspect of camping with the grandchildren: chopping wood. If you had asked me what would be the thing young girls would most like to do with their grandfather in the great outdoors, chopping wood would not have led the list, but I'd have been wrong. The younger granddaughter was especially enthusiastic, working through the challenges of holding the hatchet just right, using the hatchet to lift and drop the wood without losing control while chopping it, splitting off kindling wood, then graduating to the big axe and feeling how different chopping wood with an axe is from chopping it with a hatchet. The older granddaughter didn't want to be left behind, so she put in her time splitting wood as well. The grandson was mightily peeved that he was judged too young, at six, to wield big edged tools. Glenn tried a preliminary lesson with the hatchet, but it will take a few more years before there's enough hand-eye coordination and simple strength for this task.
Biggest disappointment: We didn't get to Denali. We had hoped to do so. We located campsites we could reserve over the Internet, made sure we had enough warm clothing and sleeping bags, and then checked the weather. The prospect of cooking in the rain, hiking with wet (possibly whiny) grandchildren, one of whom had a cold, and then striking a wet tent before driving the lot of them to the airport lost all appeal. Instead, we reserved a cabin on the North Fork of the Chena River over the Internet and spent one very pleasant night there. We saw more moose and the only beavers of the whole trip. Glenn and the girls chopped enough firewood to keep the cabin going for weeks, and Glenn stacked wood on the cabin porch from floor to ceiling. We burned three or four pieces of the wood they chopped and used the fire to roast hotdogs and marshmallows.
Miles: 3,250 on the trip meter, starting from a few yards after we drove off the ferry in Haines. That means we didn't include the 80 miles from Seattle to Bellingham, nor however many miles the ferry traveled. To keep it all in perspective, of that mileage, about 650 occurred in getting us to Fairbanks; 2,124 occurred getting us home from Fairbanks without the intervention of a ferry; the rest was driving around Fairbanks and vicinity for a week. For comparison, driving across the US, from Seattle to Boston, is about 3,080 miles; driving all the way across the US, from Neah Bay to Bangor Maine, adds another 400 miles; really driving all the way across the US, from Hawaii to Bangor, can't be done according to MapQuest, although it does give some hilarious directions to get from Dutch Harbor, Alaska, to Bangor, involving an incredible number of times you drive on the ferry, no times that you drive off the ferry, and 5,970 miles.
I'm ready to go again.
