Home again

News Flash!!!  The carpenters are home again.

Well we made it.  The last part of our trip was a visit with family like we have done before, so there was not the newness of the Alaska trip.  There is something good about that, too.  It is nice to drive into places where we have been before and know where and what we are doing.

GOLD PANNING WITH GRANDKIDS

As I told one person at the gold mine store, "If my granddad had come home from Alaska with a bag of gold dirt and a pan and let me pan for gold, heaven knows what my life would have been!"   Well, we'll see because I brought some for some of the grandkids.  They all had fun with the pan and liked the gold.  Most thought a big jar of gold would have been better.  That's true. 

Well, I have tried to load pictures here, but they won't load, so I quit. 

SO, HOW FAR AWAY IS ALASKA?

As you might guess, a long way.  We drove 11, 021 miles on this trip.

People we met.

One thing that stands out in my memory of this trip is the interesting collection of people that we met in the lower 48, in Canada, and in Alaska.  We were treated to pleasant times with people all over.  I can only think of one adverse interaction with an old grump while fishing who said: "Go home, Alaska is already full!"

There was the old fellow from Alberta who I helped move a table that was too heavy.  Over that evening and the next morning, he treated me to a number of interesting and somewhat pithy comments like, "You have to get to the Yukon to get good sourdough bread...they don't know how to make it here."  His description of the sticky buns at the Haines Junction Bakery was accompanied by an expression that reminded me of Cole Gergely trying to pick the perfect donut out of the box at breakfast.  We stopped at the bakery on the way up and on the way back.  He was right.

WE went to dinner at a restaurant recommended by the RV campground owners in St. George, BC.  The people at the table next to us recognized us as from the lower US and visited with us about Canada.  He and his wife were from New Brunswick and had been transferred to British Columbia not too long ago.  I think they were lonely for the part of Canada that had been their long-time home.  I think we should visit New Brunswick and the other maritime provinces of Canada to see the wonderful sights that he described.  His comment about British Columbia is that its all trees, just trees.  Over the next week, we found out just how true that was.

The woman who examined Pat's arm in the Soldotna, AK hospital took time to tell us about growing up in Soldotna fishing as a little girl and catching big salmon from the rivers around there.  She described how the fish population had shrunk in number and size and the importance of the work to preserve the fish that everyone around the world loves to eat.  She made us feel comfortable and was very comforting to Pat, taking great care of her.

The nurses  aid who helped Pat while her cast was being put on in Anchorage had grown up in Oregon, moved to Homer and been a commercial fisherwoman before she began working as a nurses aid.  She described being out in the ocean in winter catching the salmon, tuna, and haddock that we buy in the stores and how you came to terms with the fact that if you ever went overboard, you would be dead before they could turn the boat around.  She enjoyed the solitude out there and enjoyed her job.

Then there was Karen who could be a tough businesswoman, but had a heart of gold. Disrupting her RV repair schedule to take care of us and get everything fixed, she fixed the tow and the rv so we could continue our vacation.  All the while she fed us cake and breakfast and let us stay in her parking lot rather than pay for a rv parking spot.  Then she worried about us until we called her from Tok to tell her that everything worked.

And Eddie who we found on the shore of Lake Kulane in the Yukon with a broken down car.  His alternator had quit so we jumped his battery and followed him up the highway to his house, going about 10 miles between battery charges.  While he and I stood outside on the side of the road charging the battery, he told me about panning for gold in the mountains, running from Grizzly bears while working on the highway, and the fact that there had been a Sasquatch sighting near Haines Junction.

And the people at an rv park just outside Edmonton, AB who let us dry camp on their manicured lawn rather than turn us away because they were full. 

The woman in Dawson City who cut my hair while telling me about living there in the winter and sharing ski patrol stories with me because she had done that while in high school.  She was trained as a true barber and shaved you with a straight razor, something I haven't seen in a lot of years.  She truly loved where she lived and enjoyed winter being outside in the cold Canadian winter temperatures.  Just bundle up and be careful.

Glaciers I have known

Glaciers I have known.

OK, so I have learned some stuff about glaciers that I didn't know before and that I find interesting. So here goes.  About 10% of the earth's surface is covered in glacer ice and about 75% of the earth's fresh water is contained in them.  At the height of the last ice age, about 35% of the earth's surface was covered with glaciers.  When the ice looks white, it still contains tiny bubbles of air.  After the  ice has been compressed by its weight, the air is forced out and it looks blue.

Here you can see the blue in the ice
 of the exit glacier near Seward 

 They are not just big blocks of ice that slide down hills or make lakes in Denali. Beginning with the obvious, if enough snow falls that it can't all melt in the summer, the snow builds up. The weight of the snow changes it to ice. The pressure of the huge layer of ice causes the it to melt at the base of the glacier so that the whole thing is sitting on a layer of water that lubricates its movement over the bedrock. There is always water flowing out of the base of a glacier unless they are at really cold places like the South Pole. Note that this business of water liquifying under pressure instead of staying ice is one of the really unique properties of water. Most things solidify under pressure but water does not. Ice is also less dense than water, so it floats. That is also unique. All right, enough physics.

Now, we have this huge slab of ice on a rollercoaster ride down the mountain. It can speed up or slow down; it can bend downward or bend upward. The top and bottom can move at different speeds. All of this causes the ice to crack open or push up in ridges. Scientists who have drilled holes in the ice see that the holes never stay straight. The hole bends as the ice travels its different speeds.




The lower end of a network of water conduits

The water coming from a glacier not only comes from underneath it, but also from the top surface of the glacier in the summer. As the sun melts the ice, rivers form on the top and flow downward. The ice in the glacier is very hard and not easily penetrated. However, the top water can flow into cracks and begin to melt its way through the glacier. These openings become the beginning of a network of "pipes" through the glacier where the water is staying liquid even though the temperature is below freezing. I remember seeing a Nova show on some French scuba divers who dove into these openings with movie camera. They were in water that was several degrees below freezing but still liquid. The pictures were amazing and they were some brave people.

this gives you some idea
of how big the opening is

So now look again at the picture of me standing in front of the "cave" in the face of the Worthington Glacier near Valdez and realize that it is the opening of one of these pipes. In this picture you can see a little way up inside the glacier.

The top of the glacier is a field of ice with the only thing showing above the ice are the tops of mountains which appear as rocky hills above the ice. Individual glaciers then come from the ice field down different mountain valleys, so several glaciers can share the same ice field. You can see this in the picture of the Portage Glacier with the Spencer glacier to its right. The Northeastern side of the Kenai peninsula is very mountainous and the Harding ice field that is 40 by 60 miles starting at the area south of Seward. Many of the glaciers go down to the ocean and form icebergs. This area is known as the Kenai Fjords National Park. Just at the north edge of Seward is a place where you can walk up to the Exit Glacier which is coming from the northern edge of the ice field. Again you can see the water coming out from under it.

As the glacier ice moves down to the foot of the glacier, it collects rock and earth that can be pushed onto the front and top faces of the ice.  In several of the glaciers I visited, they looked dirty, but when you picked up some of this material it was rocky and gritty with no organic matter such as you find in most soil.  An extreme example of this is the foot of one of the northeast glacier forks coming off of Mt. McKinley.  The central bench in this picture is actually the edge of the ice that has come some 16 miles down from the mountain and collected enough stuff on it to grow grass.  It looks like a canyon wall, but is ice.

More information about glaciers

Girdwood and gold panning

So we left Denali, drove south, and spent one night in Anchorage. The next day we took the time to get the truck serviced and do some running around that was needed. Then we treated ourselves to a lunch at our favorite restaurant, Ginger, that would remind you of the Winds with a Thai bent. We had been there before when we stayed in Anchorage to get Pat's wrist cast and found their food really to our liking. We were not disappointed this time. We'll probably find an excuse to go there again.

We left Anchorage and drove the 40 or so miles south along Turnagain Arm to Girdwood. We were here before and had decided to stay in the Ski run parking lot, but couldn't because there was a festival going on. This time we settled in and have been here for two days. These are gold panning days for Bob, the prospector. I went to the Crow Creek mine and paid for access to their land. After 6 hours of panning I had a couple of specks of gold, answering the question, "If you inherit a played out gold mine from your grandfather, what do you do with it?" Answer: "Charge tourists to try to find gold there." Saturday we drove down onto the Kenai Penninsula and tried panning a creek down there. No luck. I guess if gold were easy to find, it wouldn't be valuable. The salmon have run into the rivers and there will be another run in a week or so. As a result, you have to be careful where you pan so as not to destroy the fish nests. That stopped me from trying a more extensive panning expedition. This is not an issue around Chicken, so I will try up there next. So far, if you want to find your fortune panning for gold, get a job as a greeter at Walmart, the pay is better.

We drove to Hope, AK. It is a vanishingly small town on the south side of Turnagain Arm. I guess the fishing was on there because the place was packed with fishermen. Watching the action, I did not see any fish being caught, but it was between tides. Lunch on the side of the road while we wished Sheila Happy Birthday. As I enjoyed the beauty of having green marshlands, snow capped mountains with glaciers and the sea all in one place, I realized what was making this so unusual. On one range of mountains that ran down to the water you went all the way from sea level up so high that you were above the timber line and on up into tundra. That is an amazing range of climates on one hill.

Back in the lower 48...but they took our GRAPES

We went through customs the day we left Lethridge.  This time we came through a busy customs portal on I 15.  We had to wait quite a while.  The customs agent was very polite and business-like and wanted to know what food we had in the refrigerator.  Who can remember that after 10 weeks of travel.  There are things in there that must be alive!  She was obviously used to this so she talked us through finding out.  Pat was looking in the fridge, shouting things to me, and I was talking out the driver's window.  So go figure, what we couldn't bring into the US was a small bunch of green grapes.  The grapes in our chicken salad were ok, though. ??????

We have continued through Montanna and into Wyoming and are sitting in Cheyenne.  Tomorrow its Denver.

Alaska pipeline

The ALESKA Pipeline, or trans-Alaska pipeline, or TAP, goes the entire length of Alaska from the very north to Valdez. It's 800 miles long and moves about 10% of Americas oil. It transports from as much as about 2.5 million to as little as 500,000 barrels per day, depending on demand. From Valdez, the oil is taken by ship to California and some to Texas through the Panama Canal.  Pipeline facts

Getting to stand by it and listen to how it works and why it is built the way it is can't be duplicated by a link.  We were treated to a short lecture about the pipeline as part of our visit to the gold dredge.   Wherever there is permafrost, the pipeline is above ground. Where there is no permafrost, it is buried. About half of the pipeline is buried.  The above ground portions are supported by vertical supports.



 

Here the pipeline is buried and what you see is the service road
going ovet the hill.

There was great concern about melting the permafrost and both altering the environment and destabilizing the support for thousands of miles of pipe. Here you can see that the pipe sits on an H shaped support. The center of the H is designed to move and the pipe rests on it. This is a provision to protect against earthquake and to allow the pipe to expand and contract. The pipe itself is 4-feet in diameter and what you see is the outer shell of an insulating layer that keeps heat in the oil so that it will flow. At the top of many of the H supports there is an aluminum radiator. There is a system in the H that carries heat away from the ground and radiates it into the air, protecting the ground from melting. There are sections of the pipeline that zig zag up and down hills. They serve to give the pipeline some springiness.

We just had to have some "we were there" pictures, so we snuck up against some of the supports and went click.  You can get some idea of how big this thing is.  By the way, it turns out that one of the great environmental concerns was not an issue.  Further north from where we are is the range of the largest Caribou herds in Alaska, over 500,000 animals.  There was concern that the pipeline would disturb their migration patterns and put them in serious jeopardy.  It turns out that the Caribou ignore the pipeline completely.

In the next picture, you can see the pipeline coming out of the hillside and passing by us.  We were at the No 8 Dredge historic park and part of the tour was a description of the pipeline.  The little house in the foreground provides what is called cathodic protection for the pipeline.  It keeps the pipe from rusting.  It turns out that it is also necessary to scrub the inside of the pipe to remove accumulated sludge.  To do this, they shuttle what is called a pig into the pipe and use the oil to push it along.  At various points in the pipeline are systems to introduce and remove these pigs.  An example of this is in the picture of a cutaway part of a section of pipeline pipe. 

This is a dumb pig, but now they use smart pigs that have instruments in them to inspect the pipe as the pig moves through it.

Critters a third time

Do you know what this critter is?

 Rarely seen in the wild in southern Wyoming.  Habitat includes the Wyoming grasslands east of the western mountain ranges.  Has been seen in the Medicine Bow range near Laramie. This specimen was found at the AB Barbeque in Cheyenne Wyoming.