Trip Update 8/10/01 (Matt)
Hello from Skagway, Alaska. Julie and I are both writing an update right now on adjacent computers. I'm covering the last week, and she is covering the week before. To go to hers, click here.
The Trip to Alaska
As you may know from our trip plans, we entered Alaska via ship/ferry taking the Inside Passage. We got on our first ferry, with the Rover, about a week ago, and just arrived in Skagway yesterday morning (at 2AM). I don't think we appreciated how far away Alaska is until we got on one ferry for 15 hours, then another one for 5 hours, then finish it up with one final ferry ride for 44 hours. It was a long trip, but it was fun stopping in the small inside passage towns along the way. We ended up spending a day and a half in Ketchikan. The rest of the stops in Wrangell, Petersburg, Sitka, Juneau, and Haines were in the range of 1-2 hours... enough to take a quick bus tour or walk into town quick. We wished we had more time in all of these areas, but you could easily spend a month visiting just the areas we just passed through in the Inside Passage. If we were to visit the area again, we would definitely try to spend more time in Sitka. The town is packed with amazing history from the Natives to the Russians to the Americans (This was the town where America acquired Alaska from the Russians). From the decks of the ferries, We also saw tons of wildlife - lots of humpback whales, bald eagles, harbor seals, and a few sea otters.
Salmon, Salmon, Everywhere!
One thing we are seeing a lot of as we travel up the coast is salmon. They are spawning now, so the small streams are packed with salmon traveling from the ocean up to shallow streams. In Ketchikan, Julie and I watched for over an hour a rapids area of Ketchikan Creek. Huge salmon were hurtling themselves into the air trying to get over the rapids. Some were so big we jokingly referred to them as dolphins. I would estimate a couple were 25-30 lbs but most were much smaller since the pink salmon are the primary species running now, and they are also the smallest of the 5 salmon species. Yesterday, in the tidal flats near the abandon gold rush town of Dyea, we found a stream that was filled with hundreds of spawning salmon. The stream was so shallow that the backs of the fish were exposed from the water. The whole stream was alive with splashing salmon amongst the decaying fish that had already spawned (Salmon die shortly after spawning).
Miscellaneous Stuff
This is probably the halfway point of our trip. The 8 week anniversary is today. This is just a bunch of general nuggets of information about the trip to date...
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What's been our favorite event so far? Julie and I both agree that every week presents a new and awesome experience and we can't really answer that question. If we had to, the West Coast Trail hike ranks high, as well as the Enchantment Lakes hike, but at the same time it is tough to compete with a killer whale breaching right next to our boat near the only killer whale sanctuary in the world - Robson Bight, BC.
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How's the budget doing? Every few days we say, "let's sit down tonight and look at how we're doing on the budget". It hasn't happened yet. We are recording everything we spend, right down to a quarter for a phone call. I'm not sure what use this will ever be, but we're doing it. The Rover is of course chewing through gas like a harbor seal eats salmon (excuse the localized metaphore :-)). We have the exact number of hundreds of gallons of gasoline we've consumed so far recorded somewhere... it just needs to be added up. It is somewhere around 400 gallons right now I think. We are sticking to plan fairly well as far as staying out of hotels, which would blow the budget pretty quickly. The average right now is 5 days out of every 7 have been spent in a tent - which was the plan. The longest we've gone without stepping into a hotel is 15 days I think.
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What's been our favorite city so far? Vancouver. Scariest/Strangest city? Bamfield, BC.
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How's the weather been? We've had tremendous weather. For the entire trip, generally highs have been in the 70s. We've only had about 5 or 6 days of rain so far, and those days haven't slowed us down at all. We are very happy to be missing out on the heat wave that we've heard about in the midwest.
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Scariest moment so far? It is a toss up between nearly every experience with Canadian Customs and coming face to face with a bear. It's not that we are hiding anything, well much at least :-), from the customs officials... they just have a way of making everybody feel like a fleeing criminal. The last guy asked us 3 times if we were carrying any weapons or firearms, the last time in a way that relayed "this is your last chance before we tear apart your entire vehicle and search it" (they never did search it). Read the next sentence with a bit of satire: The good news on the both the bear and customs front is we are now in grizzly bear country - no more pansy black bears, and we will only be running into Canadian Customs officials 2 more times in the next two weeks.
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Clubphoto trouble - As you probably know, we're using clubphoto.com to develop and post our pictures to the web while we're gone. We were suprised to find that they swapped our pictures with somebody elses on one of our recent rolls. We could post this guy's pictures to our webpage for a laugh I suppose, but we'd rather have the ones we are missing. So, you will not see the last few pictures from the Enchantments Hike, or the majority of those taken during the weekend at Lake Chelan with Karen and Jay. Clubphoto has assured us they will figure everything out, but I'm not counting on that happening before we return.
Where from Here?
We leave tomorrow morning to hike the Chilkoot Trail. This was the main route that gold-rushers took in the late 1890s to the gold fields of the Yukon in Canada. Tens of thousands of of gold prospectors took the route and the entire path is littered with the discarded supplies from those prospectors. It is referred to as the longest museum in the world. Hundreds of people also died hiking this trail, but they would also attempt it in the dead of winter and with a ton of supplies - literally. Canadian Mounties required everyone to carry one year's worth of supplies over the Chilkoot Pass during the rush. We will only be carrying 5 days worth of supplies - our planned hiking time on the trail - so the dangers presented by the trail are much less to us than those that followed the same path over a hundred years ago. Look at our pre-trip Chilkoot Info for more trail stuff.