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I have to admit I'm warming up to Anchorage. I still think the city itself is kind of a dump, but the land around it really is amazing -- mountains, glaciers, salt water and fresh water.
On Saturday, Toby took me for a hike up Ram Valley, where neither of us had been, to climb Raina Peak, at 6,795 feet. We parked the car at about 1,400 feet and hiked under a power line, along a narrow road, and up through tall, dead grass and thick alders more suited to bears than humans. After bushwhacking and sidehilling, we popped out in the valley to see a big grizzly eating overripe blueberries 400 yards away. Before he could hear or smell us, the bear dropped to his belly on the tundra in a way that must have been efficient but was not very stately. We chose a path around him and checked over our shoulders as we hiked to see that he hadn't moved. Then he disappeared. We worried he had dropped into alders between us and him, but we kept an eye out and never saw him again.
We hiked steadily up the tundra to a spit of rock coming down from the peak, then followed that up, climbing over rock ridges as necessary to avoid spots that were too steep to climb without ropes. Not having hiked much this year, I got sloppy after a few hours. Footing was hard on the loose rocks. We turned around a few hundred vertical feet from the top. The views were amazing, and even more so because of the quick transition from wooded lowlands to soft tundra and finally to rock, covered only by multi-colored lichen. We half-ran down scree fields and rushed across the tundra to make another friend's birthday party nearly on time.
On Sunday, Toby and Darcy and I set off on another expedition -- to hike and float from Girdwood to Eagle River over Crow Pass and down the north fork of the Eagle River. It's a trip that people do fairly often on foot, I understand, often spending a night or two on the trail. There's also a trail marathon along the route, for which Toby once held the course record. Once again, the hiking was spectacular. We climbed past old mining operations, along short cliffs, and past waterfalls. We paused at the pass and soaked up some sun, then hiked another bit to where we could see a handful of glaciers. We passed mountain goats on the trail, seemingly unafraid.
The trail covers about 13 miles of rock, grass, and fairly thick woods before reaching Eagle River a little below the glacier that gives it life. There wasn't enough water to float, so we crossed the milky, fast water and picked up the trail on the other bank and kept hiking. After a few more streams added their water, we blew up the packrafts we'd carried over the pass and paddled a few miles. Canyon-like walls rose from the glacial valley. A grizzly sow and two cubs lumbered up the bank 100 yards from us.
Our route proved somewhat ambitious, and despite hiking fast all day with little rest, we still had miles to go when we pulled our boats from the river at nightfall. The sun had long since disappeared, and even as we floated, ice formed on our packs and paddles. On the trail, fresh frost glistened back at us from the light of our headlamps. We reached the nature center and road a little before 10. The night was clear, and the stars came out as bright and unpolluted as from my Fairbanks home, maybe even brighter.
Yay! Jesse and I had a story come out over the weekend in the New York Times. It's about the poor runs of king salmon on the Yukon in recent years and how they're affecting people. Be sure to check out the slide show. Both can be found here.
We're done! After 50 days on the river and about 935 miles in the canoe, Jesse and I made it to the ocean on August 31. Against the advice of nearly everyone we met and despite a stern warning from a volunteer with the search and rescue squad in Emmonak, we paddled the last 11 miles to the Bering Sea in a fall storm that kicked up 30 mph winds and threatened to push the surf over the low ground. It took about 6 hours of paddling -- at times so hard we had to grunt -- and large quantities of chocolate, but we managed to get there through wind and waves and even stay dry at our ocean camp. Like most of the trip, the weather proved erratic, and we had a few moments of sun on the first day of September. The beach, if one can call it that, looked something like the Great Plains and something like the Serengeti, or so said Jesse.
For the last several weeks, the floor of my cabin has been cluttered with gear: waterproof totes and bags, buckets, cooking pots and rubber boots, tent stakes, sleeping bags, wool clothes, bug nets. Yesterday I finished making a pair of canoe paddles, cut the handle off my $3 frying pan, and bagged up 145 pounds of food.
In less than a week, I'll be leaving Fairbanks on a five-week paddling adventure down the Tanana and Yukon rivers. If all goes well, we'll make it 900 miles to the Bering Sea before fall storms kick up in mid-August. I'm paddling with a friend from college, a freelance photographer now, and the goal is to do some stories about the trip and how the horrible returns of king salmon are impacting Yukon River villages.
In planning, I've felt a bit like an amateur. What do we do about bears? How long should our painters be? Which is not to say I've never been on a wilderness trip. In 2002, I spent 30 days paddling solo down the Hudson River, and last fall I kayaked the Noatak -- one of the most remote rivers in all of Alaska. But most of the Hudson is settled, and on the Noatak, I relied on experienced companions.
So I've been preparing -- gathering gear, reading, talking with people, paddling. Last week I did a test run of sorts, floating the first 50 miles from Fairbanks to Nenana with my friend Ian. The last time we did it, two years ago, I was newer to Alaska: "There's signs of life, like little marks on trees for fish camps, I'm guessing, and a sign for Skinny Dick's, but mostly the river is wild," I wrote. "Ian likened it to a highway -- it's fairly well traveled, and you can't really get lost -- but I mostly saw it like a big, remote river."Well, this time was different -- I saw the highway. The current is strong, but manageable, the river braided, but easy to follow. The river feels more like a path through wilderness than wilderness itself. There will be sections of river more than 100 miles between villages, but it all seems doable now with some good gear, paddling skills, and common sense. I think I'm getting that Alaska perspective.
I can't imagine blogging much during the trip, but certainly upon return!
In the end, the money worked out about the same. Fred Meyer was selling whole Copper River reds for $3.99 a pound Thursday afternoon when we left for the Copper River, the truck loaded with empty coolers, long-handled dipnets, sleeping bags, a hand truck, and enough cheese, chocolate and salami for a few days. We made it back Saturday night with about 40 pounds of fish -- 30 pounds headed and gutted -- and spent about 90 bucks on gas and another 30 on miscellaneous stuff, for a total of about $120, or $4 a pound.
That wasn't how it was supposed to be. The limit is 15 fish per person, but somehow we ended up in Chitina during a lull and netted only eight fish between the two of us. The day they were running strong, I had to work. We both caught kings, which would have more than doubled our take (and given us the most highly-coveted, oily salmon species), but the Alaska Department of Fish and Game isn't letting dipnetters keep kings this year. Runs have apparently been bad around the state. I respect the idea of conservative management, but there certainly seems to be a lot of politics around who gets to keep the fish that are taken.
In the end, the time, work, and effort we put into fishing seemed large for a sinkful of salmon. On Friday, we spent 17 hours hiking in, scrambling down rocks to the river, and standing with a net in the silty, roiling glacial water waiting for the tap of a fish hitting the net. The idea of driving 320 miles one-way to gather our own food seemed like an odd twist to the idea of eating local.
But time and money are poor measures for the experience itself -- for learning again how to do it, for getting up early and pushing the body as hard as it will go, for truly knowing where your food comes from and how it got to your plate. We cleaned the fish in my cabin Saturday night and broiled a fillet around midnight. Oily, mild, and good enough to eat the skin.
The silence on climate change here in the capitol has been deafening, as the saying goes. I spend a good chunk of my time in the building, and aside from a few side mentions from the public during testimony on energy-related bills, there has literally been no mention of the issue. Gov. Sarah Palin mentioned climate change in her state of the state address, but only to note that her sub-cabinet group on climate change was studying the issue.
Anyway, the Immediate Action Work Group, a temporary group set up under the sub-cabinet, just issued its latest report. It has a few broad policy recommendations that suggest they're still trying to come up with a process that makes sense. But it also has several FY 10 funding requests, many of which are not currently in the budget bills working their way through the Legislature. If any of them are going to make it in, it's going to take some quick, effective lobbying. The session ends April 19. As for who will do that lobbying, beats me.
This is why Juneau is amazing. Drive across the bridge from town to Douglas Island and up the hill about half a mile, then hike for a few hours and you end up here.
Sorry for the delay. I had a story about renewable energy run in the New York Times, with photos, video, and a blog post to boot! More on that later. And yesterday afternoon I climbed a small mountain on Douglas Island. The snow was deep, and came all the way down the water. The trees are huge, of course. And the bits of blue in the sky and white of the mountains down the channel were striking -- so blue at times that I mistook the sky through the trees for something man-made. I made it to the shoulder on Jumbo just as it was getting dark, then skied down the winter trail (snowmachine trail) with shaky legs as the trail disappeared and lights came out in Juneau below.
Alas, I missed the powder day at the mountain this weekend. That was yesterday. I got out today, when the sky was so thick you could hardly see across the channel, and hiked up to the tram. It was only a few miles, but offered a taste of the mountains all the same: the chill of wet skin at the top, the warmth of good clothes and exertion, the perfect asymmetry of the hike up and down. The snow, knee-deep at the top, thinned and turned to slush on the way down.
There was a funny moment today in the Capitol when a VP from Canadian pipeline builder TransCanada updated lawmakers on his company's proposed $26 billion natural gas pipeline from the North Slope to Alberta. Trying to demonstrate the small footprint of the pipeline's compressor stations, which pump gas down the line, the VP, Tony Palmer, compared the facilities to wind turbines -- a whole station would cover an area smaller than the spread between two turbines, he said, and the tallest building would be only one sixth as tall as a wind turbine. It seemed like an odd comparison. Palmer actually said something like, "So if you're familiar with wind turbines, . . ." which I imagine most Alaska lawmakers are not.
Once on the subject, Palmer took the opportunity to mention that TransCanada is building Canada's largest wind farm -- totaling 740 megawatts, or several hundred utility-scale turbines. This also seemed like an odd thing to note. Did Palmer think oil-state legislators would be impressed by the green-power project? Lawmakers did include a softly worded requirement in recent pipeline legislation requiring companies to say how they would handle future carbon regulation, but environmental concern is rare here.
Palmer went on with his presentation, and a little later, one of the committee members, Bryce Edgmon, returned to the turbines. Is TransCanada planning to put turbines in Alaska? he asked.
This really was an odd question. Lawmakers have studied this project for many months, and it's hard to imagine that something like using wind turbines to power a giant natural gas pipeline would simply slip past unnoticed.
But Palmer's response suggested the idea wasn't completely off base. TransCanada is planning to use natural gas to power the compressor stations, he said, but the company has used electricity on other pipelines, and has built power plants (burning natural gas) at some compressor stations.
"Will those be things that we look at?" Palmer asked himself. "Clearly they will be."
So maybe Edgmon is onto something.
Well, the boots are out. I've been a little busy lately, but did get outside this weekend. On Saturday, I hiked up to the tram with my snowboard, although I didn't bother with the heavy, wet snow. On Sunday, I skinned up Mt. Troy with some folks and got in a few turns, despite crusty ice at the top and small ridges formed by runoff below that (shown here). With any luck, it's a temporary downturn in the skiing conditions. I can't complain about the sunny skies and T-shirt weather.
I made it to Juneau.
I mention this because for a while there, I thought I might not. I left Fairbanks on Friday, a little later than planned, and promptly got stuck a few hours down the road in Tok, the place that was so cold last week it made national news. I’d stopped to send an e-mail and noticed smoke from under the hood. It was just getting dark. A woman stopped behind me – as people will do when it’s cold in Alaska – and offered to follow me into town. Later, when I ran over a rabbit and stopped again, we checked the oil, found none, and added a quart. It was windy, and you had to be careful with your fingers. The oil turned to molasses in the minute it took to pour it.This woman and later her husband, longtime Tok residents, showed a kindness that went beyond helping the needy traveler and took me somewhat by surprise.
I followed the woman to her house, where her husband added some more oil. When I noted the cold, the husband explained that it had actually warmed up – it was only 62 degrees below zero, and had been 69 below a few nights before. We could see now that oil was splattered on both sides of the engine.I spent the next 20 hours at Fast Eddy’s restaurant, the accompanying motel, and the towing and service shop across the highway. I once tried walking the half-mile to the gas station for a candy bar, but turned around when my nose started to tingle. The temperature never got above 39 below.
At first I considered pushing ahead, as the problem itself wasn’t that bad (there was oil in the engine, it just wasn’t showing on the dipstick) and would presumably resolve itself if I could just get out of this frigid cold.
But it wasn’t a good time or place to be driving an unreliable car. Even with bunny boots and down, 60 below would give you a chill fast. And the Yukon isn’t exactly populated. I remembered that awful Jack London story about the man whose life depends on his ability to start a fire in the cold, and I decided to get the car fixed.
The shop, Willard’s, gracefully fit me in to what was clearly a booked schedule – cars, tractor trailers, even a U-Haul were failing in the cold. My problem proved to be a frozen pressure control valve, which meant the truck basically just had to thaw out. The mechanic, short on sleep and with hands that looked like he’d given up on washing them, worked the ice out of various tubes and valves.
At Fast Eddy’s, where I must have drank a quart of coffee, everyone was talking about the weather – about the dog musher with the totally white nose, or the thermometer bottoming out at 65 below, or the pipes that froze in the school and flooded the computer room. I eyed humongous plates of food and watched the cars drive by out the window. I had already missed one ferry to Juneau and worried I would miss another.
When I finally got my truck back at 4:45 Saturday afternoon, I got in and drove. I reached Canada a few hours later, crossed Chilkat Pass around midnight, and drove back into the U.S. a little after 1 a.m. The snow was deep, the trees huge. And it was warm.
I have to admit I'm warming up to Anchorage. I still think the city itself is kind of a dump, but the land around it really is amazing -- mountains, glaciers, salt water and fresh water.
