Skagway

4-21-2015

     Skagway is awesome. The first thing we did was drive down Dyea road, which is a long, scenic road that winds around the bay and ends at a serene little campground area. As soon as I stepped out of the car I liked the place. It smelled like the rainforest in Washington: the smell of spring times three. Swainsons Thrushes were singing their eery, single long whistles, always in a flat key. It's beautiful to hear. Everything was green and the forest floor was covered in moss, but the trees weren't dripping with it. It was heaven.

      Just past the campground is the site of the original gold rush town, now completely grown over, with nothing but an odd false storefront or old boot to show that it ever existed. There's also a cemetery way out in the woods, down a two track dirt road, full of the graves of people who lost their lives in the Palm Sunday Avalanche on the Chilkoot Trail back in 1898. An estimated 65 people died, but not all the graves were in the Slide Cemetery. A lot were sent home to families who requested it. We wandered around and read the signs that told the story, then headed back to town. 

     The town of Skagway itself was a neat town, but it was closed. Really, the whole town was closed. It was like Mackinac Island in the off season. There was one restaurant/bar open, with a few locals inside, just off the main street. The main street itself was pretty cool, all the buildings were old but fixed up nicely, and it felt like walking through a legitimate old western town back in its heyday. But every building was either empty or in the process of being set up for the coming summer. We got lucky and caught a few park rangers setting up their building, so we stopped by and said hi. They let us in and we chatted for a bit, and they gave us a good food recommendation. It was for the brewery down the street but they didn't open until 5:00. We had tickets for the ferry that was leaving for Haines at 8:00 and we had to be there by 7:00. We decided that was still enough time to have a beer and a snack, plus it was the only place open to kill time, so we went. 

     The beer was good but it was really expensive. The food was excellent. I had a crab and artichoke spinach dip (with homemade bread slices!) that was delicious, even though it was made with overly frozen spinach. I'm not even counting that against them because it's unfair to expect such a remote place, in a cold climate, to have oodles of fresh spinach. Luke had a burger that was also quite good. I hardly even got to steal a few bites because it was so good he didn't put it down. 

     Pretty soon we had to leave to catch the ferry, so off we went. It wasn't hard to find, it was right down Main Street by the huge docks meant for the cruise ships. We waited a little over an hour because we had to be the last ones on since we were one of the first ones off. Haines was just the first stop of many. The ferry was headed all the way down to Ketchikan. I know because we ran into a guy setting up his sleeping pad and sleeping bag on a lounge chair on the top deck in the back. The deck was shaped kind of like a big oval room with the back half of its walls missing. The front had windows but they were blocked by the smoke stacks. We were all well protected from the wind, but it was still cold, and the view wasn't great. 

    I let my desire for warmth take charge and I headed down to an indoor deck with a better view. Turns out that was a good choice because there were orcas in the bay and I was glad I could see, even if we only saw dorsal fins. The sun was already well below the mountains and the lighting was flat, so I decided not to take pictures. They were kinda far away anyways. I hope I get another chance to see orcas or whales sometime this summer, hopefully up close, although now is the prime time. 

     Not long after that it was full dark, and I just slept until the boat stopped. We rushed back to our car to get off in Haines, and just drove to the first suitable place we could find; a half closed campground, where we slept in the back of the car for the night. 

Ghost Mouse

4-20-2015

     I have come to the conclusion there's a ghost mouse in the car. Last night, we woke up because we heard something rustling around in the small garbage bag we had on the passenger seat floor. We had it in the car because we were in grizzly country and garbage is bear bait. I'd rather have mouse bait than bear bate. We had garbage at all because we made dinner at our campsite area and there weren't any garbage bins around. Besides, what are the chances of having a mouse problem twice in one week? High, apparently. 

     We were certain there was a mouse in the garbage bag. We could hear rustling, chewing...very mouse like noises. It couldn't have been anything else. So we got up, grabbed the garbage, and threw it outside. We checked the car and didn't see any evidence of mice. We checked the garbage in hopes that we'd find the mouse and know it was outside. We were shocked to find that the garbage bag, which was tightly tied off, had no holes or any evidence of a mouse. Strange. I could have sworn we heard a mouse in there, for sure. But there wasn't one now, and it didn't look like there had ever been one. 

     Maybe there was something else plastic that the mouse could have been making noise in. I looked. Nothing. 

     We went back to bed, hoping it was gone. We couldn't be sure, but for a while we didn't hear anything. Then, maybe a half hour later, Luke heard some clunking noises. Then I woke up because I heard what sounded like a mouse chewing on a paper bag. We didn't have any paper bags in the car. I looked around anyway but didn't find anything. No paper bag, no shredded napkins, no evidence of anything, anywhere. I went back to sleep.

     It went on like that for a few hours. Luke moved the car as far away as we could get in the small camping area. It didn't help. I was relieved we'd moved all our food from bags to a plastic storage bin. There was only so much a mouse could get to. We were sleeping in the blankets. Our food was safe. Our stuff was in sealed plastic totes, and our gear was in the rocket box up top. 

      Eventually I didn't even get up anymore. Sometime, around 4:30 I think, we quit hearing any noise. I figured we'd find the damage in the morning and I quit caring before then. 

     In the morning we took everything out of the car. Again. We looked in Luke's slippers, we looked in all the nooks and crannies, and we didn't find anything. No food stores, nothing shredded, no poop...nothing! We looked at the garbage again, but still didn't find anything. We searched and searched and didn't find a thing. 

     So, obviously, the only reasonable conclusion is that we had a ghost mouse. It could not have been anything but a mouse, and yet there was no physical evidence of it. Clearly it was a ghost mouse; the ghost of the mouse we killed at Lake Louise. 

Atlin

4-19-2015

     We decided to take a very scenic way to Alaska by going South to Skagway, taking the ferry to Haines, then driving North back into Canada, then West back into Alaska. But first, we decided to check out a dead end road that led to Atlin, BC. What a great decision!

    Atlin is a mining town way off on its own in British Colombia. There's only one road in and out, it starts in the Yukon Territory, and it's about 60 miles long. As the crow flies it's actually not very far from Skagway in the US, just on the other side of some mountains, but by road it's a solid day's drive. It looks like it's on a sound, like Skagway, but the water is actually the very large Atlin Lake, a huge glacial lake. 

    The town itself is small, maybe a mile long. Most the houses are neat and tidy, of the cute fishing cottage sort, and almost all of them have a view of the lake because the town is on a bit of a hill. There's a small marina with lots of docks, and a few odd but picturesque churches. Most of the businesses are historical buildings, and they have placards on them explaining what the building used to be. Some have a long history, some have stories. Most of the stores were closed because it's not yet the summer season. There was a gas station and restaurant that were open, that was it. 

     We went to the restaurant just to get a cup of coffee and learned about a guy who makes jewelry out of the gold the miners of Atlin find. He sells it to jewelers in Skagway, where the price gets marked way up, and takes his stuff to jewelry shows in Canada, where buyers purchase it for their stores and do the same. 

     We were told we could buy directly from him, too, but we'd have to catch him at his house. So we went to his house (the waitress told us where to go) and it wasn't until we got there that I realized how rude this really was, since we didn't intend on actually buying anything. Too late, though. This was a very small town and we had already pulled in and parked in this guy's driveway. It was likely he'd come outside just to see who we were and what we were doing there. And he did. 

     He was a super nice guy, he welcomed us right in. He had two dogs that looked like labrador mixes, one short haired and one long haired, that were really friendly. He led us down some rickety, old, wooden steps into the basement, where he had his work table and a few huge display cases set up. Wow did he have some cool jewelry! He made jewelry out of the raw, uncut gold. He had huge nugget rings and necklaces, he had small nugget linked necklaces and bracelets. He had some of the coolest rings I've ever seen. I wanted one so bad but they were a little out of my budget, even at half the price of the jewelry stores. Now I am determined to save up and go back, at least on the way back to the lower 48, and get something. I mean, how cool would it be to have a gold nugget ring with real gold from a real place that we actually went to, found by real people we actually talked to, from such a unique and cool little town. And at a good price, too! I have to go back. 

     The coolest part is that it's not at all a tourist town. Hardly anybody drives that far out of the way without good reason, so everything there had a real local, homey feel to it. I may have just made up words there, but I hope I got my point across. It's a real down to earth place. 

     The surrounding area around Atlin was really cool, too. The paved road from the Yukon ends in Atlin, but there are two dirt roads that continue on for a few more miles before ending in the middle of nowhere: Discovery Road, and Surprise Lake Rd. Discovery Road continues south, and we took that one first. We drove past some houses back in the woods, then started seeing signs for Warm Bay on Atlin Lake. Before too long we passed Warm Bay. There wasn't too much there, just a small beach and a tiny little trickle of a stream that went under the road and fed into the lake. It was the only part of the bay that wasn't covered in ice. 

     Later down that road we saw a small sign for Warm Spring. That sounded intriguing, so we pulled in. The "road" was a short, muddy two track that led right to a bright, emerald green pond. It was the greenest thing we'd seen in Canada so far. We parked right next to it and got out to explore. Luke touched it and confirmed that yep, sure enough, the water was warm. Not hot, but warm. Like a baby's bath water. Just offset from the middle we could see a grey gravel bottom and some small bubbles rising up in little rivulets. It was the only part of the bottom we could see, so we assumed that was the direct source. The rest of it was covered in algae, like long, green hair. Mermaid hair. It looked soft to the touch, and most of it was between one and three feet long. 

     At the opposite end from where we parked our car there was a little stream running off. It was only two to five feet wide, and about two feet deep. That same, soft, stringy algae grew in that small stream, too. On the sides bright green patches of moss, shrubs, and green grass sprouted, in complete contrast to the dead yellow grass in the rest of the field. It looked so very odd.

     Warm Spring was the coolest find so far. We drove down the road further but it changed from a reasonable dirt road into an unmaintained two track, comprising of only snow and mud, so we turned around there. 

     We drove all the way down Surprise Lake Road, too, but it wasn't nearly as exciting. There was nothing there but gold mines, which look a lot like gravel pits, so it wasn't nearly as scenic. We did find the town cemetery, and a separate historical cemetery full of Klondike gold rushers, and those were pretty neat. 

    Overall I really liked Atlin. I hope we can get back there and explore Discovery Lake road to the end, and can buy some original, authentic gold jewelry from that nice old man. What a neat town. 

Upper Liard Hot Springs

4-17-2015

     There's a place in Northern British Colombia, along the Alaskan Highway, where everyone must stop. Or so we were told, by truckers who drove the road regularly, and by locals in the small towns we stopped in. Everyone was talking about how great the Upper Liard Hot Springs were, so of course we stopped. 

     Across the road from the Liard Hot Springs Lodge there's a campground. At the back of the campground is a dirt parking area, open to the public, which is where we parked. Right by a big sign, of the kind we typically see at trailheads. Sure enough, the sign was about the hot springs, and we could see a trail lead off through the bog and into woods. We followed it for about a half mile before we could see a building. It was small, two stories tall, with no windows. It looked more like a really nice maintenance shed. As we got closer, we could see there was more off to the left. Two separate wood buildings that shared the same roof, with a deck in the middle, that turned out to be changing rooms. They were light and open, and clean. They seemed new. So did the deck that ran the length of both buildings, along the steaming river. Stairs led down into the river from every inch of deck near the water. 

     The whole river was the hot spring. The head of it was the spring itself, just past the stairs at the North end. It was really hot at that end, but it got cooler the further we went downstream. At the end of the deck was a man made wall, even with the water level, which made a man made waterfall. Stairs also wrapped around from the end of the deck to right below the waterfall. That part of the river was cool on the bottom, but warm on top. It was refreshing after the heat of the upper part of the river. 

     We spent the better part of an hour there, maybe a little more. We met some really cool people from Chicken, Alaska, and had some good conversations. They told us they stop there every time they pass through, which is usually twice a year, and I've heard the same thing from many Alaskans ever since. Everyone asks us if we stopped there, and I'm glad to say yes. It was a great place.