First of all, if you've been checking in this week, apologies for not updating the blog. Internet time on the ship was $0.79/minute and SUPER slow, so it would have cost too much. But I'll catch up now. This is the blog post for Saturday, September 8th.
And by the way, the bird I misidentified in my Day 6 blog post as a Ptarmigan is actually a Spruce Grouse. Thanks to Linda for straightening me out on that one.
Next
morning Denali showed himself beautiful and clear. It was a cold morning, below freezing and
still only the 8th of September.
We got our luggage out, had breakfast and boarded the bus for a walk around the village of Talkeetna.
Talkeetna is a
real hippy village with a lot of colorful characters, including the guy who
lived in his car wearing a miner’s hat and made cat and bird noises at you as
you walked by. Talkeetna is evidently the site of a famous Bachelor Auction where women (who until recently were outnumbered up to 4 to 1 by men) would bid on the company of men, with whom they would attend a pretty wild Bachelor's Ball. Our guide told us that sometimes there was mighty slim pickin's at the auction because as the saying goes in Alaska, "The odds are good, but the goods are odd"
But they also had an open
air market where we bought some nice souvenirs before we boarded another bus to
take us to the train station where we waited another hour and a half before our
train arrived.
I think someone was actually living in this camper in the train yard. I could tell by the pink flamingos in front of the truck.
And
we were all back on the bus for a 5 hour train ride to Whittier Alaska to meet
our boat.
Cranky Carlos our bartender, in action.
The train pretty much ran parallel to Route 3, the main (and
only) road between Anchorage and Fairbanks, the two largest cities in
Alaska. We even saw 4 cars in a row,
which was the first “traffic jam” we saw in Alaska.
As we got closer and closer to Anchorage we saw consistent
traces of civilization including many summer cabins and recreational areas,
including ATV trails, hunting and fishing cabins and nice lake and lake front communities
like this one on Lake Nancy
Pretty soon we were passing through Wasilla where one Sarah
Palin cut her political teeth as Mayor.
We were hoping to see Russia from the train, but alas, it must have been
hidden by the clouds.
What we did see was more shopping than we’ve seen since we
left the lower 48. Evidently, people
came from hundreds of miles around to shop in Wasilla. FACT:
there’s a Walmart in Wasilla that sells more duct tape than any other
Walmart in the world. And, obviously,
this passes for a college in Wasilla. I
guess that explains a few things.
Typical biker bar in Alaska.
You have to be pretty tough to live in Alaska, I’ll tell you that.
The scenery was still beautiful, but after 4 hours in the
train 2 days before and another 3 hours into this trip, some people were
getting a little antsy.
Finally we arrived in Anchorage, the largest city in
Alaska. Anchorage was smaller than Juno
(which is now around 33,000) until the 1970s when the Alaskan oil fields really
opened up. Anchorage seems like any
other mid-sized city, except with really good scenery.
We travelled along Turnagain Arm which is a long inlet that
leads up to Anchorage. The tides in
Turnagain Arm are huge, I think like 40 feet.
Visitors are warned not to walk on the mudflats at low tide because the
sand can be like quick sand and the tide comes in faster than you can run. They say they lose a few people every year
who drown in the mudflats.
There was a huge earthquake in 1964 in anchorage that
registered 9.2 in the Richter Scale and lasted 4 and a half minutes. They say some parts of the land rose and fell
as much as 25 feet. The land along the
Turnagain Arm fell enough that the salt water rushed in to an area that had
formerly been pine forest so we passed many stands of dead pines that were
poisoned and preserved and now stand in salt marshes. They call it their Dead Forest.
We passed by quite a few glaciers and water falls. The water falls in Alaska are AMAZING) and
everywhere tumble down hundreds of feet to the valley floor…
…until we got to the train/car tunnel into Whittier. Until around 2002 the only way to get your
car into Whittier was to load it on a flatbed train car and transport it
through this tunnel. Now, cars share
this one-lane tunnel with the trains,
Cars pass through this tunnel one way at a time, first a bunch of cars
north, then a bunch of cars south, until a train comes by. Then the stop cars both ways and the train
uses the same tunnel. Cars by the way
pay a $12 toll and buses $125. Kind of
like the Hudson River crossings.
On the other side of the tunnel lay tiny Whittier, and the
Diamond Princess. Whittier started as a military
base in WWII. They chose this cove because
it was fogged in something like 250 days a year and provided great cover for
our fleet. Whittier still only has about
a hundred year round residents. Whittier
lies at the back of Prince Williams sound.
The Alaska Pipeline comes down the Valdez Alaska and from there emanate
the super tanker bound for Asia and US refineries, including the Exxon Valdez
which ran aground in Blye Reef (named for Captain Blye for Mutiny on the Bounty
fame) in 1989 and created the famous Prince William Sound oil spill. Valdez was destroyed in the 1964 earthquake,
first by the quake then by a massive Tsunami that killed around a hundred
people when they rushed down to the harbor side to see where all the water had
gone, before it came rushing back in as a huge wave. They rebuilt it father up the mountain side. Whittier was pretty well devastated during the earthquake as well. Most of the clam beds were raised high enough by the quake to taking them right out of the water, effectively killing that industry for a time
We boarded the ship, had a safety drill and found out where
our muster station was and how to put on a life jacket. Sue met a bartender from the Crooner’s
Martini Bar, he was a crew guide at our muster station. I think he was a plant. Then a late dinner, and we were on our way.
No comments:
Post a Comment