The Deadliest Catch Captain and Birds

I really like the show The Deadliest Catch and liked seeing the Time Bandit’s shop in Homer. Well, we were riding around the Valdez Harbor and I said to Tommy, “that’s one of the Capt from the show The Deadliest Catch”. He said “no way”. I said turn the car around. I knew it was Gallagher in Anchorage and I knew that’s Bill in Valdez. We turned around and stopped and I said “aren’t you one of the Captains from The Deadliest Catch?” He smiled and said “yes, I’m Bill.” I apologized for invading his privacy and he was so gracious saying “hey if you didn’t watch the show, you would know me.” He introduced us to his wife and asked us where we were from and told us he was originally from the Pittsburg, PA area. Our neighboring State. We got our picture with him. (of course my eyes are closed!) He is a massive man with huge hands, quite handsome really, and a really great tan. You might think he lived in Hawaii not Alaska. We then saw his boat The Kodiak in the harbor and grabbed a shot. Nice guy, a very gracious guy. Thanks Capt Bill for the photo.

We found this old cemetery, The Pioneer Cemetery,  way way back in the woods.               It has been in the process of being restored for years and years. It’s known as the Chinese cemetery but at this time they have only found one Chinese person buried there.

We were at this local park and saw a man with two birds, an owl and a hawk, out for people to look at and to raise awareness for animal rescue. These were rescued birds. He receive calls about injured birds and will travel to get them, then rehab them, and teach them how to fend for themselves to return them to the wild. How lucky was I when he asked if I wanted to hold them.                

On our way back to find more bears to watch, we saw this cute truck. I had to get a picture of it. It’s like a doll house on wheels. Love it.

We could watch the bears for hours,                      unfortunately, they don’t stay for hours.        

Salmon Have Arrived And So Did The Bears

The Pinks are in! There are 5 types of Salmon and they rank in this order of yum. King, Red (Sockeye), Silvers, Pinks, and Chum. Pinks are good for canning and if you are Alaskan, you don’t bother too much with them because the first three on the list are so much better. Salmon return to spawn where they were born and 30 million Pink Salmon will come back here to spawn and then die this year alone. There are so many fish you can practically walk on them to cross the river. The water appears to be boiling from the swimming fish. There is a fish ladder at the fish hatchery off of Allison Point. The salmon have to navigate through a small opening to reach the 1st level. At each level up there is another small opening in a wall that leads to the next level. A salmon maze is you will.     Only a very small fraction of these returning fish will climb  up the ladder to their birth place to spawn. The rest will swim and swim butting their heads into the fish ladder wall or rocks on the river bank until they are exhausted and die. Seagulls have a feast. Its almost hard to watch the Seagulls drag the salmon out of the water and peck their eyes out. They don’t hardly eat any other part of the fish, only in small amounts, but it’s the eyes they want. Hard to watch.

Now what’s not hard to watch are the bears. We were so close to this Black Bear, we could watch every detail. Black Bear are more docile than Brown bear, but they are bear and you need to respect their power. Bears are great fisherman and really only want the female fish. It truly was amazing to watch the bears catch a fish. They put their head in the water and with one try they come up with a fish in their mouth. Funny how they can tell on that 1st bite if the fish is female or male. If it’s a male, they spit it out. It’s the girls they want, filled with eggs. They will bring the fish up to a rock, lay it down, and with their paw, press on the fishes' abdomen, squeezing out the eggs. Then they lick every egg up not leaving one. Sometimes they eat more of the fish but pretty much when they have eaten the eggs, they go back for another fish.    As soon as a bear would arrive, a crowd would immediately gather. People came out of the wood work. The people did not bother the bear at all. He or she wanted fish and would eat until full. The people knew better than to stay where they were and decided to move away in a hurry when the bear wanted to fish on the other side of the river. After the bear was full, it would quietly walk away returning in a few hours for more. 

The Road To Valdez

If you ever go to Alaska and question if you should go to Valdez, go. The drive in is spectacular. Foggy mountains, steep terrain, ragged cliffs, thick forests, and waterfalls, so many waterfalls. Some are narrow, other are at least 300 ft tall. Two of them are breathtaking, Bridal Veil Falls and Horse Tail Falls.    The mountains are enormous and fog has settled in and is acting like a canopy over the town. There are five glaciers in the Valdez area, some are accessible by car, this is Valdez Glacier, makes you feel very small doesn’t it? See the car on the road, just a little speck.       Others can only be accessed by boat.

Valdez is a small fishing town that happens to be the home of the end of the trans Alaska pipeline. The refinery is nestled into the mountain side on the waters edge. The refinery offered tours until 9/11, then, as part of our national security, the tours were halted.

We settled into our campsite and went down to the city dock. We stumbled on a 2012 Chevy Silverado commercial being filmed. We watched a crane load a boat on the trailer that was hooked to the Silverado. We watched people walking back and forth doing what appeared to be nothing, people stood around and did nothing. For hours people looked busy but nothing was happening. Love the guy with the microphone, what a job he had to have had. Finally with the boat on the trailer, that was hooked to the truck, the dock was hosed down with water, then the truck drove down the dock about 75 ft. When the truck stopped, the crew all started clapping. What acting, the truck knew its lines perfectly. We giggled about the clapping. Were they happy the truck could pull a boat 75 ft or were they glad the hours of work on the dock to drive the truck 75 ft was over? Amazing how many people were there and how much equipment it took to make just this part of the commercial. So, next year look for this truck pulling this boat. The ad for the new 2012 Chevy Silverado. Nice looking truck I will have to say. 

We Went Into Nowhere and Then Couldn’t Get In

What a long day. As I said yesterday, we went into one of the visitor centers in the largest National Park in the US, Wrangell-St. Elias. We knew we would take the 60 mile gravel road that would take us to another section of the park where we could access a tour bus today to see more of the park. Sounds like a plan huh? Well it was, but not all plans go as planned.

Let me begin by saying we only drove about 67 miles out of the way to go the Chitina where we would leave the RV and take Hooptie the rest of the way. We knew that it would take about 3 hours, yes 3 hours, to go the 60 miles because of the road conditions. That was OK with us. We are here in Alaska and want to see and experience as much as possible. We also remembered what Rodger, a Capt we met at Kirtland AFB, said about this National Park. He said he thought it was prettier than Denali. So we were in for the ride. This road was in need of much repair. We are OK with gravel roads, we understand the pits, pot holes, and wash boarding. So, with that being said, I say again, this road needed repair. This drive though offered either no scenery at all, just stubby Black Spruce trees that grow up here in the tundra, or really pretty views of mountains, rivers, lakes, ponds, flowers, ducks, and balanced rocks.     It was definitely an either/or situation. We were also fortunate to see fish wheels on the Copper River.    

Ok, we get to mile marker 58 of 60. We saw 2 women working on a sign. I turned around after we passed them and saw them taping up a note. After about 2/10 of a mile it dawned on me what I saw on the note. Road Closed. What? Road Closed? That is the road we just came in on. That is the only road in. That is the only road OUT! We quickly banged a u-ey . Yup, the road was closing in 30 minutes and they were hoping it would reopen Friday or maybe Monday. This is Wednesday. WTF? No notice what so ever? We did notice one of the bridges that we crossed had a sign up saying closed to truck traffic because of damage but allowed one car at a time to cross. Well, the DOT in their infinite wisdom decided to close the bridge to all traffic with no warning. We asked the woman who was taping up the sign what if we don’t make it back before the bridge is closed? Her answer, I don’t know, we are already here. Great! And really helpful too! There is the small town of McCarthy that is only accessible by foot path since there isn’t a road that leads into it. Maybe it has a hotel? OK, we need to high tail it back to mile 42, 18 miles away in a half an hour. We have been averaging 20 miles an hour to get here. Poor Hooptie, we were hitting pot holes, weaving around them the best we could. The wash boarding was making our teeth chatter. We got to the bridge and a DOT worker was there. He told us that the bridge was officially closed but would reopen in a few days. We told him we knew nothing about the closing, our RV was on the other side, and we would not know what to do since we are not from here. He was kind enough to let us cross.      It wasn’t 2 minutes after we crossed that a bulldozer with 2 concrete barricades was coming up the road. We made it by 2 minutes. No exaggeration! Had we not seen that sign when we did and if we hadn’t abused Hooptie the way we did, we would have been stuck. So much for the park and so much for seeing McCarthy. We took a really really long road to nowhere and couldn’t get in but we did get out just by the skin of our teeth. True story!