What A Winter This Has Been!

 Winter in Anchorage this year (counted as when we start cross-country skiing!) started the first week in November, and we MAY have stopped skiing now - the next week will determine that. It has been a beautiful, snowy winter, the best winter we've had in the 11 winters that we've been here! 

Pandemic guidelines and common sense have still meant that we've been home for the most part since we traveled back from the east coast in October. It's been good to be able to get outside here, as it's easy to be separate and not around other people - plenty of open space - wonderful trails, most of them free. 

One of our favorite places to ski, we can easily take Kira, Nancy Lake. The trails are groomed, not tracked, but they are ski only and have always been a great ski - nice hills, enough to be challenging, some flat around lakes and ponds, about an hour 15 minutes from our house - and sometimes we see no one the whole time that we're there - beautiful birch and spruce woods. We went there several times this year, and the first time we went with our RV - then froze as it was about 15 below zero overnight. The marine heater that Brian installed couldn't keep up! 

We also ski on local trails, even right from our house, and we discovered a new set of trails so close by that we never knew we had easy access to - in our 11th year here. We can't even get to all of the places we could ski - there is never enough time! It's definitely been a winter wonderland, often with the hoar frost that covers everything! And it's great to come home to our little deck that keep the winter white lights on for in all of the darkness. And we used the outdoor electric sauna a lot this year - turn it on, go for a ski, and it's ready when we get home. 

And here is what Kira likes to do after her little legs run 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 miles keeping up with us! 

Home to Alaska!

 We've been back in Alaska just 4 weeks, and it is an escalating pandemic here. So mostly I've been home and only going out for exercise - which thankfully here is easy to do. But we did get out to vote! 

Daily walks with Kira on the trails got colder quickly, and as of November 10th, enough snow to ski! Today we went to Hatcher's Pass to ski and met Alys and Pete (see Valdez story) on the trail. I brought cookies, they brought us a home-baked sourdough loaf of bread with rye flour - I can't wait to try that in the morning! 

Kira enjoys being home = she likes to nap in the afternoons in the guest. bedroom!  

On to Upstate New York for 2 months this year

 We bought a house in upstate New York in January, an area of the country that we lived in before coming to Alaska more than 10 years ago now. We've spent a part of every summer there (my son, my three stepchildren and their spouses and now six young grandchildren - in addition to siblings for both of us and my 93 yr. old mother still live in the area.) Now that we travel with our dog, Kira, it seemed important to have a home of our own, especially since we plan to spend more time there. It is a small house, about 1100 sq ft., and I decided that I wanted to live in the city, in a walkable neighborhood. Utica is a city of only 60,000 with a very active Refugee Center, a city-owned golf course, a zoo, a symphony orchestra, a community theatre, and my very favorite coffee shop - that one around the corner from my new house! 

The garage deserves it's own blog post, but basically Brian took a garage that was billed as a tear down and completely rehabilitated it, including heavy-duty jacks to jack up the sides, re-calibrating it so that the garage door worked, tearing off and replacing the roof, and then we scraped and painted the whole thing. Brian also replaced the fence after we tore down the wild vines growing like a wilderness into the yard, and I planted flowers. We ordered the patio furniture before we got there so that it was waiting for us, and we were very happy with the BIG umbrella for shade. It is a very comfortable house, and we were surprised by how comfortable we are there. 

It took some planning to be able to visit with family, but we managed to see and spend time with everyone, outside and socially distanced or with masks and not as much contact or time as we would have liked. Brian played golf a fair amount, and our one regret was that we did not put our sailboat in this year. Now we can look forward more than ever to sailing next summer - the border to Canada wasn't open anyway this summer, and we usually sail in Canadian waters. 

We have great pictures with our grandchildren - walking Kira to the tennis courts, going to the zoo. . . and I don't like to post pictures of children on the internet - but we thoroughly enjoyed the precious time with them. We live in a neighborhood of porch-sitters, we have found, so we're looking forward to getting our own FRONT porch set up for that next year. In the meantime, it is rented for the next 9 months, so that will keep! 

And on to Valdez from McCarthy

 After leaving McCarthy (61 more miles back out on a road that hadn't improved any), we drove to Valdez on what is supposed to be one of the most scenic routes in Alaska. We weren't crazy about the camping right in Valdez, but we spent a couple of nights along a road right on the water with seals and sea lions and otters visible right from our camping spot. Brian fished for pink salmon because everyone was and even rode back into town to get a heavier fishing pole than what we had come with (He caught two and could have caught more - they were jumping onto everyone's hooks.) Mostly Alaskans don't keep pink salmon, believing them inferior, but we were told that these are good smoked, so that is what we're going to try with them. He mostly thought they were fun to catch. 

There was a fish hatchery just a short walk from where we camped, so the salmon were coming back, and the sea lions were having a ball scooping them up. 

Also from where we were, opposite side of the road, we saw a mother bear and two cubs walking along just up from the road and clearly visible. The next thing we knew, we found a baby bear, a third cub, over on our side, seemingly stuck up in a small tree he or she had climbed. After about a half hour and a call to 911 for bear cub rescue, the cub got herself down and ran off in search of her mother. The cub was crying just like a small child, and it was hard to listen to . . . and to wonder if the mother was going to come back and tear into whomever was in the way - like us! 

And, of course, there had to be a hike, and it was a short one but with a couple of very steep sections up to a dam with a lake - and a sign down where we were camping to evacuate in. minutes if there was an earthquake in case the dam broke - I think the estimate was that you had 5 minutes! Fortunately, no such problem while we were there! 

Valdez is a beautiful village in Prince William Sound and an important commercial fishing port and shipping terminal. They had catastrophic damage in the 1964 Good Friday earthquake in Alaska necessitating moving the town and are famous for being near the again catastrophic Exxon Valdez oil spill. There is a lot of history in the town; Valdez was the nearest ice-free port for the Trans-Alaska pipeline carrying oil from the oil fields in Prudhoe Bay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valdez,_Alaska

Kira found a way to get comfortable during the trip! There is another whole story as we started back and camped for the night at the Blueberry Hill campground. We met Alys Culhane, a writer who was bicycling 800 miles to update an article that she'd written years before. Alys is nearly our age, very impressive, and she also had a flat and no tube for her bicycle. So we headed back into town with her in our RV, had a socially distant lunch together, and decided to take the ferry back to Whittier the next day with her instead of driving the 400 miles back to Anchorage. Whittier is just a little over an hour drive to Anchorage after the stunningly beautiful 4-5 hour ferry trip. And Alys and her husband Pete have become good friends! 

Finally a trip this past July to McCarthy and the Kennicott Copper Mines

 We took a second trip in July, renting out our townhome and taking off in our Chinook with Kira. We've been wanting to go to McCarthy almost since we moved here more than 10 years ago. We made one stop on the way at the Copper River to camp - McCarthy is about 307 miles, the last 61 of which are on a road that is just as bad as advertised on what I've seen portrayed as a "historic gravel road." Slow going - lots of washboard effect, and if we ever did it again, we'd let a lot more air out of the tires to lessen the being shaken to death! 

McCarthy is at the foot of the Wrangell Mountains with a population of 28 in the last census - a population which increases in the summer - but this was the summer of the pandemic, so few people were around. It's pretty charming though, and we stopped and had a glass of wine and an appetizer coming back from a tour of the Kennicott Mine and a hike on the nearby glacier. The wine and appetizer were both excellent, and unusually so,  leading me to believe the summer residents are pretty upscale. I'd like to go again when we're freer to hang out in McCarthy and to socialize - without masking up! 

Athabascan Natives with Chief Nikolai hunted in the area near where McCarthy is now and had a summer camp close by. McCarthy itself came into existence because of the Kennicott Copper Mine, established in 1903 with J.P. Morgan, the Havemayers and the Guggenheims who formed the Alaska Syndicate for this purpose. A railroad was built by 1911 to transport the ore. Copper was no longer feasible and had been largely mined out by 1938, and we were told that the men and the few families that lived there were given 3 hours to pack their bags and leave on the last train once the decision had been made to pull out. The buildings went through a couple of sales and were abandoned at different times before becoming a National Historic Landmark District. 

The National Park Service is in the process of restoring the buildings, and tours were abbreviated because of Covid-19.  That might be a reason to go back! See The Kennecott Story https://www.nps.gov/wrst/learn/historyculture/upload/Kennecottbulletin.pdf. 

We had a wonderful three days and also want to go back hiking on the glacier, with pretty much limitless space for spending the day and unbelievable views, of course! 

Hatcher's Pass Hiking on the Way Back to Anchorage

We couldn't decide what to do on our last day of this trip, but we'd never been to Hatcher's Pass in the summer, only in winter to ski. So reading up on some hikes, we camped overnight at the bottom at the Gold Mint Trailhead - but did the Reeds Lake hike first off of Archangel Rd.





We didn't get all of the way to the lakes. Two things about this hike - first, we started after it had been raining all day and sometimes pretty hard -- it didn't rain the WHOLE time we were hiking, but everything was so wet and the trail so narrow that we were soaked by the time we got back - well, really within the first 15 minutes or so of this 3 hr. hike. It is a fun hike, and we'll go back again - pretty socked in by fog and mist, so not so many pictures -- the water was gushing down pretty violently -- and by the time we got to a boulder field with the water rushing down just underneath it, we didn't see a way to get Kira across. The ranger told Brian the next day that it is a spot that routinely canines refuse when the water is as high as it is right now.

So we overnighted at the Gold Mint Trailhead and then went up the next morning (yesterday) to Independence Mine and did the relatively short trail to Gold Cord Lake. What a treat though! The main treat for Kira was to find snow again - she's in heaven with snow in July!



You can see the ice still on the lake on the 9th of July!



Sigh . . . and then we came home - to do laundry, clean up and get ready for another RV trip next week - to McCarthy this time! And we spied some more places to hike back at Independence Mine another day - maybe without Kira this time! Independence Mine was a gold mine most active in about the 1930s to 1950s. There is good historical information there and a number of buildings still standing.

More Exploring!

One of the campgrounds where we stayed had an unexpectedly good hike to "The Overlook" -- we were the only people there overnight again, though we saw one other in the morning. It was a State Recreation Site, and they had a 1 mile "Nature Trail" but the Overlook hike was longer and quite steep. The view at the top was so worth it, and the sun had come out by then with enough of a breeze at the top that there were no bugs.



It was just one of those days that you wondered, "Why didn't I bring lunch and a book?" We were content there for quite a while but wanted to move on to the next place (headed back from Chicken now) so we descended and packed up!

We'd brought fishing gear, so we did fish a couple of places along the way.



Ironically, Brian caught a grayling in one place that we completely didn't expect to, the Grizzly Campground, where we ordinarily wouldn't have chosen to stay - still, we were parked right by Grizzly Lake, only one other camper was there (not primitive camping at all, so cabins, etc., all unoccupied mid-week.) We rented a canoe and paddled a little, came in for a rainstorm, then went out again in the morning and paddled - Brian through in and caught a pretty good-sized grayling on the first cast.



Kira isn't crazy about being in the canoe, but this is more of her favorite spot! She starts out across from us in her own bed, and sometime during the night, she hops over with us. She was a good sport for the week though and hiked every day with us.