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Bicycle Alaska 2008: Instalment 6 (new)

noreply@blogger.com (John Berry) — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:35:00 +0000

BICYCLE ALASKA, 2008

by John Berry

Installment 6: Saskatoon, SK to Winnipeg, MB:

July 24th (Thursday) (cont.): Saskatoon to Colonsay, SK. 53 miles.

After Doug and Janelle Gilmour left me I rode on with fair winds. Near Clavet I saw a freight train so long that I counted the cars – there were 125 of them! If the wagons are about 50 feet long (http://www.sdrm.org/roster/freight/hopp7801/index.html), the train was about 1¼ miles long. I saw several more trains of this length on the way to Winnipeg, and a couple that were much longer – probably about 2 miles long, I was told. Mostly they were unit trains of potash or coal, but some were of mixed freight.

As I passed through Elstow I could see the head frame and dump of a potash mine located at Allan, about 6 miles south of the highway. This was the first of four huge potash mines that I passed.

The Allan Mine (http://www.potashcorp.com/about_potashcorp/operations_map/allan/) is about 1,000 m (3,400 ft) deep, and produces 1.9 million tons of KCl (sylvite) each year. There are three sylvite intervals, separated by beds of common salt (NaCl). The highest grade interval of potash is about 11 feet thick, and the workings at Allan underlie a 10 km-square area. The potash is in thin laminae separated by slightly thinner layers of mud. Once brought to the surface the ore is crushed to liberate the crystals of KCl, and scrubbed to remove the clay. It is then fed to a series of flotation cells, where the pure sylvite floats to the top and is skimmed off, leaving behind a salt brine. Thus the large dumps on surface are composed mainly of salt, with some mud. The crude sylvite is dried, screened and graded, and then loaded into rail cars and shipped off across Canada and around the world. Potash was first found in Saskatchewan in 1942 during oil drilling. There are now around 10 mines in the province, which produces a third of the world's commercial potash. Canada is the largest miner and exporter of potash in the world.

Recoverable reserves in Saskatchewan are well over 100 billion tons, and 95% of the production is used for fertilizer, with the rest being used in the chemical industry. Right now the industry is in the middle of a tremendous boom, which is good thing for Saskatchewan, but perhaps provides a hint of long-term difficulties in feeding the world, as it means that more and more land is being farmed by modern mechanical methods using mineral fertilizers, a trend that obviously has limits.

The potash was deposited by repeated evaporation of the Elk Point Sea in mid-Devonian time (370-380 million years ago). One of the peculiarities of deposits of evaporite bitterns is that the dominant potassium mineral is usually sylvite (or sylvinite (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3672/is_199605/ai_n8744898/pg_3?tag=artBody;col1), a term for a mixture of sylvite and halite). However, if seawater is evaporated, the dominant potash mineral obtained is not sylvite, but carnallite, along with kainite. Someone somewhere calculated that, in the case of the famous Triassic-aged Stassfurt deposits in Germany, the observed mineralogy can only be obtained by the passage through each cubic meter of rock of ten cubic meters of water. This water then, over some part of geologic time, dissolved the original minerals and replaced them with sylvite. This is a very strange concept to many geologists, who are accustomed to thinking of evaporite deposits as the most perfectly impermeable rocks in nature.

At about 7 p.m. I reached Colonsay, where I found there was no hotel, but a very nice swimming pool and large campground with a lake. I had the usual dinner of hamburger and French fries at the Colonsay restaurant, and then went for a swim. I found that my swimming muscles had atrophied and I felt very uncoordinated in the water. I then pitched my tent at the far end of the campground, under the canopy of a tree which I hoped would prevent a heavy dew from forming on my fly-sheet. The tree abutted a well-tended vegetable garden belonging to Bob Procyshyn, who came out and not only showed me everything he had growing, from potatoes to peas and beans, peppers, tomatoes and dill, but offered me some of each. Having eaten, and knowing how most of these things would fare in my panniers during the heat of the day, I accepted only a couple of peppers.

July 25th (Friday): Colonsay to Foam Lake, SK. 113 miles

The day began with a snack of fresh pepper from the Procyshyns' garden and Saskatoon berries from the Gilmours'. All of my care to avoid a heavy dew on the fly-sheet, though, was of no avail, and to make things worse, there had been some rather dirty birds in the trees overnight, so I spent some time cleaning the results off the flysheet. Bob came out to say good-bye and to offer me more of the fruit of his garden, and gave me his card. I have good memories of Colonsay.

I had been debating with myself for days whether to take a rest day at the Manitou Springs Resort and Spa near Watrous: on the one hand I badly needed a rest day, but one the other, the spa was 50 miles off the road, and would cost me an additional day, or perhaps more, of riding to visit. I had gone as far as to make enquiries of people at the bike shop in Saskatoon and in the restaurant in Colonsay as to whether there was an alternative to riding out by the same road as you ride in, and had found that there "probably" was – it was not certain whether it was tarred.

At the turn-off to Watrous there was that rare thing in Canada, a road-house in the middle of nowhere, Blue Horizons, where I had a good breakfast and decided not to go to Watrous and Manitou Beach: pictures I had seen of the warm water pool at the Manitou Springs Resort and Spa showed black water, and people I talked to said that everything was stained brown from the iron in the water. I discovered that the room rates were well over $100 per night, although everyone said the campground nearby was very nice, but it didn't seem worth two to two and a half days of my time. I had and still have some regrets!

Little Manitou Lake is a highly saline lake with a water density of 1.06, claimed to be greater than that of the Dead Sea. The lake brine is dominantly sodium chloride, but with a great deal of magnesium and potassium sulphate (http://watrous-sask.com/history2.htm ). The literature claims that it fills a glacially eroded channel and that the brine is formed by evaporation, because the lake has no outlet. Personally, I doubt that it is either solely a glacial depression or formed solely by evaporation – I saw several lakes in the area that filled steep-sided depressions which looked to me like they were due to collapse as a result of dissolution of some of the underlying salt. The high potassium content of the lake water also suggests to me that there is some component due to inflow of dissolved salts from beneath.

The next little town was called Viscount, and the one after that Plunkett. According to the web site http://www.saskbiz.ca/communityprofiles/CommunityProfile.Asp?CommunityID=719, both towns are named after Viscount Plunkett, an Irish lawyer and judge who was also a major shareholder of the Canadian Pacific Railway. At Viscount there was a plaque commemorating the 100th Anniversary, on June 29th, 2008, of Brithdir United Church, which was attended by the Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan and the head of the United Church in Saskatchewan. I asked a man who was mowing the lawn nearby if this was a Welsh church, but he didn't even know where it was, and told me that the townspeople were mainly French and Ukrainian in origin. It turns out that the community of Brithdir has long since gone, and the origin of the name has been forgotten, except that it is undoubtedly Welsh. All that is left is the little church, hidden away in the countryside north of Viscount (http://mkanhai.livejournal.com/).

There are several Brithdirs in Wales, though, one of which is a thriving sustainable farming commune on the coast near Fishguard (http://www.brithdirmawr.co.uk/): I wish I had known about it when I was cycling and walking around there a year ago! Another is in Gwynedd near Dolgellau, and has a small Roman fort (http://www.roman-britain.org/places/brithdir.htm).

Near Lanigan I saw my first bright blue field of flax, grown here for the oil rather than for the fiber. By this time I had been cycling across the Canadian prairies for more than ten days, and the old saying that the prairies consisted of nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles popped into my head. As I had found when crossing eastern Colorado, Kansas and Missouri on my little motorcycle in 1961, this is just not true if one is on two wheels and not zipping along at the speed limit. In reality the prairie is miles and miles of yellow and green and blue fields, dotted with pretty little towns, and with vistas across low, rolling hills and wide valleys. Every few miles there is a grain elevator, almost every one of a different vintage and design. The roadsides are lined with blue and purple, white and yellow weeds, the latter with a strong and very sweet smell. In many sections there are dozens of little ponds, most with fleets of little ducklings fleeing the strange intruder on two wheels. Sometimes the mother is equally panicked, but on other occasions she can be blasé and just let the little ones go. And everywhere there are red, white and yellow butterflies, horse flies and white-footed flies, the latter with a bite that doesn't heal quickly. In British Columbia and Alberta there are crosses of all varieties and condition commemorating those who have died in accidents: these are scarce in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the Northern states of the USA. Then there is the roadkill, which changes with the climate – on this day I saw my first dead skunk, near the little town of Elfros. And the litter: along the Alaska Highway the main component of this seemed to be full pampers, presumably dropped right where the baby was changed. These became less common southwards, as soft drinks cups and bottles became more common. Also, from about 58 degrees North onward there are little piles of scat every couple of hundred yards along the roadside, always about a foot onto the tarmac. I never did find out which animal was so fastidious as to drop its spoor so consistently. Every once in a while one would hear a shrill cry, as of a baby being tortured, and see a hawk take off from the telegraph pole, usually closely pursued by (or accompanied by) a small black bird.

So, in the microcosm the prairies are not boring at all, but of an infinite variety of natural and human detail.

East of Lanigan the road descended a gentle escarpment into an area that obviously flooded frequently, and was therefore used for ranching rather than crops. Everywhere there were muddy wallows. My guess is that this low area represents the outcrop belt of the evaporite sequence that is mined for potash. Here the Yellowhead Highway turns south and briefly joins highway 6 to Regina.

At Dafoe the two highways diverge again and the Yellowhead resumes its easterly course. It was very hot and I stopped at the large roadhouse at Dafoe for lunch and to rehydrate. I talked to a very nice couple from Regina who were taking their nine-year-old grandson out to see the original homestead settled by their grandparents. From here eastward the road passed along the southern edge of the Quill Lakes, broad shallow lakes that are an international sanctuary for migrating birds. At the little village of Kandahar a farmhouse was flying an Australian flag, but I didn't stop to ask why.

At Foam Lake I stopped and found dinner and lodging at the Big Willies Bar and Hotel. A small group of people in the bar here were listening to loud music and watching the antics of a very drunk young man nicknamed "twister", because in his inebriated state he would wobble and twist. The hotel had recently been renovated by the owner himself, and the result was a very nice bedroom with a rather palatial bathroom just across the hall.

July 26th (Saturday): Foam Lake to Churchbridge, SK. 95 miles

Another hot and dry day, with a gentle breeze from the SW that was not much hindrance, but no help, either. Dead skunks now became common along the road, as did rolling fields of blue flax, especially near Theodore, which was one of the first towns in Saskatchewan to have a Swedish Evangelical Mission Covenant church, a little before 1904. As in much of the Canadian Prairie, many of the fields in this area are quite small and of irregular shape, with large hedgerows between them, so that the country looks rather like the East Anglia of my youth.

The Yellowhead Highway follows one of the main railway lines across Canada, and so all through the prairies there are little towns about 12 km (8 miles) apart along it. These always have a grain elevator, and are usually just off the road. They nearly always have a hotel and a restaurant, as well as a grocery store and post office, and often have a municipal campsite with very reasonable fees. It is rather ironic that, whereas such little towns in the USA are dying or already dead, these tiny Canadian towns survive with some vitality. The irony arises because the law under which the land was homesteaded required people to live on their farms for at least 6 months a year for at least the first three years.

People would choose their land either on the basis of what prior immigrants told them or with the help of the local Crown Agent. In the case of the Ukrainians, who seem to have been the dominant group in this area, they would usually look for land that had had some stands of trees and some rocks available, as well as a good thick chernozem soil. The stone and trees they needed for building and for fuel (information from exhibition in Saskatoon Ukrainian Museum). Homesteaders had to pay little or nothing up front, but they were required to improve a certain number of acres each year for three years and to raise crops on those acres. They also had to build a house and live in it, without being absent for more than 6 moths in any year, which must have been a hardship for the Ukrainians, who were used to living in centralized villages in the old country. If, after three years, they could prove that they had fulfilled all the requirements of the law, they could apply for a patent to the land (An Official Handbook of Information relating to the Dominion of Canada, 1897, p.77). The patent document often became a family's most prized possession.

Canada did not try to become a melting pot of all the different ethnicities who came: there was for a long time an effort to provide schooling and other services in their own languages, and there was even in Saskatchewan a college for training Ukrainian teachers. There is still a bilingual Ukrainian catholic school in Saskatoon – the Bishop Filevich School (http://www.spiritsd.ca/ukrainian/eng_home.htm)

Fig. 1: Ukrainian Church, Insinger.

At Insinger, a tiny community, I took a photograph of a little gem of a Ukrainian Church, unpainted but in immaculate condition. Less than a mile away across a field was a much larger and more ornate church with a silver-painted onion dome. I took shelter from the heat and blazing sun by eating lunch at the Chinese restaurant in the little town of Springside. The next town was Yorkton, a large regional center. The tall silver dome of St. Mary's Ukrainian Catholic Church can be seen from miles away. Attached to the church is a Redemptionist Seminary. Exactly a month after I visited, the retired exarch for the Ukrainian Catholics in Great Britain, Bishop Michael Kuchmiak, died in Saskatoon and his funeral liturgy was held in this church. He had had a long career in Canada, the USA and Britain.

Fig. 2: St. Mary's Ukrainian Catholic Church and Redemptionist Seminary, Yorkton, SK

Outside the Information Center in Yorkton there was a series of demonstration plots for all the crops that are grown in the area. I found this fascinating, and spent enough time there to try to memorize what each crop looked like and what it was used for. I also left a sample of the different roadside flowers that I had collected with the young lady there, with a note to the agronomist in charge of the plots asking him to identify them for me. I have not as yet heard back! At Rokeby I saw the first road-killed snake of this trip. It was a harmless garter snake, but was evidence of my southward progress. The little town of Saltcoats, 15 miles east of Yorkton, struck me as idyllic in the evening light, although the photograph (Fig. 3) does not do justice to the exquisite green of the wetland between the Yellowhead Highway and the town.

Fig. 3: The main street of Saltcoats, SK, seen from the Yellowhead Highway

I had hoped to reach the town of Langenburg on the Manitoba border, but settled for the larger city of Churchbridge, 10 miles further west. There was a large and very nice, but almost empty, campground at Churchbridge, and here I spent a pleasant night.

July 27th (Sunday): Churchbridge, SK, to Shoal Lake, MB. 55 miles

Ever since leaving Whitehorse I had been trying to contact my friend Stan Korowski in Winnipeg. This had proven difficult because I turn my cell phone off while riding, for safety reasons and to conserve the battery, and anyway it was useless much of the time in the Yukon and BC.

I am not joking when I mention safety reasons for having the phone turned off: Ingrid once called me at the exact moment that I passed a garbage truck on 45th Street in Austin. The street here is very narrow and very busy, and the garbage truck had just emptied one bin and was about to pull out into the street to go to the next one. A cyclist in Austin has recently been killed by a garbage truck in a similar situation.

I did not have Stan's cell phone number, and would leave messages on his home phone, but he, apparently, was not in the habit of checking them often. This is understandable, because Stan and Irene have two teenage children. However, Stan had left a message on my phone asking me to contact two old friends of his when I reached Russell, his birthplace and the first town I would encounter in Manitoba. I had called Al Wagner, who had been on the high school track and field team with Stan, and he had told me that the service at Grace Lutheran Church would be at 10.30 a.m. Since it is 47 km (29 miles) from Churchbridge to Russell, and Russell is in the Central Time Zone, an hour ahead of Saskatchewan: this would mean getting up while it was still dark, at 5.30 a.m., in order to strike camp, eat a light breakfast, and be in Russell in time for the service.

However, the wind had turned decidedly against me during the night, and I had to peddle hard to maintain 10 miles per hour. The terrain also became somewhat hilly near the Manitoba border. At Marchwell, the last community in Saskatchewan and another early settlement of Swedish Evangelicals (http://www.multiculturalcanada.ca/Encyclopedia/A-Z/s13/5), there was a very pleasant smell in the air– very sweet and, I thought, probably coming from a malting. It turned out to be from the Bunge canola processing plant at Harrowby, just across the Manitoba border.

Soon after passing that border the road abruptly descended several hundred feet to cross the entrenched, southward flowing, Assiniboine River. On the other side of the bridge there was, of course, a long steep climb requiring the granny gear, which would slow me down to 3.4 m.p.h. From that moment on, I knew I was going to be late to church! However, I pressed on as fast as I could, and was soon at the Information Center in Russell, which fortunately was staffed. The very young lady there was not quite sure which church was Grace Lutheran, and called her mother to find out, but within a few minutes I was on my way, and was in church by the end of the first hymn.

The service was modern in style, but the congregation was small and mature in years. However, there were two small black boys running around, and they turned out to be the pastor's brand-new adopted children, brothers from Ethiopia. The family had got back from Ethiopia with them two weeks earlier, and already the boys were learning English, though they still spoke to each other in Amharic.

A couple, Coreen and Don Porter, from the congregation invited me for lunch at the Chicken Chef Restaurant on the Russell by-Pass. They lived in Foxwarren, the next town down the road. After eating lunch I went in search of Stan's friend Al Wagner, who lived "next to the C-Store", which turned out to be not quite as easy as it sounded. The C-Store is a chain of convenience stores, but it faced the by-pass, whereas Al lived on the residential street behind it. Al had been on the high school track team with Stan, and he drove me all around Russell to the scenes of both their boyhoods: Stan's family home, the schools, and the main street. There we tried to look up Ted Jankovsky at the Assissippi Inn: Stan had also given me his name, but he was not at home.

Russell's Main Street is framed by eight sets of wooden arches (Fig. 4). These are 32-ply nailed laminate arches made by a former Russell business, the Glu-Rite Rafters Company. They

Fig. 4: View along Main St., Russell, MB. The wooden arches were manufactured in Russell and were rescued and brought back to Russell when the stadium in Dauphin was demolished (Photo from http://www.russellmb.com/arches.html)

were used to support the roof of the stadium in Dauphin, and brought back to Russell when the stadium was torn down. They give Russell's downtown a unique charm.

Al has been widowed for a year or two, and has changed very little in his house. He plays a mean guitar and has a good singing voice, and has played for parties and in bands around the Russell area most of his life. Back at his house he played a couple of songs from the 1950s on the guitar, and we both sang along. It felt a bit odd doing this at 2.00 pm on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Al offered me some fruit and a glass of whiskey and water, probably the first whiskey I had had in 20 years, and after some conversation about running and "the good old days" we bid our farewells.

I had been warned about the dangerous roads of Manitoba, and while I was in the Yukon two members of a family of four had been killed while cycling eastward on the Trans-Canada Highway near Winnipeg. However, the road from Harrowby to Russell had been well-engineered, with wide shoulders, and so was the road southward out of Russell - a very pleasant surprise indeed. But 19 km (12 mi) south of Russell there was a sharp bend to the east and a steep hill down to the municipal campground and swimming pool at Binscarth, and right there at the worst possible place the road narrowed and the paved shoulder disappeared. I continued riding gingerly toward Foxwarren. I tried riding at the side of the road, and large vehicles tried to pass each other abreast of me. I tried riding in the middle of my lane, and a thirty-wheeler tried to come around me from behind with a car not more than 50 yards away coming towards us: others just put their finger on the horn button. I tried jumping off onto the loose gravel shoulder when I saw a vehicle behind me in my helmet mirror at the same time as there was an oncoming vehicle, but that was not fool-proof, as it is not always easy to see vehicles in time in a helmet mirror, especially if one wears glasses. One's eyeglasses need to be pushed right up to the top of one's nose, or the reflection in the mirror is badly out of focus. On a rough road glasses do not stay pushed up all of the time.

To make matters worse, it was now getting rather late, so the sun was low in the west, and at Foxwarren the road turned due east, so drivers coming toward me would be straining to see what was coming toward them. The volume of traffic was not urban, but it was busy by rural Canadian standards, and much of it was very heavy vehicles. After jumping onto the lose gravel at the side of the road for about the 6th time I decided I would never get anywhere like this, and put my thumb out. That didn't work well, so I started riding again, but soon had to jump back into the dirt. Finally, a pickup turned onto the highway from a side road very close to me. The driver stopped, and I asked if he could give me a ride to where the shoulder began again. He told me that that would be at Shoal Lake, about 30 km away. I asked if he was going that far, and he said "No." So I offered to pay him for the ride, and we lifted my bike into his truck bed.

Don Campbell was a fairly taciturn person of about 70 years of age, and he agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to take the $20 bill that I offered him. He was originally only going to Solsgirth, just a few kilometers from where he picked me up, so I was adding at least 50 km and nearly an hour to his drive, and at $1.25/litre ($5.00 per gallon), $20 didn't seem like an awful lot. During the drive we talked about the crops that were raised in the area.

Don dropped me off at a gas station on the Shoal Lake by-pass, which was undergoing major construction, and I rode through the deserted town to the campground (Fig. 5), stopping at Allen Choy's Chinese restaurant in the main street (Station Road) for a quick dinner.

Fig. 5: Lakeview Park Campground, Shoal Lake, MB. I pitched my tent just behind the first trees in the center of the photograph. (Photos 5 & 6 from: http://www.shoallake.ca/whattodo.htm)

The campground lay along the shore of a very pleasant lake and, as in most Canadian small towns, site selection and payment were on the self-service plan. You selected your site, and then wrote the number on the front of an envelope obtained from a "mail" box near the entrance, put the requisite fee inside the envelope, and stuffed the full envelope into a slot. I didn't have the change, but found a little Royal Canadian Mounted Police Museum at the end of the campground, and got change there (Fig.6).

Fig. 6: Log Cabin housing the RCMP Museum in Lakeview Park, Shoal Lake, MB.

Shoal Lake has been the administrative HQ of a Mountie detachment since the NWMP "march west" to Fort Edmonton in 1874. The original post was served as a local headquarters for "D" division, but was reduced to a mere mail stop in 1886, when the Manitoba Provincial Police assumed policing for the area. In 1921 Royal Canadian Mounted Police returned, and Shoal Lake is one of the longest serving Detachments in Canada. The young man staffing the tiny museum told me that it is a replica of the original NWMP building, and it is certainly stocked from floor to ceiling with interesting relics, including firearms and uniforms, as well as historical photographs and items of Native American culture. It is well worth a visit.

One of the east-west streets leading to the lakeshore in Shoal Lake is wider than all the others and is known as The Parade: it opens into a square at the lake shore, and although it is in a residential section like any other, I wonder if it is not the site of the old RCMP parade ground.

I had picked a tent site close to a large RV which had a party going on around a very cheerful campfire. I went over to chat and was made very welcome. Everybody was very curious about my trip. As I had found in several other places in Canada, these people parked their RV permanently in the campground, and spent most of the summer there. In this case they were natives of Shoal Lake who had moved away, and one family around the campfire were their childhood friends, who still lived year-round in Shoal Lake.

July 28th (Monday): Shoal Lake, MB, to Macdonald, MB. 110 miles

From Shoal Lake to Minnedosa I had a headwind and a shoulder to ride on. This shoulder began with a width of about 2 feet, but by the time I reached Strathclair it had shrunk to 18 inches and I could not fit completely within it. From Newdale to the Highway 10 junction near Minnedosa it was only 1 foot wide, but it was something and I felt relatively safe. I carried straight on into Minnedosa, which gave me several miles on old and bumpy, but empty and safe Highway 18A. After running straight across the plateau for 2.5 miles this highway swung to the right and into as cleft-like valley, and then down a steep hill into Minnedosa (Fig. 7), providing a beautiful view over the snug little town of 2500 people.

I found a nice vegetarian restaurant on Main Street, the Garden Thyme, and had an excellent meal. Sitting across the aisle from me were a couple, about my age, with strong English accents. They had farmed all their lives in Leicestershire, but had never been able to own a farm. So five years ago they had come to Canada and used their life savings to buy a farm near Brandon, a larger town 50 km south of where we sat.
Figure 7: View of Minnedosa looking North. I entered town through the cleft in the trees in the background.

It was a steep climb back out of Minnedosa, but then I had a strong tail wind all the way to Neepawa, another quaint old town. Neepawa is somewhat larger (3300 people) than Minnedosa, and claims to be the Lily Capital of the World, and also to be the most beautiful town in Manitoba, having won the annual competition more often than any other town. I had missed the annual 3-day long Lily Festival by a week! The Yellowhead Highway is Neepawa's Main Street, but the commercial district is a couple of blocks north, and I shopped at the Safeway store there. This was the first time that I have encountered a charge for grocery carts: you have to put a quarter in the slot to get one, but you get it back when you return the cart. I was a bit upset at first at having to pay, but it certainly cuts down on theft of the carts.

As I was approaching the traffic light at the Yellowhead Highway on Mountain Ave. a car drew up alongside me and the driver rolled down the window and asked if I was John Berry. This was Stan Korowski's friend and colleague Ozzie. He had a job in Neepawa that day and Stan had asked him to keep an eye open. Stan himself had looked for me in Minnedosa, but had missed me. I was beginning to feel among friends.

As you leave Neepawa you cross a deep valley – the first crossing of the Whitemud River, which the highway crosses and re-crosses from Neepawa to Westbourne. The wind had been backing, and from Neepawa eastward I had a crosswind, which became a headwind as the road veered to the south after Gladstone. The weather was very hot, and before Gladstone I stopped for a drink at a funky little store and restaurant run by an old French couple (Fig. 8). In the deep dark recesses of the store were every item of hardware and farmers' supplies that one could think of, many of them looking as if they had been sitting on the crowded shelves

Fig. 8: Quaint country store near Gladstone, MB. Inside was a restaurant and a general store with every item known to man, both run by a French-Canadian couple.

for a half century or more. As I left the store a young Black lady from Saskatoon pulled in on a big Harley-Davidson – she may be seen in the background in Fig. 8 bending over her bike. She was on the way to see some relatives in Winnipeg and in Ontario, and to see a bit of Canada at the same time.

I reached Gladstone, again on the Whitemud River, in the late afternoon but too early to stop, even though Stan had warned me in a phone conversation that here was the last accommodation for 50 km. I asked at the gas station and was told that there was a campground near Woodside. But now the wind was turning against me and my progress slowed. Nothing at Woodside but another crossing of the Whitemud River. Then a long slog to Westbourne. Just before the river crossing there was a sign pointing to a campsite of to the left, so I rode a mile down the road and across the railway line and ended up at a dead end in the yard of a deserted house. Back on the main road I crossed the Whitemud River yet again and came to a road junction called Sportsman's Corner. Here there was a small café run by Native Americans, but no-one seemed to be around. Eventually the cook turned up, and after an interminable wait I got a very basic hamburger (meat and bun only), and directions to a campsite, again on the left. After cycling through a tiny village I again appeared to be headed down a dirt road into the middle of nowhere, so stopped a car and got new directions, which were the exact opposite of those given at the store. By this time it was beginning to get dark, so I decided that my only chance was to try the next town, Macdonald. This turned out to be off the road to the left, and I could see the lights of the large town of Portage la Prairie not far away (perhaps 10 km), but it was too dark to get there along a road with no shoulder and heavy traffic.

After asking a couple of times I got directions to the park at Macdonald, and got my tent up just as the light fell. Pat and Hannah Blair, who live just across the road from the park, invited me into their house for a shower, which I needed badly after my 110 miles on a hot day. This couple had hearts of gold and insisted on giving me tea and ice-cream, as well as some pins extolling the virtues of Manitoba. By the time I got back to my tent the town of Macdonald was surrounded by a spectacular display of lightning, and as I crawled into my sleeping bag the first drops of rain fell. Within a few minutes I was in the midst of a violent downpour, with lightning so close that I decided it was easier to stay awake and watch it rather than try to go to sleep. After an hour or so the rain eased off, and then stopped: I went outside to watch the still-spectacular lightning for several minutes, and then slept like a log. Not a drop of water got into the tent.

July 29th (Tuesday): Macdonald, MB, to Winnipeg: 62 miles

I got an early start and was in Portage la Prairie by 8.30 am, in spite of having a strong headwind until I reached the junction of the Yellowhead Highway with the TransCanada Highway half way there. I also was held up just before the junction by the passage of a 151-car mixed freight train. People in Canada say that these huge trains are an innovation since the Canadian National Railway was bought out by US interests, but I have never seen trains quite so long in the USA.

I had breakfast at an A&W restaurant on the west side of Portage, and as I was leaving was greeted by a lady from whom I had asked for directions to the park in MacDonald last night. She was driving a Portage city-owned truck, and was very concerned to know that I had survived the storm well.

As I was rolling into the downtown area of Portage I was passed far too closely by a Gardewine North truck that turned into the Daily Graphic's offices in the next block to make a delivery. I followed the truck and spoke to the driver, who refused to accept that he had not left enough room between the side of his truck and my handlebars (he had left about ten inches), and who got very angry, defensive, and arrogant and claimed that he had tons of experience and that his judgment as a driver was the only guide to safety. I gave up arguing and went into the Daily Graphic office, where I got his company's phone number in Winnipeg and also directions to the RCMP, to whom I reported the incident in detail. I called the company when I got to Stan's house, but unfortunately did not reach the right person and did not receive a call back until I was on my way into the USA.

In the open country just east of Portage I passed four women walking along in the gravel shoulder, escorted by a support vehicle. They were walking to Ottawa as part of a campaign, the Walk4Justice, to bring national attention to the fates of 3000 women, mostly of First Nations origin, who have been murdered or who have disappeared in Canada in the last 40 years. The organizers feel that the Canadian police have not taken the murders of women, especially those of Native American women, as seriously as they should. The campaign was started by Gladys Radek, whose niece disappeared in 2005 on the Highway of Tears, BC Rte 16, on which 18 women have disappeared or been found murdered within the last 30 years,. This is the same Cassiar Highway that Julienne Pacheco had taken southward from Watson Lake. I walked along with two of the women, Tulsa and ___, and listened while they told me about their campaign and their feelings about the way violence against women is handled in Canada.

Barely half a mile after I had left the walkers behind Stan Korowski overtook me and got out to welcome me to Winnipeg, warn me of road conditions ahead and give me directions. One of his suggestions was to turn right off the TransCan in a couple of miles and take the much quieter old road through Oakville, and then to do the same at Elie, where there was a neat old country store at which to eat. These were welcome as there had been no hard shoulder on the TransCan from Portage, and traffic was dense and fast. It was also a dull and windy day, and the old, narrow roads were better sheltered from the wind. At Elie, where all the businesses had French names, the store was of Victorian vintage and sold excellent sandwiches.

As I waited in-line to order my sandwich I was inadvertently regaled with stories of the F5 tornado that had hit the town just 13 months earlier, on June 22, 2007 (Fig. 9). Several

Figure 9: The Elie tornado, June 22, 2007 (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e3/Elie_F4_Tornado_Justin.jpg/240px-)
customers had very anxiously stayed awake and watchful through last night's storm because it reminded them so forcibly of the weather that preceded the tornado, and they were comparing notes. Even though this was only the second tornado to reach F5 on the Fujita scale since 1999, no-one was killed, and damage was surprisingly light: $1 million damage to the four mill, four homes and several cars destroyed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie,_Manitoba_Tornado).

While I was sitting on the porch outside the store eating my sandwich a train passed on the line opposite every five minutes. These included two very fast (at least 90 mph) passenger trains, a west-bound one with 5 carriages, and an eastbound train with 15 carriages, including three dome cars and a final panorama car. I marveled at the efficiency of Canadian railways.
From Elie to Headingley I raced a storm, and at Headingley was intercepted by Stan and his friends all piled into one SUV on their way back to the office. Headingley is only a few kilometers outside the Winnipeg Perimeter Highway (Highway 101). With the strong and gusty wind now behind me, I was at Stan's house, just a mile inside the Perimeter Highway and a few hundred yards north of the Yellowhead Highway, by 1.30 p.m.

At first I thought no-one was home, but repeated loud calls brought forth a response from the upstairs bathroom, where Michael was getting ready to go to work. I unloaded the bike and set my tent, flysheet and sleeping back out to dry and air, and began to write up my journal. In spite of some threatening clouds and a still gusty wind the day had turned warm and sunny, and everything was soon dry. A neighbor, Mr. Houston, came over to talk and we exchanged cards and talked about budget traveling.

When Stan and Irene came home Irene prepared a lovely roast dinner, and set me up with a bed in the basement. I sat up late at night planning my way southward and writing up my journal on the computer.

July 30th (Wednesday): Winnipeg - 0 miles.

In the morning Stan and I ran errands. I took my sleeping bag to the local cleaners and laundered it in the oversize washer, and then I went to the barber shop. I left my change purse on a shelf near the dryers at the Laundromat. When I came to tip Leo, Stan's Ukrainian-Canadian barber, I fished in my pocket and realized it was gone. What was worse, I couldn't tip Leo. We went back to the Laundromat, and there was my purse, right where I had left it 2½ hours earlier– could this have happened back in a major US city? Anyway, the day was saved and Leon got his tip.

In the afternoon Stan drove me down to the center of Winnipeg and we walked around the Forks area, where the Assiniboine and Red rivers meet, the very heart of Winnipeg.
We climbed the observation tower at the Forks Market, an old warehouse complex that has been developed as a high end boutique shopping area. We also had a snack at a Korean restaurant in the complex, and went onto the point between the rivers, which has been landscaped and has a "walk through time" – a geological display as one walks up the ramp from the rivers edge – as well as an astronomically-based outdoor megasculpture. There is a marina and boat dock at the point, and one can take boat tours through downtown Winnipeg from there. Unfortunately, my camera battery chose the moment of our arrival at The Forks to die, and in such a tourist-oriented place there was no drugstore or camera shop at which to buy a new one, so I have no pictorial record.

After exploring The Forks we walked under the main railway line and across a major highway to the site of, and partially reconstructed ruins of, Upper Fort Garry.

This was a Hudson's Bay Company trading post established in 1822 and named after Nicholas Garry, deputy governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. It served as the centre of fur trade within the Red River Settlement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Garry).
"The Red River Colony (or Selkirk Settlement) was a colonization project set up by Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk in 1811 on 300,000 km² of land granted to him by the Hudson's Bay Company under what is referred to as the Selkirk Concession. The colony along the Red River of the North was never very successful, but changes during the development of Canada in the 1800s led to the colony forming the basis of what is today Manitoba.

Fig. 11: The Red River of the North watershed (shaded) & the route of Selkirk's Scots to Winnipeg (red)

Selkirk had become interested in the concept of settling the area after reading Alexander Mackenzie's 1801 book on his adventures in exploring what is today the west of Canada. At the time, social upheaval in Scotland due to the introduction of sheep farming and the ensuing brutal Highland and Lowland Clearances had left a number of Scots destitute. Selkirk was interested in giving them a chance at a better life in a new colony he called Assiniboia.

He then purchased a controlling interest in the Hudson's Bay Company and set up the land grant. His idea (apparently) was to gain firm control of the area in order to take control of the West from the company's bitter rivals, the Montreal-based North West Company. With a colony in place the Métis trappers supplying the North West's fur traders, the Nor'Westers, would be displaced, cutting them off from areas further west.

The land grant … covered portions of present day southern Manitoba, north-eastern North Dakota, north-western Minnesota, in addition to small parts of eastern Saskatchewan, north-western Ontario, and north-eastern South Dakota.

He sent out a small group of Scots in 1811 to the area, but they were forced to pause for the winter in York Factory. When they finally arrived in 1812 they built a fort, Fort Douglas, but by the time it was done the growing season was over and they hastily set about hunting buffalo for food.

When farming started the next spring, the results were less than expected and Selkirk had to ban anyone from taking food out of the colony. It is not clear if this was simply a way to ensure food for the colony, or a business move intended to cut off the Nor'Westers. Either way, the move touched off the Pemmican War. The Nor'Westers, who relied on pemmican supplied to them by local Métis, were so upset that they destroyed Fort Douglas and burned down all the buildings around it. The fort was later rebuilt and things settled down for a time.
Selkirk heard of the problems and sent out a new governor, Robert Semple, to take over. When he read a proclamation ordering the fighting to stop, the Battle of Seven Oaks broke out, Fort Douglas was destroyed for a second time, and the settlers were forced off their land. Selkirk then sent in a force of about 100 soldiers from the British Regiment de Meuron to enforce the peace and eventually become settlers themselves, while also capturing the North West outpost at Fort William, Ontario. This attempt worked, and peace was maintained. However it also left Selkirk almost bankrupt, and was one of the reasons the two companies were forced to merge in 1821, thus ending the problems for good (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_River_Settlement).

Unfortunately in 1826, a severe flood destroyed the original Fort Garry. It was rebuilt in 1835 by the HBC and named Upper Fort Garry to differentiate it from the "Lower Fort," or Lower Fort Garry, 32 km downriver, which had been established in 1831. Throughout the mid to late 1800s, Upper Fort Garry played a minor role in the actual trading of furs, but was central to the administration of the HBC and the surrounding settlement. The Council of Assiniboia, the administrative and judicial body of the Red River Settlement mainly run by HBC officials, met at Upper Fort Garry.

In 1869, the Hudson's Bay Company agreed to give up its monopoly in the North-West, including Upper Fort Garry. In late 1869 and early 1870, the fort was seized by Louis Riel and his Métis followers during the Red River Rebellion. After the Rebellion, the area around the fort continued to grow. In 1874, the city of Winnipeg was established and the name Fort Garry no was longer used. By the end of the 1880s, the majority of the fort had been demolished to straighten Main Street" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Garry).

A couple of blocks further west, and immediately south of the historic Fort Garry Hotel, which is in the style of the Park Plaza Hotel in New York (http://ghosts-hauntings.suite101.com/article.cfm/haunted_fort_garry_hotel) , is Fort Garry Place - a tall building with a revolving restaurant on the 30th floor. It was very difficult to find the elevator that went up to the Royal Crown Restaurant, but from this perch we were able to see all of Winnipeg – fortunately without any customers blocking the view, as the restaurant was not yet open for the evening.

We returned to The Forks by way of Union Station (now the VIA Rail Station). This impressive railway station, a joint effort of the Grand Trunk Pacific (GTPR) and Canadian Northern (CNoR) Railways, took three years to build and was opened in 1911. It was designed by New York architects Warren and Wetmore, designers of New York City’s Grand Central Station (built 1903-1913). (http://www.theforks.com/files/File/The%20Forks%20Walking%20Tour%202004.pdf).

The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway was a historical Canadian railway, and was constructed using loans provided by the Government of Canada. The company was formed in 1903 with a mandate to build west from Winnipeg, Manitoba to the Pacific coast at Prince Rupert, British Columbia. East of Winnipeg, the federal government would build the National Transcontinental Railway (NTR) across Northern Ontario and Quebec, crossing the St. Lawrence River at Quebec City and ending at Moncton, New Brunswick. The combined GTPR and NTR were to be operated as a single trans-continental railway, competing with the Canadian Northern and Canadian Pacific Railways (CPR). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Trunk_Pacific_Railway). The Canadian Northern Railway was a private system that initially grew through the purchase and consolidation of a series of branch lines in the Prairies, but eventually became a national network and went bankrupt in the process, in 1918. The GTPR and CNoR together form the basis of the Canadian National Railway, formed through nationalization in 1923.

I found the station a confusing place, with ticket counters and waiting rooms apparently randomly scattered around, much as they are at Washington, DC's, Union Station. I stopped at the ticket counter to inquire about fares to Churchill, on Hudson Bay. My original plan for this trip had included a visit to Churchill to see the Hudson Bay Company facilities and the famous polar bears. I found that the fare from Winnipeg is quite expensive, but if one can get oneself to Le Pas, the last road connection to the line, it is considerably cheaper. Part of the station is a railway museum, but we did not spend time there.

After retrieving Stan's car from the parking lot we took a brief tour of the historic Exchange District of Winnipeg: this area contains many neo-classical buildings from the nineteenth century, and is undergoing a revival with new clubs, restaurants and coffee houses. It also contains several theatres and cinemas. Then we crossed the railroad tracks and turned west alongside them – here Stan showed me the offices of the company he works for, and also many old houses that we would call "shotgun houses" in Texas – i.e. single storey wooden houses with a narrow street frontage but running back from the street a considerable distance. This is a poor area that is just beginning to undergo gentrification.

Finally we visited the stopped at the Polo Park Mall to buy batteries for my camera. When we got home Irene fixed another wonderful meal for us – roast turkey!

I again spent the evening writing up my reports.

July 31st (Thursday): Winnipeg - 0 miles.

I spent most of the day in front of the computer writing and e-mailing my blog, although Stan and I did get out to the local pub briefly to meet some of his friends.
There we saw the first television reports of a grizzly murder that had taken place at about 8:30 pm the previous evening on a Greyhound Bus on the TransCan west of Portage la Prairie – perhaps only 3 miles west of where the Yellowhead Highway joined it. A Chinese Canadian who boarded the bus in western Manitoba had suddenly and repeatedly stabbed a young man who was sleeping on the back seat of the bus, with no provocation. The bus driver had pulled over to the side of the road, and the passengers had fled: they then prevented the attacker from leaving the bus by holding the door shut while the driver disabled the bus.

These events felt a little close to me since not only had I just traveled the highway, but I had on several occasions in the Yukon and Northern BC thought about taking the bus back home. These occasions were when I realized that I was falling behind schedule, and on days when there were strong headwinds and lots of rain. Not every day on a long bicycle trip is a pleasant outing, and not every crazy old man on a bike is always full of derring do! At the end of the Alaska Highway, in Dawson Creek, I had even inquired at the bus station about the fare and the rules for transporting bicycles. These turned out to be onerous and expensive – i.e. disassemble the bike and box it, and pay about $80, just like the airlines – so it seemed cheaper and easier to keep on riding.

All along the Alaska and Yellowhead highways I had been able to measure my progress by the times when the eastbound and westbound buses passed me. Each day the eastbound bus passed me about an hour and a half later than the day before, and the westbound bus about an hour earlier than the day before. Generally I would wave at the bus driver, under the assumption that most days it would be the same driver, at least until I passed through a large town: often the bus driver would give me a friendly toot back.

After the passengers left the bus and locked the attacker in it they saw him carry the severed head of his victim to the front of the bus and drop it: he apparently also ate some of the flesh of his victim. After the police arrived there was a stand-off for some hours, and then at 1:30 am the attacker tried to escape from the bus by breaking a window, and was arrested.

Life at 5K BHD

noreply@blogger.com (John Berry) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:09:00 +0000

December 16th, 2008: Task Force on Street Closures meeting

Last night I attended a meeting of Austin's Task Force on Street Closures. This body was created because of a rising volume of complaints from Churches and residents about the number of street closures due to running events, parades, art events and so on. I went down there as a result of an appeal for more runners to come forward with their point of view: this was the last meeting of the panel before the results were to be presented to Austin City Council. I had a prepared statement based on the minutes of the previous 5 meetings, but on reading the handouts we were given found that previous discussions and resolutions of the panel had made what I had to say was almost irrelevant - embarrassingly so.

However, I found the proceedings extremely interesting and rather disconcerting. The interesting part was the very reasonable way in which the discussions proceeded, with no heated arguments. In fact, relations among the panel members, even those who represented very different interests, were surprisingly friendly. This was not at all the atmosphere in which national partisan politics proceeds, nor the atmosphere of the blogosphere. The most disconcerting part of what I heard was that there was no recognition of the "rights of the Commons": the underlying assumption of all discussion was that private property rights and the automobile reigned supreme. The whole purpose of discussion seemed to be "what can we do to mollify the property owners along the routes of events so that they will not get together and shut down ALL events in downtown Austin." It seemed to be assumed that, if conflicts came to a head, the enjoyment of Austin's streets by up to 30,000 runners at a time would count as nothing against the complaints of a few scores of property owners. Even the representatives of the runners seemed to have accepted this proposition at face value. The next most disconcerting part was that the rights of car owners to drive unimpeded on Saturdays, Sundays and Holidays across central Austin on 4 East-West corridors (15th, 11th, 5/6th, Cesar Chavez and Oltorf Streets) as well as 2 North-South corridors was accepted without question.

Obviously, there are issues of courtesy involved: property owners should be informed well in advance of street closures that will affect them, and the number of property owners affected needs to be minimized. I can sympathize with home-owners who are "trapped" in their houses or on their blocks by an event. But, in fact, they are generally only "trapped" if they want to drive out of their driveway by car. It does not seem too much to ask that, in order to benefit a few thousand people, a score or so of people be asked to park their car on a neighboring street and walk to it if they want to go somewhere during the period of a couple of hours that their street might be closed for an event. What I saw was a case of the "Tragedy of the Commons" - if we the people want to use a public street in such a way that it inconveniences the people who live or have businesses there, then they win and we lose because no-one is prepared to stick their neck out and demand that the public have full use of the public thoroughfare. It is the same with the cross-town routes: if you are in a car you are assumed to have the right to go anywhere you want - if you are not in a car you have to defer to the car drivers under all circumstances.

A further source of concern to me was that no-one knows how many running events are held in central Austin each year. The police contingent present suggested that there were 100 events per year, another list in circulation gave 53, and a third list gave 23. One would have thought that by this late stage there would have been a serious effort to arrive at an exact measure of the impact. Similarly, it appeared that there was no way to measure the financial impact on the city, either in terms of expenditure and revenue to the city government, or in terms of money spent by event participants with local businesses. The police did not even know whether the rate charged event organizers for their services by the city actually covered the cost to the city of providing police services. If the police are correct in their estimates of the number of events per year in downtown Austin, it would suggest that the main users of downtown streets on weekends are athletic events, and therefore everything in downtown Austin should be geared toward facilitating their growth and success.

In fact, simple observation of Congress Avenue on weekends suggests that there are only two types of users: event participants (and people training for future events), and sightseers. This would suggest that Congress Avenue (and possibly 6th Street as well) should be closed to vehicular traffic (except perhaps, for the 'Dillo) on ALL weekends and Holidays. Austin's Congress Avenue is, in fact, one of the prime public spaces in North America. In terms of beauty it is almost a more urban version of Washington's Mall, or a narrower version of Paris' Champs Elysees. There are few to no retail businesses on Congress Avenue that depend on vehicular traffic, and there are no garage entrances (thank goodness!) on the Avenue, whereas there is plenty of parking just off the Avenue. Closing Congress Avenue to weekend traffic would allow it to function as the public Heart of Texas - the host to all large functions of civic life. It could be used for many more parades, runs and walks, as well as for art shows, concerts, outdoor dining, street performances and even circuses.

It is ironic that Austin's efforts to revitalize downtown have led to conflicts between the new businesses and residents and the special events which, in large part, have brought the life to downtown Austin that has made it attractive to residents and new businesses. This may be illustrated by the case of the company which owns five of the largest buildings in downtown Austin and sent a representative to three of the last five Task Force meetings to complain about lack of access to its buildings on weekends: it uses their proximity to the Hike and Bike Trail as a major attraction in its advertising to prospective tenants! However, none of these buildings, though they are architecturally attractive, have the kinds of ground-floor retail facilities that would add to the liveliness and attractiveness of downtown Austin. They are just large warehouses for office workers.

Dec. 27th, 2008: An adventure on our training walk

This morning we went for an informal nine mile training walk with Austin Fit. About 3 miles into the walk, as I was jogging northward down South 5th St, at about the point it turns into Dawson St., a southbound car passed me with the passenger door held open by a middle-aged blonde lady. Immediately after passing me the car turned left. I was still puzzling over the possible reasons for someone to hold a car door open, and had onlyt gone about twenty paces, when a voiced behind me yelled, "Sir! Help!", and there was the lady running down the stret after me.

She said that the driver of the car had been trying to sexually assault her: I was the first person she had seen since the incident began, and she had jumped out of the car. She was about 55 years old and carrying a large handbag in one hand and a metal box with a key dangling from its handle, which was wrapped which a brightly-colored handkerchief, in the other. Her burdens were obviously not light, and I offered to help her carry them, so she gave me the box, which had the weight and heft, as well as the appearance, of a cashbox.

We continued to walk north on S. 5th/Dawson, and the lady, whose name was Janet, told me that she needed to get to a medical appointment on Cesar Chavez Street a few blocks east of I-35 by 8:30 a.m. It was now about 7:45 a.m. and it was clear that she would be late unless I could drive her part of the way, since we had at least a mile to walk to our car. Fortunately, she was a pretty good walker, and also fortunately, Ingrid is a very fast walker, since she had the car keys. By the time we got to Barton Springs Drive, Ingrid and Anita, our Dutch walker friend, were close behind us. I gave Ingrid a brief explanation and took the car keys, and we set off along Barton Springs toward the DoT parking lot on Riverside east of Congress.

Janet told me that she lived near Westgate and Manchaca Roads, and that she and her sister were looking after their mother, who had lung cancer and was on oxygen about 20 hours a day, round the clock. Her sister had relieved her and driven her to the bus stop in front of Crockett High School, but they were two minutes late for the bus and her sister could not take the time to take her all the way to her appointment. When the bus didn't come, Janet assumed she had missed it and started to walk. She was offered a lift by a man about 30, and accepted as he said he was going past her destination. However, he had left the route and driven into the Bouldin neighborhood, and then started to make advances, which was when Janet had seen me.

We were at our car by about 8:10 a.m, and by 8:20 I had driven her to Comal between 1st and 2nd Streets, where she asked to be dropped, and walked off eastward along 2nd St. By 8:30 a.m. I had parked the car and resumed my walk - this time starting at the end and going "backwards" so that I would pass Ingrid and the other walkers and could explain what had happened. I passed Ingrid and Anita near 17th St., and Mary and ____ near 20th St., so was able to reach the designated turning point at 21st and get almost my whole 9m miles in.

Thursday, Jan. 1st, 2009: Hot Polar Bears and Hotter Appelflappen

You can't beat life in Austin! After a nice leisurely breakfast we went down to Barton Springs Pool to meet some friends for the Polar Bear Swim. The weather was warm but a bit raw, but the pool was crowded.

For those who don't know Austin, Barton Springs is one of the largest natural springs in the USA and a major outflow point for the Edwards aquifer. It is about one mile southwest of downtown Austin, in Zilker Park, which is a very large park. In the nineteenth century Barton Creek was dammed to make the pool, which is over an eighth of a mile long. The springs well up into it about two-thirds of the way up the pool from the dam: one can dive down into the springs, which are inhabited by large dark brown fish (bass, I think). Ingrid swam about 1/4 mile and I swam about 3/4 mile (three laps). The pool was quite crowded, and the water felt warmer than that at Deep Eddy, our usual swimming pool.

Our friends joined us at home for coffee and mulled cider, as well as Christmas cake and cookies, and by the time they left the neighborhood apfelflappen party had begun.

Every year one of the neighboring families cooks up tons of apple fritters (they told me they peeled and sliced 100 apples for this year's event) and invite the neighborhood. They are of Dutch extraction, hence the name appelflappen for the fritters, which are apprently a Dutch New Year tradition. The fritters come out of the deep fryers steaming hot, and are dribbled with cinnamon-laced confectioner's sugar before ewating. Heaven!

Of course all the neighborhood children are there, and this family has the perfect backyard for them, with some playground equipment but, more importantly, a climbable limestone cliff. Usually about 200 people drift through in the space of three or four hours - it is a wonderful opportunity to get to know all the neighbors - one of several such opportunities during the year.

Saturday, Jan. 3rd, 2009: 19 mile walk/run, and Barton Springs again!

Today started off cool but very humid, threatening rain. However, by 9.00 a.m. the sun had come out, the temperature was beginning to rise, and the humidity had decreased. Our training route followed the Marathon course down into south Austin, then back to Town Lake and along the hike and bike trail to Deep Eddy and the Tom Miller Dam. As I jogged along by the Rowing Dock on Town Lake Bob Murphy, a close neighbor, passed me with his kayak in the back of his truck. He had just finished a two hour paddle on the lake. We then ran up Exposition and Bull Creek to Hancock, and back down Shoal Creek and Guadelupe to the Congress Avenue Bridge and home base. I did it in 4:20, and Ingrid came in with Anita at 4:50. The remaining walkers arrived at 5:25, whereupon Ingrid and I went for brunch at Whole Foods, and then for a swim.

Whole Foods at 6th St is a real town meeting place on Saturdays. We usually see several people we know among the crowds shopping for breakfast food and eating either on one of the outside terraces or upstairs. We had a delightful meal of fruit salad and vegetarian Satay, along with our usual mocha coffee.

Deep Eddy was crowded, so we went to Barton Springs again: this was fairly crowded, but idyllic in the sunshine and 80 deg. F temperatue. One could see the bottom of the pool in great detail, and watch the fish swimming beneath you. I was very stiff from the run, but 2 laps (1/2 mile) in the pool worked it out of my joints and muscles.

Unfortunately, on Sunday a cold front came through and dropped the temperature to 40 deg.F. On Monday morning we had long periods of drizzle, very badly needed.

Christmas Letters

noreply@blogger.com (John Berry) — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 00:03:00 +0000

5000 Beverly Hills Dr.,
AUSTIN, TX 78731, USA

December, 2008

Dear Friends,

We are writing this letter a week after the US Presidential Elections, which we all hope mark the dawn of a new day in which America regains the trust and confidence of the rest of the world, returns to the rule of law, and begins to deal with the major issues that face us all, such as climatic change and increasing energy costs. But the ship of state here has, by design, huge momentum, and is thus very slow to change course: so those of you abroad please have patience.

Ingrid and I have had a good year: Ingrid retired in August and now intends to devote herself solely to research. In practice that has meant so far that she is sorting through the giant pile of impedimenta (mostly books and papers) that came home from her office.
She spent the month of September in Europe, and actually was able to fulfill a long-held dream by visiting Malta in connection with a conference. While she was in Sweden she walked the marathon at the European Masters' games, held in Malmö, and won her age group. She got a nice little medal for this! She also had an opportunity to visit with friends and family in Sweden, and long-time friends in Italy on a whirlwind trip to Murlo, Castiglion Fiorentino, and Rome.

Both of us have run or walked several races during the year: the Austin Marathon, Capitol 10K, Texas Round-Up, Keep Austin Weird 10K, the Fila Relays (Ingrid's team won their division), the IBM UpTown Classic, and the Run for the Water 10-miler (English miles, NOT Swedish ones!!). This latter follows a very pretty course through the Tarrytown neighborhood of Austin and then along the cliffed banks of Lake Austin. It is organized by Gilbert Tuhabonye, a Burundian champion runner who was slashed and burned and left for dead in the genocide there, but who survived and has settled in Austin where we runs a training program. Money raised in the race goes to drill wells in Burundi. Our performances are improving as we age, rather like red wine or blue cheese!

At this time of the year we swim 3 to 4 times a week in Deep Eddy Pool, which is a weird swimming pool, as befits Austin (One of Austin's slogans is "Keep Austin Weird"). It is down by the lake and is spring fed, and is therefore not chlorinated. It is not 25 yards or 25 m long, but 100 feet. It consists of two pools separated by a wall: when they empty the shallower of the two during the winter artesian water can be seen fountaining from every defect in the concrete base. It is not named after a philosopher or idiot savant who hung about the area in the early days of Austin and committed suicide there by diving off the 15m board into an empty pool, so that his ghost may be heard in the rustling of the cottonwoods, even though that is a romantic conceit. It is named after a deep pool in the bed of the Colorado River, which was generally nearly dry in summer time before the chain of dams were built in the 1930s to 1950s. The Swedish settler who owned the land turned the natural pool into a swimming pool. He was bought out by a German named Eilers, who turned the area into a tropical resort complete with a funfare, water slides and a zoo – I believe a swimming elephant was a feature of the latter. In 1898 the city bought the facility from Eilers, and within a couple of months the whole thing was destroyed in a massive flood. This led to a mindset of total opposition to any kind of Government getting involved in any kind of business deal, because government always loses the taxpayers' shirts. This opposition lasted until three months before the end of the conservative G.W.Bush administration, which decided to take over the banking industry and lost the taxpayers' shirts.

John was ready to swim the Capitol of Texas 2K in Town Lake in April when he was found to have an irregular heart beat and was catheterized. Nothing bad was found, so John carried out his plan to tour Alaska by bicycle and then ride back to Austin. He had a wonderful time, in spite of some frost damage to his hands, and was able to spend some time with brother Ted in Bethel and with old college friend Milton Wiltse in Fairbanks. He rode the Inland Waterway ferries from Seattle to Skagway, and the narrow-gauge White Pass and Yukon train from Skagway to the Canadian border. Then he rode to Fairbanks, flew to Prudhoe Bay and Barrow, and took the Alaska Railroad train to Anchorage, from where he flew to Bethel to visit Ted. He then rode to Homer and briefly visited Kodiak Island. After taking a bus and ferry to Valdez he rode home via Chicken, AK, Dawson City and Whitehorse, YT, and Dawson Creek, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg and Lincoln, NE. Total distance cycled 5,018 miles, averaging 74 miles per day. You can reach John's blog through www.johnlberry.com/blog/blog.html.

Dana has been out on the West Coast, but has recently moved back to Baytown, near Houston in Texas. She continues to work in sales and seems to be doing well. Robert has left home and is sharing a house with a friend. He is going to Austin Community College and still working in construction, which is slow but not stopped in Austin. He still owns his 1970 Chevy Nova, which has done more harm to his wallet than has Wall Street's infatuation with pooled mortgages to the US Treasury. Barkley, our squatty black mutt, is now gray, blind, diabetic and has a heart murmur, but that doesn't stop him walking a mile a day or so and occasionally trying to steal food from the kitchen counter. He's the only dog I know who will crash into a parked car at full tilt!

With our very best wishes for a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, God Jul och Gott Nytt År, and Happy Holidays!

From John and Ingrid

Bicycle Alaska 2008: Introduction

noreply@blogger.com (John Berry) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:13:00 +0000

BICYCLE ALASKA, 2008

by

John Berry

INTRODUCTION:

There are always many reasons why one attempts a strenuous journey or any other activity that taxes one's physical or mental abilities. In the extreme it can be to prove that the thing is possible: more often it is merely to prove that you yourself can do it. It can be to create space away from people and mundane worries to meet a spiritual need. It can be because you really enjoy the activity, or because one needs to live "on the edge". It may be that you have always wanted to go to a place, or that there are people you want to visit there, and travel by air seems to spoil the point of a journey, which is largely in the going. The project in question may also be part of a larger, longer term, project. In the case of a long bicycle tour, it may also be that you want to save money, though I think that touring by bicycle is not really cheaper than doing the same journey by car. What you save in gasoline you spend on huge meals and for accommodation.

All these reasons apply to my tour of Alaska and the Yukon this summer: my brother Ted lives in Alaska, as does my best friend in the Geology program at the University of Pennsylvania, Milt Wiltse. Ever since I passed through the State on my way to Ice Island T-3 in 1963 I have wanted to see more of Alaska, and ever since I read the poems of Robert Service and "The call of the Wild" by Jack London I have wanted to see what the Yukon really looked like. Also, this is the second leg of my bicycle journey across the entire accessible continent of North America.

Therefore I prefer to think of this summer's adventure not as a long bicycle tour, but as a tour of Alaska and the Yukon by the best means available, including aeroplanes and the Alaska Marine Highway (ferries), as well as standard gauge and narrow-gauge railway lines, followed by a bicycle journey home. Incidentally, during the latter I crossed the only two Canadian provinces that I had not previously traveled in, as well as briefly visiting the only American state that I had not yet seen – North Dakota. An overview of my route is shown on the map below

There are seven installments in this account. At the moment (15 Sept, 2008), Sections 3 and 7 have no content. Section 3 will detail my visits to Barrow and Bethel by air, as well as the train trip from Fairbanks to Anchorage, and Section 7 covers the trip southwards from Winnipeg to Austin.

I have tried to write for both my friends at home and for my fellow cyclists. For the accounts of some of the latter see:

http://members.tripod.com/gohike/bikeak.html: describes a trip made by Dave Brock in 1987.
http://crl.ucsd.edu/~buff/alaska/: photos by as guy called Bob from a supported 1998 trip.
http://alaskabikeblog.blogspot.com/: blog by Tim, a year-round Anchorage biker. Lots of links.
http://www.cyclingaroundtheworld.nl/alaska/ie_alaska.htm this is an information site with links to many others.

For this reason I do not describe just the road and the events of the road, but also give details about the things that interested me: the geology, industry, history, the people that I met, and as much about the vegetation as I am competent to write. Most of the research for this I have done on the web.

This is a first draft, and one section is still more-or-less exactly as I sent it by e-mail. The other sections have been expanded on and cleaned up. I am sure that some passages will be tedious to many people, and that I will sound by turns pompous and wimpy, depending on whether I am spouting science or complaining about the weather. However, I hope that my readers will get a feel for what it is like to cross a continent by bicycle, and perhaps also a feel for the variety of landscapes and people along the way.

Figure 1: My bicycle journeys across North America. 2008 trip in red.

Compared with my trip north from Texas to Labrador four years ago through the eastern part of the continent, this trip involved more mountainous terrain and was shorter (5,000 miles vs 6,300 miles) and more hurried (105 days vs 154 days). On that trip my average daily ride was 63 miles; on this trip it was 74 miles, representing an additional hour of actual pedaling each day. On the last trip I rode every inch of the way, even though I embroidered the main thread with some loops in hired cars when the weather was unpleasant. During this trip I accepted or cadged several lifts for a variety of reasons: my health (I am now 67 years old and suffer from Atrial Fibrillation), mechanical problems with the bicycle, or dangerous road conditions. All of these were enhanced by the fact that I had a fairly tight deadline, so that waiting out an episode of "A. Fib." or waiting for bicycle parts did not seem like smart options. However, on this trip I made no loops by car but did use trains for three very pleasant stages in Alaska. Both journeys involved extensive voyages by ferry, because along the intricate coastlines at both glaciated extremities of the continent there are many communities and places of interest on peninsulas and islands that can only be reached by sea. These ferry trips were some of the best parts of each trip, in terms of the scenery, the wildlife seen, and the fun and interesting people I met.

The statistics of this summer's trip are summarized in the table below:
.......................................................Miles .....Kilometers

Total Distance Ridden ...............5018 .......8030
Days on Bicycle ...............................68
Average Daily Mileage ...................74 ...........118
Longest Day's Ride (July 25th) ..113 ...........181

Total Nights ..........................Number .........% of total
.....Under Canvas ......................38................. 36%
.....Hotels/Motels .....................36................. 34%
.....In Hostels............................. 16................. 15%
.....With friends and relatives. 15 .................14%

Tires and Parts Replaced: Number

Number of Punctures: ................3
No. of tires replaced:.................. 3
Other parts replaced: Rear Wheel
.........................................Front derailleur

Bicycle Alaska 2008: Instalment 5

noreply@blogger.com (John Berry) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:05:00 +0000

BICYCLE ALASKA, 2008

by

John Berry

Instalment 5: Dawson Creek, BC to Saskatoon, SK.

Hello All: As several people pointed out, the last message, from Battleford, SK, was empty. This was because I goofed and had no time to correct the goof. Here is the continuation of my trip from Dawson Creek to Saskatoon. I will bring you up to date on theSaskatoon-Winnipeg leg later. John
______________________________________________

This instalment of my blog has been cursed - I am in Winnipeg now at my friend Stan Korowski's house, and we just had a power outage that destroyed an hour's work. The section below with short lines is the part that I failed to finish in Battleford ten days ago. The final part of the message brings the story up to date from the time I left BC.

Well, I am totally incompetent today, and can only blame exhaustion. The last episode was sent from Dawson Creek, BC, on completion of the Alaska Highway. This instalment gets me to Battleford, Saskatchewan, a very historic town in the heart of the Canadian Prairie. Relative to my adventures in Alaska, the Yukon, and B.C., this has been an uneventful section, marked more by strenuous exertion against headwinds and encounters with giant trucks than by tough hills, bears and bugs. Leaving Dawson Creek I got caught in yet another heavy shower on very muddy roads at Pouce Coupe (the Cut-down Flea??), resulting in a garishly filthy appearance for the rest of the day. However, I did try to take a photograph of the beautiful, rolling Peace River country and its patchwork of bright yellow Canola and green hay and wheat, with a really dramatic sky above it. Just south of here was a little Memorial Park and campground for the Sudeten Pioneers, but it contained no explanation of the who's and why's of their migration. After this park the last 10 miles of road in BC were truly dangerous: the riding shoulder was useless as it was covered with gravel, so one had to ride on the narrow, 2-lane road itself. This was populated by a constant stream of heavy oilfield equipment on 30-wheeler trucks, and large RV's. At the Alberta border I met two young men taking a break on their way up from Pittsburgh, PA, to Anchorage. They had been battling headwinds across most of the continent.

On leaving them I noticed that the number of "floaters" blurring my vision seemed larger than usual, and some seemed suspiciously organized, reminding me of the pattern that appeared when my retinas tore. On reaching the little Alberta town of Hythe, drenched in yet another rainstorm, I enquired about seeing a doctor. It turned out that there was a "Surgery" of sorts (i.e. the doctor was in from 8.00-10.00 pm) down the road in Beaverlodge. However, unlike the good old days, I would have to pay an Emergency Room fee of $369 to see him, and then his fee: all would have to be in cash or credit card, and no insurance could be filed. I therefore evaluated the new floaters and decided that the risk that they were related to a retinal tear was small enough that a doctor's visit could wait until I got to the next big town, Grande Prairie (population 39,000 and growing rapidly). So I spent the night in the nice campground at Beaverlodge, and in the morning rode the 30 miles in to Grande Prairie, where I spent too long in their excellent museum before going to the eye doctor's. This was unlike anything I had ever seen before - huge, with about 8 doctors and a very large opticians' area.

The doctor agreed with me that there was no new retinal tear, but did tell me that new floaters could result from vibration or shaking of the head. So it was significant that I noticed them after riding the roughest ten miles of highway on the whole trip – 10 miles marked by having to repeatedly cross and re-cross the rumble strip. I walked out of the doctor's office into bright sunshine with my eyes dilated and the usual plastic excuse for emergency sunglasses. After having a meal at A&W, as in the root beer, but there is a very extensive chain of restaurants with this name in Canada, I set off eastwards on a quiet highway. However, a thunderstorm appeared to my right and gradually closed in on me, until I was forced by it, and the lack of accomodations for many more miles, to stop at Bezanson, where I ate dinner at the local diner and rigged a camp-site in the local baseball dugout.

The next morning I tried to adjust my very badly out-of-whack front derailleur. All of a sudden there was a loud report, and the thing went slack – an internal spring had broken. I decided to hitch a lift into Valleyview, the next town, where people said there was a bike shop, Robb's Sports. A trucker, Willie, offered to take me in. He was hauling two trailers of molten sulfur in a typical western Canada 30-wheeler. We strapped the bike to one side of his truck, and off we went. Willie was very talkative, and was a Mennonite from the community at High Level, off to the north. He had been married at 18 to a 17-year-old girl, and they had 4 kids. He had a 7th grade education, and the family spoke Plattdeutsch at home, as did the rest of the community. I had seen such a family in the doctor's office the previous day, only that family had had 8 children. Willie was 27, his father 49, and his grandfather 70. Willie regarded the modern Mennonites as being too concerned with material possessions, but admitted that he was as much enmeshed in the material world as anyone. In Valleyview he dropped me off, but Robb had no suitable parts, so we just removed the broken gear shift and I set off again.Fortunately, there were very few steep hills between Valleyview and Edmonton, so I did fine without it. However, this road, Alberta 43, the continuation of the Alaska Highway, was very busy with 30-wheeler trucks. I estimated that about three-quarters of these were related to the oil industry - rigs, tanks, tankers, etc. There were also a fairly large number of heavily loaded logging trucks near Whitecourt. The noise and sudden gusts of wind were offset by the high quality of the Alberta roads and their riding shoulders.

The night of July 17th I spent at a campground in Meyerthorpe, planning to have breakfast the next day in San Gado, a small town 10 miles away. San Gado turned out to be off the highway and I could see no restaurant from the road, so I kept going. There was a little town marked every 10 miles on the map, and I was getting close to Edmonton, so I felt sure I would soon have a good breakfast. However, the next town, Cherhill, had no restaurant, and neither did the next, and by the time I found a restaurant attached to the Esso station at Gunn, I had gone 40 miles and was beginning to weaken. While I was eating in Gunn a storm that I had been trying to outrun broke upon us, and I was stuck there for two and a half hours. During that time I watched one of the few near-violent confrontations that I have seen in Canada. A lady who owned a restaurant in downtown Gunn, which, as is typical in western Canada, is a kilometer off the main road, came to stridently complain that the owners of the restaurant I was in had destroyed her advertising sign. This the Korean owner of "my" restaurant equally loudly denied, and pointed out that her sign had been on his property, anyway, and she had no right to advertise a competing business on his property. Our cook got involved and there were threats and counterthreats.

When the storm cleared I took a diversion around Lac Ste. Anne and through the resort community of Alberta Beach, where the lakeshore was lined with very swish summer "cottages".I came out on the main TransCanada Highway, and by evening was in Edmonton. It turned out that even the Motel 6 cost $145 per night, so I called Ingrid and asked her to go on line and find the cheapest hotel in the central area and book it for me through Travelocity. This she did, but due to the incompetence of a newly-hired desk clerk and the delay in Travelocity bookings showing up in the hotel's system, not only was the first room I was assigned un-cleaned from the previous occupant, but we have been charged twice! Everywhere in Alberta and western Saskatchewan waitresses and store clerks would answer my questions about prices or menu items with "I don't know, I have only been on the job two (or one or three) days." I eventually discovered that the natural resources boom has created such a job shortage that employers are offering even unskilled workers bonuses to sign up. This has resulted in employees hopping from job to job, collecting sign-up bonuses but never working at any one place for more than a few days. Hotel prices are vastly inflated because oil rig crews get a $180/day cost-of-living allowance, and the hoteliers have figured out that it costs them about $40 to eat. The other $140 is available to spend on a room. The smart roughnecks are camping out in tents or secondhand trailers in municipal campgrounds for $5-$10 per night. Roughnecks earn $350 for an 8 hour shift, with typically several hours of 1 1/2 or double time overtime, so they are taking home up to $100,000 per year. Alberta alone has 300,000 jobs going begging for lack of people to do them.

I was going to spend Saturday, July 19th, as a rest day in Edmonton to tour the city, but in the event I just found my way across the High Level Bridge, a spectacular crossing of the Athabasca River, which is incised several hundred feet in a gorge, to Red Bicycle, who replaced my front derailleur. I then left the city via Broadway and 82nd Avenue, a very "hip" shopping street, rather than pay for another expensive night in a hotel. At the little town of Tofield a rainstorm caught me, so I went into the library to check on my e-mail. While there I made enquiries about Lutheran Churches in the area and was told by a young lady who had been married in it that there was a very nice one in the town of Viking. When the storm was over the wind had become a headwind (which lasted the next three days, until I reached Battleford, in Saskatchewan: this was a tough 200 miles). After a long slog I stopped at the hotel in the town of Holden for dinner, and found that the cook there was a young and rather pretty lady from Newmarket, in Suffolk, England, a few miles from where I grew up.

I then went to the municipal campground, where there only two RV's. I called Ingrid, but the reception was bad and I had to walk around the site to try to find a "sweet spot", and was near one of the RV's while telling her that I intended to go to the Lutheran Church in the very Scandinavian-sounding town of Viking the next day. When I finished the couple from the RV asked why I was going to a Lutheran Church, and I explained Ingrid's background. The man then asked me where I was from, and mentioned that he had spent his very early life in the Isle of Man. He had only been back once, and was from the south of the island, and therefore did not know the area around Ramsey, where I had spent my summer holidays, or the Dhooar School, which I attended for a year back in 1947.

He also told me that he was a glass technologist, and I mentioned that I had had some glass-blowing equipment that belonged to my father. He then asked my father's name, and when I told him his eyes lit up and he started to tell me chapter and verse about what my father had done when he worked at Pilkington's (owners of Pittsburgh Plate Glass) from 1936-1942, there. I knew that my dad had perfected the float glass process that enables the modern style of glass-curtain walled office building, but this man, John Arniel, told me that he was also responsible for some of the earlier steps in the development of this process as well, in addition to the development of laminated glass and toughened glass. He told me that he had taught glass technology and that my Dad's achievements were all part of the historical introduction to the first year course, and that Pilkington's had put out a huge history of glass that detailed them. When I then mentioned that he had left Pilkington's to work on the Jet engine project in Rugby, he not only told me that Dad was responsible for the design of the Spitfire windshield, but that he had worked on ceramic turbine blades for the jet at Lodge Plugs, which I did not know. He then told me that Dad had been heavily involved with the development of new alloys for Naval propeller shafts when he was at Manganese Bronze in Ipswich. I knew that Dad had a Royal Navy underwater test facility off Felixstowe where alloy rods were placed under huge stress to see when and how they would fail, but had not known that it was specifically directed at material for prop shafts. All in all, this conversation left me very shaken: to have a chance-met complete stranger tell me reams of stuff about my own father that I did not know, and to have it mesh so nicely with what I did know, was spooky enough: but to realize that Dad was a much more important scientist (or technologist) than even his own Obituarist, Ray Patterson, knew, was even more spooky. Ray knew only about Dad's work at Manganese Bronze: Dad must have left his work at Lodge Plugs and Pilkington's so completely behind that it had never even occurred to Ray to look it up. Church at Viking was very nice, and I was treated to lunch afterwards by Don and Valerie Erickson.

That night I stopped at Irma for dinner, and went in the bar for a beer. One fellow was wearing a "Canada, eh?" T-Shirt, and I mentioned that I would like to buy one like it for a souvenir. He ripped it off his back and insisted on giving it to me. Another person insisted on paying for my meal, and Morley Muldoon invited me to stay the night at his place. Unfortunately, the headwind meant that I could not reach Morley's place before nightfall, so I spent the night in the municipal campground at Fabyan.The next night, Monday, I spent in the hotel at the little town of Marsden after a very hot day (33 deg C). There I was able to dry out the fly to my tent, which was soaked by dew at Fabyan, and to avail myself of the very reasonably-priced laundry service offered by the hotel - the Laundromat in the larger town of Wainwright, near Fabyan, had been closed because their parking lot was being repaved. While eating lunch at Wainwright I met the cast members of the Canadiana Musical Theatre Company, from Vancouver. They had been putting on a musical in Wainwright, a railroad town, about the history of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

I ate dinner at the Chinese restaurant in Marsden, but could not stomach the Ginger Beef, which was dried out and tough, and tasted as if it had been left out for two or three days. The owner got very upset at me for sending it back, but did not charge me. Dale Wayne, at the hotel, told me that all the local farmers went to this same restaurant for coffee in the morning. One of them had the key and opened it up, and coffee was on the honor system. So in the morning I joined them in spite of the ginger beef. I stopped for breakfast at Neilburg, the next town, by which time their restaurant was officially open and serving food. Otherwise it looked the same as, and had the same kinds of customers as, the one in Marsden.

From there it was a long haul against the wind to Cut Knife, scene of a defeat of the Mounties by Poundmaker's Indian forces. The previous night Kevin Murphy had told me there was a very nice store just before Cut Knife, Wilbert's. This was rare in Canada: a store along the road and not in any settlement. I stopped there, and the proprietress, JoAnne, was indeed a very gracious host for lunch. It turned out that Kevin had been past twice already during the morning to let her know that I was coming and to find out whether I had been there! From Cut Knife it was a long hot slog across somewhat more hilly country to Battleford. I expected the last part of the ride to be more with the wind, because the road turned south. But the tricky wind also turned south, and the last part of the ride into Battleford was, if anything, more tiring. I checked into the Motel there and went to the library where I had such a terrible time trying to do my blog. On Tuesday morning I went to the local museum: Battleford had been one of the most important early settlements in Saskatchewan, and capital of the NW Territories for a time. The Mounties had a major early post at Fort Battleford. So the museum was interesting. I then went to the Fort, where a very bad storm caught me and the rest of my group of tourists. The bicycle was parked on the "wrong" side of the Park HQ so the driving rain soaked it thoroughly, and I was soaked as well, but lunch back in town helped that. At 2 p.m. I set out for Saskatoon, with a strong favorable NW wind, and covered the 87 miles in 5 hours. At Saskatoon hotels were also horrendously expensive (Motel 6 = $105), so I rode back a kilometer and stayed at a commercial campground. Even this cost $24.50, for which I got a patch of grass between two RV sites, and not even a picnic table. A partially-serviced RV site was $26.00, so I wondered aloud what I was actually paying for, which was a mistake.

At Saskatoon I stopped by a bicycle shop to get the new derailleur re-adjusted, had a very nice cup of coffee at a sidewalk coffee shop while I read the tourist information, and visited the Anglican cathedral and the Ukrainian Museum. On leaving the Museum I was stopped by a person who wanted to know all about my trip. This turned out to be Kim Fehr, a member of the Saskatoon Police Force, who had done a transcontinental bike trip in his youth and was thinking of doing another one in the next year or so with his wife. I ate lunch at Alexander's, on the University campus, where I had a meal with more nutritional value than the usual fare of hamburger and fries, and continued on my way. In trying to get out of the city while avoiding main roads I got into a suburb where the streets were not rectilinear, and had to stop a passing cyclist to ask directions. This person, Doug Gilmore, volunteered to lead me to the Yellowhead Highway. He left me and I started off towards Clavet. I was nearly there when a little white car came past and stopped. It was Doug Gilmore and his wife Janelle, who wanted to make sure that I knew about Saskatoon berries and had brought me a present of a pound or so of them. They showed me a piece of a bush so that I would be able to identify and pick them in the wild, for they are now in season. I had seen signs offering "U-pick berries" or "U-Pick Saskatoons", but had assumed that these would be raspberries, etc., as Doug and Janelle had rightly surmised that I would if I were not specifically clued in. The blueberry-like berries are, in fact, delicious.There is more to tell between Saskatoon and Winnipeg, but I will end here because this is already long and time is a-flying, and I have described some of the most wonderful experiences that have happened so far on the trip.

Bicycle Alaska 2008: Instalment 4

noreply@blogger.com (John Berry) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:00:00 +0000

BICYCLE ALASKA, 2008

by

John Berry

Instalment 4: Fairbanks, AK, to Dawson Creek, BC

Dear Friends and Family: This will be very brief. The last messages were sent out while I was staying with my brother Ted and his wife Pam in Bethel, Alaska. We had a wonderful time together for a week, and then I flew back to Anchorage and rode down the Kenai Peninsula to the very end, at Homer. I spent one night freezing on top of a pass, at an abandoned state campground 1 mile short of the real one. Then had two flat tyres the next day. I had to hitch- hike one 20-mile section of the road as there was very heavy holiday traffic and no shoulders on a two-lane winding road. At Soldotna I heard Hobo Joe, the reigning monarch ofAlaskan Country music, perform, and at Ninilchik I attended Saturday evening service at a beautiful Russian Orthodox Church. The Priest and most of the confgregatiuon were Native Americans. From Homer I took the ferry to Kodiak and back, seeing many Humpback Whales and Sea Otters on the way. This is a very pretty trip, and Kodiak Island would be worth a longer visit. I returned to Portage, near Anchorage, on a little bus, and then got a lift through the rail/road tunnel to Whittier. This is a very unique town: 90% of the population live in one big block of flats, and the other 10% live in another smaller block. There are many more businesses than residences. From Whittier the ferry goes to Valdez, making an excursion through a field of icebergs to look at the toe of the Columbia Glacier on the way. This was beautiful, in spite of cold and dull weather. At Whittier I met a young Dutch couple on bikes, and we stayed in the same campground at Valdez. They left early in the morning but I toured the Museums and tried to get the forks of my bike tightened. I then cycled over the pass out of Valdez (2720 feet high) and again met the Dutch couple at a campground, along with two young Americans going to Valdez. The Dutch couple and I stayed together until after Glennallen, where they went straight on to Denali and I turned right for Tok. At Mentasta Lake Lodge I woke up to pouring rain and discovered that there was a bus into Tok, so I took it, knowing that I was going to have to hitch-hike tothe Canadian border. At Tok a gold-mining couple named Brooks offered me a lift to Chicken, the road to which is very steep and winding and partially unpaved. After a night in Chicken a Swiss couple offered me a lift to the border. From the border I cycled the Top Of The World Highway to Dawson City. This was the high-point and the low-point of the trip so far. On the one hand I was high, about 4500 feet above sea level, and enjoying beautiful views in all directions across the treeless tundra. On the other hand the road, shown as blacktop on all maps, had mostly been torn up, and was in fact gravel of varying depths. Then, about half-way through the 65 mile ride, it was clear I was going to be caught in rain. Make that lightning and thunder and VERY heavy rain. Nowhere to shelter, nowhere to lean the bike (no trees), nowhere to stop, and lightning all around. I cycled on through mud and fog and rain and dark, noticing at one point a new forest fire (by this time I was out of the tundra) off on my right. By the time I got to Dawson I was one big mud-lump and so was the bike. My last pair of shorts had torn and was flapping forlornly down my leg, my hands were yet again frozen and I was hypothermic. Adding to my troubles at the end I had to stand and wait for half an hour for the ferry to cross the Yukon River to take me into town. Before I could get a shower I had to hose the bicycle and all my panniers, as well as myself, off with a garden hose. I took the bike to Circle Cycle next day and found that my forks, a worry since the beginning of the trip, were easily fixed, but that the grit from the previous day, added to normal wear and tear, had scalloped out the rim of my rear wheel: Tim recommended having one built in Whitehorse while I wason my way there. Also, we found that my speedometer/odometer was not working, because the sensor head had filled with water. After a day and a half in Dawson I set off for Whitehorse. The first night I spent at Beaver Creek, where I met a very interesting group of geologists. The next night was at Pelly Crossing, a very dirty campground patrolled by an Arctic Fox. There I met Hiro, a Japanese cyclist also headed toward Whitehorse, a German cyclist headed up the Dempster Highway to Inuvik, and an Australian/Swiss couple headed in the opposite direction. In the middle of the night either the fox or a porcupine ate the leather handle of my rear pannier, and I didn't get this fixed until Fort St. John. The next day I had bad A. Fib., but still managed to get close to Carmacks. However, I was offered a lift by a couple from Ontario who were at a lay-by talking to Hiro when I rode up in bad shape. They dropped me at Carmacks but also offered to take me into Whitehorse next morning if I needed it. Next morning I woke with very prominent heart beats, still feeling"woosy", and also realized that if they gave me a lift I would be in Whitehorse in time to pick up the rear wheel and medications that Ingrid had sent to me at General Delivery before Canada Day, so that is what I did. Spent Canada Day as a rest day in Whitehorse at the "Jekyll on Hyde" hostel, which was full of people who had just completed the "Yukon Challenge" canoe race from Whitehorse to Dawson. An interesting, very international, group. Left for Watson Lake on the 2nd July, and had an uneventful though strenuous trip, meeting with a young lady who was headed down the Cassiar Highway, and also with another crew of geologists. Much rain on this leg, and attended the Anglican Church in Watson Lake soaking wet. Further uneventful riding down to Liard Hot Springs, which are a wonderful oasis of sybaritic pleasure in the wilderness, and which have wonderful scenery around them. After Liard Hot Springs the road crosses the Northern Rockies, and there are six very steep and long hills. I did the first and second of these, arriving at Muncho Lake just as some very violent weather hit. By this point I was feeling beat and beginning to realize that I would have trouble getting back to Austin in time unless I speeded things up. The next morning, when Jim MacGregor, an Alaska Highway employee, offered me a lift in his pickup to Steamboat Summit, about 80 miles away, I accepted. We passed through some sections of highway that would have been very difficult for me, and I was able to relax and enjoy the magnificent scenery! From Steamboat I cruised into Ft. Nelson, where I had another drug shipment (this one my heart medicine) awaiting me, and then cruised right out for Fort St.John. This section was again strenuous riding, since Fort Nelson is the lowest point on the highway, and Trutch Summit, some 70 miles south, the second highest. However, I managed all the big hills, and spent one more night in the bush. At Wonowon, with Fort St. John almost in sight, I found that my chain was damaged. Since this was at noon on Saturday, I decided to ask for a lift the last 30 miles into Fort. John so that I could get it fixed before the weekend. Ferris Fast cycles did an excellent job, and I bought a new chain there just in case: an irony since I had sent home my spare chain from Fort Nelson because the chain on the bike had been new in Whitehorse and I had assumed that I would not need to change it again - a spare chain is a heavy object to lug around! The last major obstacle on the Alaska Highway is Taylor Grade, a few miles south of Fort St. John. The Peace River here flows through fairly flat country but is deeply incised below it. The grade reaches 10% in places, and I knew that even pushing the bike up it would be a huge effort. An old German chap at the Visitor Center in Taylor offered me a lift, and I took it. From the top it was a relatively easy day into Dawson Creek, mile zero of the Alaska Highway. This morning is a wet morning, apparently long needed, in Dawson Creek. It sounds as if most of this trip was hitch-hiking, but I actually have ridden all but about 150 miles of the Alaska Highway (3 lifts) and all but about 70 miles of the Klondyke Highway (1 lift). The other lifts were to avoid unpaved sections of the highway from Tok to Chicken and the Canadian Border. At my age I have no shame in accepting help! I am also aware that I am behind schedule, and will probably have to take a bus (or other form of transport) for about 300 miles in order to be back in Austin before the end of August, unless everything goes perfectly and all winds are favorable. Hope that all of you are having a good summer.
John

Bicycle Alaska 2008: Instalment 3

noreply@blogger.com (John Berry) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:58:00 +0000

BICYCLE ALASKA, 2008

by

John Berry

Instalment 3: Fairbanks, Barrow, Anchorage and Bethel, AK

May 28th (Wednesday): Fairbanks, AK.

Milton A.Wiltse and I were geology students together at Penn, and both rowed lightweight crew in our freshman year. I dropped out of rowing after one year because I wasn't that terrific at it, and also because I had become involved in so many other things at Penn that something had to give. I visited Milt at his family's summer home in the Thousand Islands region, N.Y., in the summer of 1961, and remember his parents as a very gentle and cultured couple. After graduation we lost touch because we went to different graduate schools and then he went to Alaska and I went to Zambia.

Milton and Flora Wiltse and their two huge and friendly dogs live in a very pleasant A-frame type log house in a heavily wooded subdivision north of the University of Alaska. Flora has taught at an elementary school just across the road for years, and Milton has been on the Geology faculty at the University, as well as State Geologist for a number of years. Both are now retired, but still very physically active: Milton was very successful in the University of Pennsylvania crew as an undergraduate, and continued to row for years after he went to Alaska. He still works out every day using weights and doing Nordic walking along the trails above the house. The whole family, including their son, were very keen and competitive cross-country skiers. They were wonderful hosts while I was in Fairbanks: Milt took a lot of time out of his still busy days (he has an office at the University and is heavily involved with using GIS systems to create exploration data bases).

Milt kindly took me around the Institute of Geophysics at the University, and showed me the Museum of the North on campus. This is a modern and very impressive building, with excellent exhibits of 19th and 20th century paintings of Alaska, as well as of Native Alaskan art. The Gallery of Alaska contains areas devoted to the people, wildlife and history of the five major biomes in Alaska. We had lunch at an excellent Thai restaurant with some of Milton's colleagues, and Milt also drove me to the visitor center to investigate trips to Prudhoe Bay, Point Barrow and Anchorage. It was quickly apparent that the only way to see the first two places was by air – any overland trip would take too long and be beyond my budget. It was also clear that any attempt to stay in Denali National Park or to take a tour there would be very expensive.

While we were down town we walked around to see if I could recognize any of the places I had seen while passing through on my way to Ice Island T-3 in 1963, for instance the Northern Lights Hotel. This hotel, in the 400 block of 1st Avenue, had been only 8 years old in 1963, but is now run down and surrounded by parking lots. A couple of blocks away is Courthouse Square, a typical Federal Building of the 1930s in Art Deco style, which I remember as the main Post Office. Round the corner from it is the Co-op Plaza, once a theater but now a two-story indoor Mall. We had a snack in a restaurant there which is run by two generations of a family from Mexico. Back in 1963 the building next door to it was a café which I remember as having a "fuggy" atmosphere and being full of Swedes. In spite of the destruction due to urban renewal projects, which have left downtown as largely a series of parking lots, it was a much more pleasant place than I remember it: sunshine and a slight breeze as against low clouds and a howling, dust-laden wind..

May 29th (Thursday): Fairbanks, AK.

This was largely a shopping day – I got a tune-up done on the bike, and also bought a book, "The Roadside Geology of Alaska", which I sorely needed. Milt bought the book "1491", whose thesis we had been discussing, and presented it to me. I did not have a chance to read it before arriving at home in Texas: in it the author, Charles Mann, argues quite convincingly that the indigenous population of the Americas was a great deal larger than we have been lead by historians to believe, and that it had attained quite a high level of civilization in several different areas, including some, such as the Beni grasslands of the upper Amazon Basin, in which the traces of this high culture have been overwhelmed by nature and ignored by historians. Europeans were able to "take over" both continents relatively easily because their diseases had preceded their attempts at settlement, and in most areas had wiped out a significant (50-90%) of the native population before Europeans actually began settling.

May 30th (Friday): Deadhorse (Prudhoe Bay) and Barrow

I began this summer's trip with some small hope that I would be able to ride the Dalton Highway from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay in spite of the fact that my bicycle is built for riding on tarred roads and is not a good vehicle for gravel roads, especially if the gravel is coarse. By the time I reached Fairbanks it was clear that any such attempt would be foolhardy: I was having too much heart trouble; it was still so early in the year that night-time temperatures would be marginal for my equipment, and I had already damaged my hands severely, probably through frostbite. Furthermore, it would be at least a 7-day trip, and there was not time to do it and still be sure of getting back home to Austin before Ingrid left for Sweden.

I had also started out with a yen to see Barrow again, 45 years after spending a week there on the way out to Ice Island T-3, and this had intensified somewhat because of the update I had received from Andy Williams at the Arctic Research Institute in Kluane on some of the Arctic hands whom I had known. Very conveniently, it turned out that I could visit both places in one day on a single Alaskan Airlines flight from Fairbanks. The air trip also had the potential advantage that I would be able to see the geology clearly displayed beneath me. Alas – in the event this was not to be!

The Boeing 737 lifted off from Fairbanks early in the morning and almost immediately passed over the Fort Knox and True North open-pit gold mines owned by Kinross Gold. The main pit, Fort Knox, is 16 miles NE of downtown Fairbanks, and True North is 11 miles NW of Fort Knox by haul road (http://www.northern.org/artman/publish/knoxp.shtml). The ore is very low grade (0.024 ounces/ton), and occurs in quartz veins, shears, fractures and pegmatites within a granitic intrusion.

There was good visibility over the White Mountains and the broad, braided course of the Yukon River, but the Brooks Range (Philip Smith Mountains in this area) were almost completely cloud-covered, as was the entire North Slope. However, as we approached Deadhorse we got below the cloud ceiling and I could see that the oil field installations covered a much larger area than I had anticipated. The ground was still completely covered with snow, and there was sufficient fast ice along the coast that I could not be certain of the shoreline under the poor lighting conditions.
Fig. 1: The Prudhoe bay Hotel seen from the entrance to the Deadhorse Airport Terminal Building. The dark piles are of dirty melting snow.

Most of the passengers got out at Deadhorse: they were mostly workers for oilfield contracting companies arriving for their duty tours. I got out too, but unfortunately the plane only stayed at Deadhorse for 30 minutes, and so there was no time to leave the airport: I did, however, manage to take a couple of photographs of the Deadhorse Hotel across the way (Fig. 1). My overall impression was of a giant construction camp, with chain link fences everywhere and even the hotel consisting of a pile of factory-built modules. The weather was raw and dull, the temperature just above freezing – shirt-sleeve weather for me, but nearly everyone else was in a parka of some sort.

We could see no trace of the ground or the sea between Deadhorse and Barrow – conditions fairly typical for the Arctic in summer. On landing at Barrow I was mistaken for a scientist visiting the BASC – the old Arctic Research Lab – and on sorting that out I was still offered a lift there in the Consortium's van, and this I happily accepted.

There was very little that I immediately recognized about Barrow: the airport was new (it was built in the late 1960s – my recollection is that the only airstrip was the metal-mesh surfaced one at the Research Lab), and the large insulated pipes alongside the road, carrying water, wastewater and natural gas were new. I had forgotten that at the lab there was a veritable spaghetti bowl of pipes that ran along the ground and then high over all the roads. Pipes everywhere. The huge Radome of the DEW Line station was gone, replaced by a very small one Almost all the buildings at the lab were new, but after being given careful directions I was able to find the old main building (Fig.2) and what I thought was the dormitory building I had stayed in.
Fig. 2: The old main research building at the Naval Arctic Research Lab.(now BASC), Barrow.

The biggest change at the lab, however, was that the Navy had left Point Barrow, and the old Naval Arctic Research Lab was now BASC – Barrow Arctic Science Consortium, which is run by the North Slope Borough (i.e. the regional government), the Ukpeagvik Iñupiat Corporation (owned by the Native people of Barrow), and Ilisagvik College (the local post-secondary college). It shares a large building with the latter.

I was introduced to the Executive Director of BASC, Glenn Sheehan, who immediately gave me a copy of the huge book "Fifty More Years below Zero", a history of the first fifty years of the Arctic Research Laboratory. The book weighs about 5 lbs, and is full of very interesting information, but after scanning it quickly in Fairbanks the very first thing I had to do was mail it back to Austin – impossible to carry it with me on the bicycle! The book's title echoes that of Charles Brower's "Fifty Years below Zero" (Univ.Alaska Press, 1994), describing the author's life in Barrow from the time he arrived as a whaler in 1883.

Everybody in Barrow said that I had to meet Kenny Toovak, since he was the only person still around from the time that I was there. Kenny goes to the lab every day, but I missed him there, and I also missed him at his other regular hang out at the EMS Station. However, I found there a group of older men, speaking in Inupiat and in their distinctively accented English, and playing cards. I asked about the Barrow people who had been on the Ice Station with me, especially Leffingwell. But they were all dead, Leffingwell not so long ago in a tragic accident with his snowmobile. Many of the men had worked at the ARL or on other Ice Stations, and we shared some reminiscences.
Fig.3: Inupiat dancing at the Heritage Center in Barrow.

I went over to the excellent Inupiat Heritage Center, and watched a performance of Inupiat dancing for a group of tourists, who were mainly from Taiwan. The receptionist at the Heritage Center insisted on tracking Kenny down, and before I had seen much of the museum exhibits he arrived. I remembered him vaguely as the foreman of the mechanical Shop at the NARL. I had been sent over to borrow a tool from him, and found him a rather fearsome character: he made no bones about what would happen to me if the tool was not promptly returned!

Fig. 4: Kenny Toovak in front of his house in Barrow.

We talked about the good old days: in the course of the conversation I learned that in 1963 Kenny had been making about $10.00/hour – eight times what I was making ($1.25/hour)!

Kenny offered to show me around Barrow, including the Browerville section across the Esalkuat lagoon from Barrow proper. I soon found that the Barrow I remember had disappeared. In my memory a street pattern was barely discernible, and that the houses were surrounded by what appeared to be midden heaps(Fig. 5)

Fig. 5: The site of the ancient village of Ukpiagvik. The topography is irregular because of the remains of semi-subterranean houses and of midden heaps. My memories of Barrow in 1963 are that the houses were placed on a similar topography. There is no trace of an irregular topography in the presently built-up area.

There are traces of this higgledy-piggledy layout left downtown (see, for example, the aerial photo at

http://irpsrvgis05.utep.edu/baid_ims/viewer.htm), but otherwise one would never believe that

Fig.6: The center of Barrow, showing some houses not aligned with the grid plan. Also shows how the ground has been levelled.

it had existed – the land is flat, the houses are aligned along streets, and most of them are well-built and quite large. I have checked on the web, and there are passing references in documents of the late 1960s to "the recently settled village". On one website a USGS 7.5 minute quadrangle map shows the houses in Barrow apparently randomly distributed (at this scale), whereas those in Browerville are on the same streets that are there today.

Fig. 7: The Presbyterian Church in Barrow.

Further evidence that things may have changed radically in the late 1960s are that the population of the town during the 1890s, when the school, the Presbyterian church (Fig. 7), and the post office were built was less than 150. In fact, according to Milan (1970 - "A Demographic Study of an Eskimo Village on the North Slope of Alaska"), there were only 400 people along the north coast of Alaska between Point Barrow and Point Hope, including both settlements at Barrow.

Apparently, times were very hard during the early years of the twentieth century because commercial whalers had killed all the bowhead whales on which the people depended. The population was further depleted by as much as 100 people in 1911 by a curious, heroic, and little-known episode. There was from about 1893 a Japanese man, Kyosuke Yasuda (http://alaskamininghalloffame.org/inductees/yasuda.php), known as Frank, living in Barrow. He was married to Nevelo, the daughter of Amoaka from Nuvuk, an ancient village on Point Barrow, and was highly respected as a hunter and trader in the community. In 1902 Yasuda formed a partnershipm with Thomas Carter, a prospectore from Montana, to go gold prospecting in and south of the Brooks Range. They made a rich strike in the Chandalar River basin, the motherlode being discovered by Nevelo. A port on the Yukon River was needed to supply the Chandalar mines, and Yasuda selected and established the town of Beaver in 1910. Careful negotiation was needed, because the site was in the territory of the Gwi'chin Athabascans, and they were adamant in defending their game supply. Beaver grew rapidly, and Yasuda and Nevelo returned to Barrow and brought several families out to Beaver. Because the people were so run down from hunger, and especially from the lack of their normal diet (they had been fed sporadically on western tinned food by the government) this overland trip through the mountains took two years. Some of the old people died along the way, but the numbers were made up by new births. Beaver became a truly multi-ethnic settlement, with whites, Inupiat, and two different Indian groups, a lone Japanese. Frank Yasuda was a very generous man, and extremely loyal to his partners and to his clients. His loyalty was rewarded in turn by theirs, and he was held in high regard by all in the Far North, but this could not save him from being interned in 1942 in the lower '48. After the war was over he returned to Beaver, and died there in 1958 at the age of 90. I wish I had known him.

Fig. 8: The new cemetery at Barrow.

Fig. 9: A successful whale-hunting team's umiat and flag on the sea ice at Barrow.

Barrow now has a population of about 4,000 people: it was 4600 in 2000, but only about 1500 when I was there in 1963. The periods of rapid growth were the 1940s (10% yearly, but from a base of only 360 people), 1960s (5% yearly) and 1980s (5%).

In the 1963 Barrow of my memories there were no Government buildings other than the Post Office, and I remember no large stores or banks, even though the web informs me that the Wells Fargo branch, now housed in a beautiful three storey building, was opened in April 1962. Today in Browerville there is a huge grocery, and in Barrow close to the bank is a very impressive Police Station (Fig. 10)and a big City Hall (Fig. 11). Kenny took me to the oldest building in town, the Cape Smythe Whaling station built by Charles Brower in 1885, known as the Browerville Store in 1963, and now as Brower's Restaurant (Fig.12), but we couldn't find the little tea-room where I stopped in 1963. Kenny thought it had

Fig. 10: The rear of the Police Station in Barrow

been pulled down long ago. We drove around downtown, and along the beach to the east, where there are the partially excavated remains of 16 dwelling sites of the Birnirk cultural phase (500-900 AD)(Fig. 5). We also visited the natural gas plant, the local quarry (not much geology was visible) and the new cemetery (Fig. 6)where, unfortunately, the inscriptions on the grave markers all faced away from the road, and the snow was too deep to hike through in sneakers.

Fig. 11: The new City Hall in Barrow
Fig. 12: The old Cape Smythe Whaling Station, now Brower's Restaurant.

Kenny dropped me off in time to eat dinner at Pepe's North of the Border Restaurant, from where I walked back to the airport, arriving back in Fairbanks close to midnight.

May 31st (Saturday): Fairbanks to Anchorage by Train

Once again Milt graciously took me to downtown Fairbanks, and waited while I bought my train ticket and got my bike and baggage checked in. While we were at the station we met Bill Walters, who I had last seen in Sitka. He has still not found the ideal fishing stream in Alaska.

Part of the railroad depot is devoted to a very large and beautifully-built model train layout run by the Tanana ____________________.

We boarded the rear part of the train in brilliant sunshine. The front part was off-limits to us, as it consisted of a series of hermetically sealed coaches belonging to the Holland-America Line and full of cruise ship passengers. Our part of the train was not at all full, so there was enough room for almost everyone to sit in the observation cars, of which there were three, and we had a restaurant car as well. The view from the first observation car along the roofs of the leading carriages gave one the feeling of being in a Hollywood western – it was tempting to imagine oneself walking the length of the train across those roofs! There were two very pleasant young people acting as guides, and the passengers were an interesting and lively lot. Between the scenery, the weather, the guides and the passengers this turned out to be one of the best trips I have ever taken – it was sad when it ended at Anchorage.

The railway line first travels along the southern edge of the University of Alaska campus, and there is some active permafrost in this area of alluvial sediments, making for a slow and somewhat uneven ride. The weather was beautiful, and soon we could see the Alaska Range on our left. The line runs NW up Happy Creek and then follows Goldstream Creek as it gradually bears around to the west and then the southwest, until it finally crosses the Tanana River at Nenana, 44 miles WSW of Fairbanks, on a 700-foot long steel bridge. President Warren Harding drove the golden spike marking completion of the Alaska Railroad here in 1923.

Nenana is a small place, with only about 400 inhabitants, but it has two great claims to fame.

Every year it sponsors the Nenana Ice Classic lottery to pick the date and time, to the closest minute, that spring ice break-up will occur on the Tanana River. This lottery, which is extremely popular all over Alaska, and is now emulated on a smaller scale by several other towns, such as Bethel, began in 1917 when a group of surveyors working for the Alaska Railroad whiled away the wait for the river to open for navigation by forming a betting pool. Over the years since the lottery has paid out nearly $10 million in prize money.
Nenana was also the starting point for the 1925 serum run to Nome. The people of Nome, many of whom were Native Alaskans and had no immunity, were threatened by a diphtheria epidemic that winter. The only available serum was at Seward, on the south coast, and there were no serviceable aerooplanes in which to fly it to Nome. So it was decided to ship it 300 miles by rail to Nenana, and then by dog team from there to Nome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iditarod_Trail_Sled_Dog_Race#Ceremonial_start).

The 20-lb cylinder of serum was passed just before midnight on January 27 to the first of twenty mushers and more than 100 dogs who relayed the package 674 miles (1,085 km) from Nenana to Nome. The dogs ran in relays, with no dog running over 100 miles (160 km).
The Norwegian Gunnar Kaasen and his lead dog Balto arrived on Front Street in Nome on February 2 at 5:30 a.m., five and a half days later. They became such celebrities that a statue of Balto was erected in Central Park in New York City in 1925, where it is a popular tourist attractions. However, most mushers consider Leonhard Seppala and his lead dog Togo to be the true heroes of the run. Together they covered the most hazardous stretch of the route, and carried the serum farther than any other team. The first dogsled races in the modern Iditarod series, founded by Dorothy G. Page, were called the Iditarod Trail Seppala Memorial Race in honor of Leonhard Seppala. The race now starts in Anchorage and covers about 1100 miles.
Nenana is the center of rail-to-river barge transportation for the Interior. Crowley Marine is a major private employer in Nenana, supplying villages along the Tanana and Yukon Rivers with cargo and fuel each summer by barge.

After leaving Nenana the line climbs the gentle slope of the Nenana River cone, reaching the mountain front after 25 miles. From here the scenery becomes spectacular as the railway climbs along the eastern side of the Nenana Gorge for a few miles and then crossing to the west. At the town of Healy the large open cast Usibelli coal mine lies in a canyon on the opposite side of the valley, but only the facilities for loading the coal onto trains are visible from the railway. This mine was the site of the Healy Clean Coal Project in the late 1990s, and lies only 11.5 miles north of the Denali Park Headquarters.. An experimental clean coal power plant was built at a cost of $300million, mostly shared between the Federal and Alaskan governments, but since operating briefly as part of the demonstration program it has been shut down by litigation. There is also a conventional coal-fired power station at Healy.

South of Healy the railway line enters the Nenana Gorge, where we passed several groups of rafters, and for the next ten miles runs just inside the Denali National Park Boundary. The George Parks Highway on the other side of the river is outside the park. Half way along this stretch is the crowded visitor area of the National Park: from the train we could see three or four large hotels squeezed between the road and the river, as well as huge parking lots for the day-trippers and the caravan crowd. The train stopped here and Bill Walters and several others of our congenial group dismounted. Milton Wiltse had advised me that this was an expensive place to stay, whether tenting or not, and was known as "million-dollar alley" by the locals: I had also checked into bus tours, and found out that they did not coordinate with the train schedules, and were indeed expensive. Milton's advice was not to bother to stay here, since Mt. McKinley is only visible one out of every three times, so to be sure of seeing it requires several days. It had been visible the day before, and clouds were building up today, so I stayed on the train, without huge regrets. The area might be worth a dedicated hiking holiday in the future.

South of Denali Village the railway traverses the west end of the strath occupied by the Yanert River, which rises in the Yanert glacier to the east. Base level for this strath is about 2000 feet msl, and the wide glacial valley that the railway follows southward never gets much above this level. My guess is that the Nenana River has captured the drainage of the Yanert in post-glacial times. Thirteen miles south of McKinley Village and 5 miles N of Cantwell the road and railway cross a major south-dipping thrust fault. At Cantwell both road and rail line enter another huge strath, showing the striated topography due to recent deglaiciation. The drainage divide between the Tenana and the southward-flowing Chulitna river is very inconspicuous and is about 10 miles SW of Cantwell. After following the Chulitna valley for another 30 miles the railroad veers off southward through the Indian River valley into that of the Susitna, which it follows all the way down to the town of Willow. This village of 1,700 people was selected as the new capital of Alaska by ballot in 1976, but another ballot proposition allotting the $2.8billion necessary to effect the move from Juneau was defeated in 1982, so the move never happened. Apparently Gov. Sarah Palin is strongly in favor of the move, and makes a point of spending the absolute minimum of time in Juneau. Gov. Palin's home in Wasilla is 22 miles from Willow.

We had not seen much wildlife in the high country, but from Talkeetna onwards the train regularly slowed down for bear and moose sightings. The engineers knew where to look, and when they saw an animal would radio our guides with instructions as to where we should look.
From here into Anchorage the country was heavily wooded, and towns were a regular sight. After leaving Wasilla we crossed the head of the Knik Arm of Cook Inlet and then ran along the NW foot of the spectacular Chugach mountains for the last leg of the journey. Once we got into the low country on the south side of the Alaska range the weather had become cloudy, and when we reached Anchorage it was cool and somewhatr raw.

I collected my bicycle, loaded it up, bid goodbye to the congenial companions of the journey, and rode off to find the Anchorage International Hostel, where I stayed for the next four nights.

June 1st (Sunday): Anchorage

I attended the morning service at the Central Lutheran Church, a very active congregation close to downtown.

I then wandered around downtown, but not much was open, an dfinally bought a combined ticket to the Native Heritage Center and the Anchorage Museum. Took a little bus out to the heritage center, which offered dance and song performances and also had a series of outdoor exhibits consisting of replicas of native housing, each one with one or more guides from its ethnic group. One of thbe guides for the Yupik house was one-half Yupik, one quarter Finnish, and one quarter northern Irish. She told mme that her paternal grandfather had come out from Finland with the first reindeer herd that was brought to Alaska by Sheldon Jackson. There had been some logistical problem with this herd, and the animals had all died, but her grandfather stayed on and worked with the second, successful herd.

June 2nd (Monday): Anchorage

Rode out to the bike shop and then back by the trail

June 3rd (Tuesday): Anchorage

Did last of my shopping, but couldn't get my heart pills. Rode the bike out to the bike shop and got a lift back to the hostel.

June 4th (Wednesday): Anchorage to Bethel, AK

Left from Bethel, collecting pills on the way.

June 11th (Wednesday): Bethel – Anchorage

Bicycle Alaska 2008: Instalment 2

noreply@blogger.com (John Berry) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:57:00 +0000

BICYCLE ALASKA, 2008

by

John Berry

Instalment 2: Skagway, AK to Fairbanks, AK, via Whitehorse, YT.

May 18th (Sunday): Skagway to Spirit Lake – 50 miles

I realized too late that by buying a ticket on the 8.15 a.m. train from Skagway to Fraser, BC, I had probably eliminated my chances of attending church.

Fig.1: My bicycle on the WP&Y train to Fraser, British Columbia

The day dawned brighter and with a higher ceiling than I had seen for many days. I was at the station early, and the brakeman helped me lift my bicycle, fully loaded, into the front of the first carriage, in which I would be sitting. The carriages are truly Victorian (some of them actually having been made in Victoria’s reign) and have freestanding oil-burning stoves. In mine were a couple from Mexico, four Germans, and an Alaskan mother and daughter.

The White Pass and Yukon Railway was built as a result of an all night meeting in Skagway between an American railway engineer and an English financier. It was finished after the Klondike gold rush ended, but flourished as a freight and passenger line, still under the original English ownership, until 1954. During World War II it was leased by the US Army in order to support the building of the Alcan Highway. From 1954 until the present the line has grown into an integrated transport company supplying Alaska and the Yukon. During the 1960s and 1970s it was one of the pioneers in container shipping, and actually owned container ships. The line has many similarities with the Kuranda Railway in North Queensland, Australia, which was completed 6 years before the White Pass and Yukon was begun. Both are 3.0-foot gauge lines, both begin at a deepwater port and both were cut at great expense through rugged rainforest country to a pass at approximately 3000 feet above sea level. Both are roughly the same length and were originally built to serve a large mining hinterland – a source of tin in the Australian case and gold, of course, in the Yukon. Both involved loss of life among the labor force: over 30 killed in the Kuranda case (E.N. Berry, 2001), somewhat fewer in the Skagway case. The hinterland sections of both have since been abandoned, and the spectacular sections cutting through the mountains have become popular tourist attractions in both cases. Both were commandeered for military use in World War II: in the Australian case the Atherton Tablelands at the end of the line were used as a staging area for hundreds of thousands of Australian and American troops bound for the Pacific campaign.

Fig. 2: Climbing the gorges to the Canadian border.

The weather cleared as we proceeded up the gorges, and soon we were able to see the glaciers on the other (west) side of Skagway. It was possible to stand on the footplates between the carriages and take photographs, but as we got higher and higher this became more and more chilly, and I already had a cold and sore throat, so was not able to spend all my time out there. We had spectacular views of the line before us and behind us, above and below us, as we snaked around the tight curved and doubled back on ourselves around deep and steep canyons, over high trestles and through

Fig.3: A large trestle followed by a tunnel.

tunnels. For part of the route we paralleled the modern road, but on the opposite side of the valley. The road was bordered on both sides by snow discolored deep brown by the fumes from the vehicles. In view of the light traffic on this highway compared to the dense traffic of the cities in which most of us live, this was a vivid illustration of how polluted is the air that most of us breathe daily. Eventually the grade became more gentle and we emerged onto a pristine plateau of white snow, surmounted by a beautiful

Fig. 4: The USA-Canada border.

blue sky and bound in front by jagged snow-covered peaks. After a few miles the train stopped at the Canadian border post, and a young lady came through to look at all of our documents. My bicycle was off-loaded, and I took a photograph of it at the control point, and then, at about 11.00 a.m., wobbled off in the general direction of Fairbanks.

Fig. 5: The beginning of the main adventure: leaving Fraser, BC.

The road surface was much better than I expected, and the grades gentler. Soon I was whizzing down long hills and pedaling along the banks of long, ice-covered lakes. However, being the first real day on the road, I found crossing the divides between lakes to be tiring, but I was having a great time. I zoomed past the only tourist attraction I saw, a suspension bridge across the Yukon River, because it was on a downgrade and I was doing about 30 miles per hour.

Fig. 6: Dall sheep at Dall Creek, YT/BC border.

Soon I came on a creek crossing saying “Dall Creek”, and almost immediately noticed some white dots on the hillside to my left. Right in front of me was the big sign announcing a welcome to the Yukon and bidding farewell to British Columbia. There were some cars stopped here, and I pulled up to photograph the Dall sheep. As I did so a man walked over from one of the cars carrying a tray full of cookies and offered me one. He introduced himself as Ante Tokic, a Croat who had ridden a bicycle around the world some years back in an effort to drum up support for peace in ex-Yugoslavia. Ante also introduced his wife, Ann Chapman, and told me that they owned a B&B in Whitehorse called La Bicicletta.

After this the road to Carcross seemed to become long and wearying: mainly because it was no longer mostly downhill, there was a bit of a headwind, and I was getting cold. However, by about 3.30 p.m. I was in Carcross, the summertime terminus of the White Pass and Yukon, but now a tiny sleepy village just off the main road. The people at the Information center very helpfully called the Spirit Lake Resort, with whom I had previously made a tentative booking. The rate for an unheated, unlighted cabin turned out to be much more than I had heard over the phone, but then the reception on my cell phone in Sitka had been very bad.

Fig. 7: Carcross, BC: the Anglican Church

Carcross was originally “Caribou Crossing”, but the Anglican bishop of the early years of the 20th Century had petitioned the post office to shorten it. In the years immediately after the gold rush it had had a boarding school for Indian children, and had also been a popular jumping off place for tourists going to the extensive lake country to the south by sternwheeler. The scant remains of the last of the sternwheelers, the Tutshi, were parked across from the Information Center, almost all of the boat having been destroyed by fire.

At the far end of the system of lakes in a beautiful valley is a place called Ben-my-Chree, or “Girl of my Heart” in Manx Gaelic. Ben-My-Chree was settled in 1912 by Otto and Kate Partridge, Manx people who had been mining nearby until an avalanche destroyed the mine and killed their best friends and partners. They built Ben-My-Chree as a hunting and fishing lodge and Kate grew a magnificent flower garden in this unlikely piece of wilderness. Until the Partridges died within months of each other in 1930, the Tutshi brought as many as 9,000 tourists a year across the lake from the rail line at Carcross to be royally entertained by them. These guests included film stars, the Prince of Wales, and President Theodore Roosevelt, and the trade continued, diminishing slowly, until 1956. I wished I could have gone there, as I was told that it was still occupied and again had beautiful flower gardens. A very touching history of the area may be found at http://www.atlinhistory.com/BMC_Story.htm.

I ate a hearty lunch of hamburger and French fries at the roadhouse on the main road in Carcross. The food tasted fine, but there was grit in my hamburger, and the place didn't seem very clean in general. I met a young marine biologist, Lucretia Fairchild, there who was on her way to Cold Bay, at the very end of the Alaska Peninsula, to spend a year studying marine mammals at Izembek National Wildlife Refuge. There were also two couples from Whitehorse, riding a Harley Davidson in one case and an off-road Honda in the other. I had a pleasant chat with them and then got on my way to Spirit Lake, 6 miles away. The wind had now become a fairly annoying and very cold headwind, and soon I was passing through the “Carcross Dunes”, an area in which the wind blew the sand deposited from old lakes around so much that vegetation could never get a hold. I was getting tired and very cold.

The Spirit Lake Lodge looked spic and span from the road, consisting of a log cabin restaurant and a row of log cabin motel rooms. On checking at the restaurant I was directed to one of a pair of cabins far away from the road, but made mistakes twice in getting there since there were other cabins, too, occupied by seasonal staff who took care of the horses and the canoes and kayaks.

My cabin was clean, but was directly in the path of the wind now blowing off frozen Spirit Lake. The bedding was just barely adequate, and I could not get any warm water in the shower, which was 200 yards from the cabin – I had apparently picked a shower whose faucet was attached the wrong way round. I asked the owner if I could do laundry, and was told that I could use their laundry, in the shower block, for $5.00. This gave me an excuse to stay in a warm place. I ate dinner there, much the same food as lunch, but of higher quality and price. There was one other customer. All in all, the person who recommended Spirit Lake Lodge to me must have had deep pockets and have been there in the height of summer!

May 19th (Monday): Spirit Lake to Whitehorse – 38 (45) miles

This day was the worst one of my trip so far, but because it was the second full day of riding I had anticipated that that would be the case. It was cold and sleeted a bit, there was a headwind, the ride started with a substantial climb to Emerald Lake and continued pretty hilly. In addition to that my shoulders, legs and butt were all quite sore. Furthermore, I got my first taste of chip seal – the mixture of minimal tar and large gravel that is used for large parts of the highways in the Yukon and Alaska. When one is feeling fine and the wind is fair, this material is not a worry – but when one is sore and the wind is foul, it shakes one to pieces! Every mile seemed to be a worse agony than the last, and seemed to take for ever.
According to Wikipedia: “Chip seals are constructed by evenly distributing a thin base of hot … asphalt onto an existing pavement and then embedding finely graded aggregate into it. Newer techniques use asphalt emulsion (a mixture of liquid asphalt, surfactant, and water) instead of asphalt. This has been shown to help reduce aggregate loss and reduce cost of installation, but can increase the occurrence of stripping. The rough surface causes noticeable increases in vibration and rolling resistance for bicyclists, and increased tire wear in all types of tire. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipseal). Unfortunately, as I was to discover within a day or two, the newer technique mentioned above is used on the Yukon portion of the Alcan, and the muck binds pretty well to the bicycle, as well as to the road!

Fig. 8: Robinson Siding, South Klondike Highway

I made one stop along this part of the Klondike Highway, at Robinson Siding, a ghost town that flourished on a siding of the WP & Y from 1909 to 1915 as the result of a local gold discovery. A few buildings survive and have been partially restored: they are home to gophers and some birds.

Eventually the South Klondike Highway ended against the Alaska Highway, and there at the intersection was a lunch wagon just like the ones on city street corners. It seemed pretty popular, and I ordered a hot dog and French fries, which turned out to be wonderful. On talking to the people running it I discovered that their father, who had started the business, came from Liverpool. I got talking to a family at the picnic table outside, and found out that the daughter had been in Botswana helping people with AIDS, and had full intention of going back to do more work of a similar nature. They asked me about US and Texas politics, and I had to tell them I strongly disagreed with many policies of the current administration.

Fig. 9: The Yukon River in Whitehorse, YT.

The ride into Whitehorse was over more gentle terrain, but there was much more traffic, and it was beginning to rain. I cyclist got on the road ahead of me, and with great effort I caught up with him. This was a mistake: the next morning I awoke with serious atrial fibrillation. This gentleman was a local who had done some touring, and told me how to get to the municipal campsite. It was a glorious descent of several hundred feet down to the banks of the Yukon River, but I knew that I would have to do it in reverse soon. The campsite office was closed, so I continued to Whitehorse, where I found the Information Center and got information on the local hostels, and left a message for Ante Tokic. I visited the excellent McBride Museum. This not only has ethnographic and wildlife displays, but a collection of old carriages used on the early trails and of ancient mining equipment. In writing this blog I have discovered that the journals of Kate Partridge of Ben-My-Chree are also kept there, so I will have to go back there on the way south. I cycled around the downtown area, which was almost deserted because it was Victoria Day, a Canadian national holiday, and then stopped for a snack at Tim Horton’s.

Fig. 10: Downtown Whitehorse, YT.

Tim Horton's is a sort of Canadian version of McDonald's, only to my mind much nicer. It is nationwide, and is even expanding a little into the USA. It serves good coffee and excellent donuts and other pastries, as well as sandwiches.
While I was sitting in the Horton’s Ante turned up to offer me a night in their house. He gave me directions, which involved riding up Two-Mile Hill, an ominous name. In view of this I rode around for 20 minutes taking photographs of the more interesting buildings downtown. Two-Mile Hill was every bit as fearsome as I had expected, and I had to

Fig. 11: Ante Tokic in front of La Bicicletta

rest about a dozen times on the way up it. I finally reached the Alcan Highway, and found the last steep little street leading to La Bicicletta, where Ann greeted me and Ante soon appeared to usher me into the best room in the house. There I had the most luxurious hot shower that I had had since leaving home, and spent the rest of the evening viewing photographs of Ante’s round-the-world exploits. I then retired to bed, where I found my face burning hot and painful, and my hands a bit the same way. In order to sleep in the broad daylight I had to take an aspirin and rub Aspercreme into my hands and face. This should have been a warning that I was headed for trouble.

May 20th (Tuesday): Whitehorse to Champagne – 61 miles

I woke up with really bad atrial fibrillation, and was barely able to climb a flight of stairs or carry my bags down stairs. After breakfast with Ann and the Tokic’s young daughter I set off backwards to the Beringia Interpretation Center, which turned out to be fascinating. This center focuses on the ecology and ethnology of the ice-free Beringia terrain, both in Siberia and in North America. With a couple from Manchester who had arrived that morning on a very cheap flight on Condor Airways from Frankfurt I also was able to practice using an atlatl to throw a spear into a target. By the time I left my heart had stopped fibrillating.

Fig. 12: A gentleman from Manchester practicing throwing an Atlatl at the Beringa Center.

I then mailed a large packet of unneeded pamphlets and gear home from the Post Office, and stopped at the last grocery store in Whitehorse to buy food and a light lunch (two sausage rolls). The Canadian Post Office is a real study in contrasts versus the US Postal Service. I have never had to wait in a long line in a Canadian post office, and have always had the most pleasant service. However, I must admit that it is expensive to mail a package home from Canada.

From the outskirts of Whitehorse onwards the scenery and the weather became more and more magnificent, whereas the road itself remained relatively tame, to my relief. In front of me I could see rain showers drifting across the line of the highway, with sunlight shining among the clouds and creating rainbows behind me. To the left the mountains grew higher, and to the right was the deep valley of the Yukon. I was determined to ride 60 miles, as that was the average progress I needed to make in order to reach Fairbanks, 589 miles away, before my friends the Wiltses left for upstate New York on June 1st.

By the time I began looking for a place to stop it was quite late, about 9.00 p.m., and I began to notice the tracks of large animals along the side of the road. Some of them were definitely moose, but others were as certainly large bears. The village of Champagne turned out to have been by-passed by a change in the alignment of the road, but by the time I reached the western intersection with the old road through Champagne I had left the tracks behind, and decided to camp right there. First I needed water – I had not figured out how to use the filter bottle, was using about one bottle of water every ten miles, and was half way through my final bottle. I flagged down an RV, and a very nice couple shared their water with me. I pitched my tent and

Fig. 13: Arctic Primroses at my Champagne campsite.

carefully went through the routine of brushing my teeth and washing 100 yards from the tent, and hauling up every piece of food and anything that might have been in contact with food as far up a tree even further away, and as high as I could throw a rope over a branch. This turned out to be not very high, but in the event high enough. I ate some fruit, energy bars and trail mix and turned in, exhausted.

May 21st (Wednesday): Champagne – Haines Jctn – Kluane Base Camp – 77 miles

I woke up cold to find ice on the metal parts of my bicycle, and also found some beautiful wild primroses on a nearby bank. I took over an hour to get my food down from the tree, clean up a little, bury my trash, and pack. The flysheet of my tent was soaking wet from the heavy dew. I pedaled on into Haines Junction, which was about 30 miles from where I had camped,

Fig. 14: Surviving original bridge on the Alaska Highway between Champagne and Haines Junction.

realizing ever more clearly as I went along that this town was in the bottom of a very deep hole, that on my way north I would have to climb out of it, and that that would be very strenuous. There was a headwind of variable strength, but nothing too annoying, but by the time I reached Haines Junction I was sore and tired. To make up for this, the scenery to my left and in front was magnificent, consisting of higher and higher snowcapped mountains.

In Haines Junction I stopped at Frosty’s restaurant for lunch, and got talking to a group of Forest Service Fire-Fighting Instructors who sat down at my table. One of them told me that he had seen my tent last night, and had seen a grizzly bear within three hundred meters of it. He had decided to say nothing since he figured that, if I was camping there at all, I knew what I was doing! Thank goodness that I had followed all precautions!

Fig. 15: Our Lady of the Way, Haines Junction.

In taking my clothes off the night before I found that I had inadvertently taken the key from my room at La Bicicletta, so I mailed it back to Ante and Ann from Haines Junction, and also visited the Kluane (pronounced Kloo-AHnee) National Park Reserve Visitor Center. The staff here were very knowledgeable about the glacial geology and the wildlife of the area: I briefly entertained ideas of hiking in to see some of the things they mentioned, but the distances were too great: the snout of the nearest glacier is 20 miles from the highway.

And then the fun began: the headwind in Haines Junction was strong, but I reckoned that it was being funneled into the area from the huge canyon of the Alsek River, and that I would have a crosswind after about ten miles. This was true, but I also had the highest pass on the entire Alaska Highway, Bear Creek Summit, 12 miles ahead. This pass is at an elevation of 3293

Fig. 16: Bear Creek Summit

(3204) feet (977 or 1004 m), and I kept climbing and resting, climbing and resting, for 90 minutes. By the time I got there I was above a considerable amount of snow-covered ground. After that I had a tail wind, but it was exceedingly cold, and immediately the road descended several hundred feet to a broad plateau. Fifteen miles later, after crossing a large bridge, it rose again steeply to Boutillier Summit. From there it was only 4 miles into Kluane, at the south end of still-frozen Kluane Lake. I knew that there was accommodation at Kluane Base Camp, and that the Arctic Institute of North America is located in Kluane, but I was under the impression that they were one and the same – it turned out that the Kluane Base Camp is a private B&B run by a very nice French couple, Emmanuel & Annie Obeissart. Again my accommodation was a bunk in an unheated, unlit cabin, but at least the showers worked well, though in the shower my hands and face were severely pained by the hot water. The kitchen was warm and well-appointed, and I cooked one of my freeze-dried meals there. I noticed that it said on the package it was for two people, but I ate the whole thing anyway. In preparing it I noticed that my fingers were stiff and unfeeling, and that I had lost some of the strength of grip in my left hand.

This cabin had no bedding, so I slept in my sleeping bag, throwing my groundsheet over me as well, and was cool but not noticeably cold.

May 22nd (Thursday): Kluane Base Camp – Kluane Wilderness resort - 63 miles

After finishing a light breakfast and packing I walked across the airstrip adjacent to the resort and asked some people standing by a light aeroplane if I could find out more about the Arctic Institute of North America. I was escorted to the “Station Leader”, Andy Williams, a south Welshman. He told me that the Institute had in the past had stations in several different places in the high Arctic, such as Devon Island and Ellesmere Island, but that its current activities are mostly confined to the Kluane Wilderness area and the St. Elias Mountains. The Institute was founded by the Canadian government right after WWII as much out of sovereignty concerns arising from American activities in the Canadian Arctic as out of concern for science. It publishes the Journal “Arctic Research” and has been run for many years from the University of Calgary.

We discussed the old days of the drifting Ice Stations and attempts to cross the Arctic on foot. Andy told me that Wally Herbert had been knighted in 2000 and had died less than a year ago. Alan Gill is still alive, as is Max Brewer, the head in 1963 of the Arctic research Lab in Barrow. He is now over 90.
Fig. 17: Ice on Kluane Lake, YT.

On this day the weather was warmer, probably because the altitude was lower, and the wind was generally favorable after the first 10 miles around the south end of Lake Kluane. Most hills were easy. I stopped briefly at the visitor centre at the southwest corner of Lake Kluane, and then stopped for a late lunch at Destruction Bay, where I learned that there were several long stretches of road work to come. The first one, beginning almost immediately, was

Fig. 18: Memorial shrine to an Indian, presumably killed in a highway accident, on pass north of Kluane Lake.

not too bad. I stopped to visit the Museum at Burwash Landing. It was good, but covered much the same ground as Sheldon Jackson and the

visitor Centers for the Kluane wilderness: the local ethnology, wildlife, and botany. I asked about water at the gas station but was told that I would have to go down to the village at the lakeside for potable water. A young man in a pick-up truck gave me two bottles and refused payment.

Fig. 19: Kluane Wilderness Resort: I squatted in the third cab in from the left.

I rode on for another 10 miles or so and came to Kluane Wilderness Resort, which was completely abandoned. I had a chat with a young man, Carol Johnson of Tok, AK, headed south on a small motorbike on his way across Canada to Labrador. He had been to the Kerrville Folk Festival, also by motorbike, and so knew a little about Austin. He alerted me that there was a German girl slowly southbound on a bicycle a couple of days ahead. It was really too early to camp for the night, but I tried the doors of a few of the cabins on the north side of the road, and at the second try found a fairly clean one with a bed in it. The next settlement was Beaver Creek, over 83 miles away, so this abandoned cabin would provide the best available accommodation for this night by far. I scouted around thoroughly but found no sign of life, so moved in. The fire alarm was beeping, but I took the battery out, wrote up my diary as far as I could with my now fairly useless fingers, and went to bed.

May 23rd (Friday): Kluane Wilderness Resort – Beaver Creek: 83 miles

I got up very early, packed quickly, and got on the road. Very soon the road left the valley of the Kluane River and began to climb: the road to Beaver Creek consisted of a series of climbs across divides separating major tributaries of the Yukon, ending with the very large White River, which also formed the northern boundary of the Kluane Wildlife Sanctuary. The weather was quite beautiful, but still cold. As I came down the hill to the Donjek River crossing I encountered two coach loads of Holland-America Cruise passengers as they pulled in to a lay-by so that the passengers could read the information signs and use the bathrooms. The passengers were gaga over my trip, and one offered to take a picture of me.

Fig. 20: Old and new Alaska Highway bridges across the White River

The water in the White River, the last of the major crossings for the day, and of all the large rivers that I crossed in the following days, seemed to me remarkably low, with only the channel full and extensive sand banks everywhere else on the valley floor. Furthermore, the channels of several of the rivers I crossed in the next few days were still lined and partially choked by ice. I have always read that in northern Canada and Alaska the rivers are bankfull torrents immediately after break-up because of the concurrent snowmelt. Here we were at a point when snow melt had reached its end in the lowlands, but must have been in full swing nearer the headwaters, and the streams appeared as I imagined they would appear at the end of summer. On asking about this I was told that the rivers were low because the glacier melt upstream had not really started, but the more I thought about it the less I believed this was the main factor. I think that the main reason is that there has been less snow than usual, and this has been partially confirmed by conversations in Fairbanks and Bethel.

Climbing away from the White River I met the German girl I had been told about by Carol Johnson at the Kluane Wilderness resort. She was on a mountain bike with all new equipment, including Ortlieb panniers, and had started in Anchorage about 10 days earlier. She was riding only about 30 miles a day and camping every night in the bush. She needed water and asked about the White River Resort, which I had just passed. It was not open yet, but was the first place that I had seen someone working on, preparing to open. So there was some hope that Karen would get the water she needed.

After the White River the road became more hilly, and there were several long stretches in which the bitumen had been scraped off and the road regraded and sprayed, making for slow going that was also quite dangerous on hills. The emulsion spray-based mud tended to stick to the undersides of the bicycle, and especially to build up around the brake and gear cable guides beneath the crank shaft. On smoother stretches I began to notice a rubbing sound from the front wheel due to mud around the brake shoes. I was also having more and more trouble changing gears on the chain wheel, because I had lost a lot of strength in my left thumb and forefinger and could not push the lever over properly.

I arrived at Beaver Creek exhausted but in time to visit the Information Center to ask about accommodation. I was told that the cheaper of the two Motels in town was booked solid by the road crews, but that the Westmark Hotel had hostel accommodation for $59 per night. By the time I got across the road to the Westmark it had become $69. However there was an RV campground nearby which had tent space for $12. While booking this I found out that it was also owned by the Westmark. I also discovered that the Westmark chain, which has hotels all over Alaska and the Yukon, was owned by Holland-America, and its primary purpose was to ensure that cruise passengers had a good place to stay when they were not on board ship.

The convenience store attendant who sold me the camping space was an immigrant from India, and told me and another person in the store that his family had got into Canada from Dubai, where they were living, with no hassle and very quickly, in contrast to some relatives who had spent years trying to get in.

He directed me to Shotgun Betty’s, a hundred yards away, for a good dinner, and his advice was good. After putting up my tent and having a good shower I ate a hearty meal of hamburger and French fries there.

May 24th (Saturday): Beaver Creek, YT – 15 mi S of Tetlin Junction, AK: 87 miles

The day started inauspiciously when I put my windbreaker down on the counter in the washroom at the Beaver Creek campground, and it activated the soap dispenser which filled one side of it with a very strongly scented liquid soap. I washed it out in the sink rather ineffectively, and tried to ride without it while it dried strapped on top of the bag behind me. However, the weather was too cold for this and I had to put it back on wet and ride rather uncomfortably for a while.

The Canadian border post was right outside Beaver Creek, but it turned out to be a very long 20 miles to the actual border. The “Welcome to Alaska” sign, at which a young couple kindly took my photograph, is near the bottom of a valley. From there it is a short but steep climb to the actual border post. I waited in line after two large RV’s who were held up for a while by questioning, and then was waved straight through after a brief glance at my passport.

Five miles after the border post there was a restaurant at Border City, run by a family from Oklahoma. Here I had an excellent BLT and green salad, the first non-eggsandbacon or burger&fries I had for over a week. Less than a mile from the restaurant I met Randy Olson, headed from Fairbanks to Roseau, Minnesota, with his Husky riding in a BOB trailer behind him. The dog had little booties on its feet, because it spent a considerable time each day running alongside Randy. Randy had less gear than any touring cyclist I have met: four very small panniers. He had very little water, and was sweating profusely, so I asked him how he was going to deal with the long stretches without settlements ahead. He said that he had a filter and it would be no problem. He was wearing Lycra, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a woolen hat, and this was the second time he had made the journey.

Within another ten miles, just before the Deadman’s Creek campground, I saw a very fancy mountain bike and trailer parked in a rest area. I stopped to talk to the owner, who invited me for a cup of coffee. He was Al Atkey, a man of perhaps my own age but dressed in rags and obviously camped in this spot, using a picnic bench as his bed. His conversation was rambling, focused on his father, who apparently piloted a Sopwith Camel in WWI, and ended up in Canada. He also talked about his love for classical music and how he was going to write a biography of Bizet and get it published. He also prospected for gold in the local creeks and was going to write a book about that. Furthermore he had other get-rich-quick schemes that would enable him to retire with millions. When I asked him where he got the water that would enable him to stay in such a place (I needed to know, because I had drunk his coffee made with water that never got past a simmer, and there was no water source in sight), he said that people gave it to him. He was very overweight, but I saw no food: I wonder how he comes by that necessity of life?
Fig.21: Al Atkey and his rig, near Border City, Alaska.

Just after leaving Al I met Josh, a serious cyclist bound from Anchorage to Edmonton. I told him about Al, leaving the decision whether to stop and chat up to him. He said that some little girls in the last settlement he had passed (Northway Junction) had offered to sell him water, and perhaps Al’s passage through had had something to do with that.
Josh was the last cyclist I would see before Fairbanks – within 24 hrs I had seen all the cyclists I would see on the trip, and three of the four had been within an hour!

The day was quite warm by now, and I bowled along nicely towards Northway Junction, but there was still a rubbing noise from my front wheel. I cleaned off the brakes, and the rubbing became intermittent and got louder each mile. By about 15 miles short of Northway Junction it had become a bumping as the wheel went around, and I realized that I had a serious problem. I stopped and examined the front tire: there was a huge swelling on it. I proceeded onwards gingerly knowing that the tire could explode at any moment. Periodic checks revealed that the swelling was increasing in size slowly, and I made sure not to go fast down any of the hills – very frustrating.
Fig. 22: The swelling in my front tire, 15 miles from Northway Junction, AK.

I arrived at the store in Northway Junction in the heat of the afternoon – the only time on the trip so far that I had felt hot. I asked the young girl keeping shop if I could use the store veranda to change my tire, and proceeded to replace the failed one with the spare. I had been carrying a spare because I knew before I left Austin that this front tire had a weak spot, though I think that the immediate cause for the failure was the roughness of the gravel stretches in the Yukon, and the penultimate cause that we had inflated the tire perhaps a little too much in Juneau. I had some difficulty getting the casings off and on the rim because of my weak thumbs, but a local person kindly helped me, and the job was all finished, cleaned up and the bike repacked within 70 minutes.

This settlement was a Native American one, and the owner of the store, contacted by telephone, did not seem too eager to let me camp in the campground. Also it was early, so I continued, hoping to get to Tok by night fall. However, I was getting tired and the hills were becoming closer together and steeper: also the temperature was dropping. By the time I reached a rest area 35 miles east of Tok, with a beautiful view across a lake to the ever-present mountains to the west, it was very late (10 pm) and quite cold.

I was too tired to put up the tent or cook, so I made a meal of the last of my bag of carrots (bought in Bellingham), my apples, trail mix and energy bars, unrolled my sleeping bag a considerable distance from my bike, and tried to sleep. Some mosquitoes had come out, so I had to use DEET, and then I heard a car apparently nosing around, so I went down and moved the bike to where it could not be seen from the road or rest area, but could be seen by me. I slept but could not get completely warm and so put my tent footprint over myself. About 2.00 am I was woken up by a strong and cold wind which blew away my tent footprint. Looking up I saw very threatening clouds coming from the north, but decided to just retrieve and anchor down my coverings. At about 6.00 am I got up to a strong NW wind, low temperatures, and a badly fibrillating heart, and was on the road at 6.30 am.

May 25th (Sunday): 15 mi S of Tetlin Junction to Cathedral Creeks, AK: 50 miles

After a short downhill stretch the road began a long, fairly steep climb. I could not deal with the cold, the wind or the hill in my present condition, and after 15 minutes put my thumb out half-heartedly for a lift. The first couple of cars did not stop, and then there was a 20-minute gap between northbound vehicles. A black bear scrambled up the bank on the left 100 yards ahead of me, crossed the road and went straight up the side of the cutting on the right. A car came by, I thumbed, it slowed down a little, continued on and then returned a couple of minutes later. The young driver asked if he could help, but it was obvious that he couldn’t since his car was loaded to the gills with household possessions and a young boy. Sadly I watched him go. I continued to ease up the long hill, with frequent rests, and finally found that I had stopped fibrillating. I got on the bike and began to ride, coming after a long struggle with the headwind and the hilly road to Tetlin Junction, where the road to Chicken and Dawson City turns off.
I thought that from here I would have an easier ride, since the road becomes flat and straight. However, the wind was now strong and directly in my face, my hands were numb with cold, and I could not use the left hand gear shift. I was averaging 7 miles an hour, and counting off each half mile in agony.

I finally reached the straggling outskirts of Tok, but could see no sign of any churches or any center at all. I stopped at Fast Eddy’s, a restaurant recommended by Milt Wiltse in Fairbanks. This was warm and looked very nice, but it was 10.45 and I needed directions to a Church and also a restroom. They told me that the churches were on the right, near the Visitor Center a ½ mile further on. When I got there this did not seem promising, but I turned off, and starting to explore one of the cross streets, found an Assembly of God Church. I was parking the bike there in order to ask about a Lutheran or Episcopal Church when a pleasant lady came along carrying a casserole dish. She began to give me directions to a non-denominational church, but then said, “We’re having a Potluck today, and the service is about to begin. Why don’t you join us?” This suddenly seemed a good idea, so I did. The ritual was simple: first hymns, then prayers, then a gospel lesson, then a short sermon by the Pastor, Joel Krise, a young and energetic person, and that was it. I knew none of the hymns, but the words were projected on a screen in front, and the singing was led by a young lady with a miked acoustic guitar and a strong and good voice. The prayers were interesting in that Juliet Churchill, an oriental (perhaps Philipino) gave a very emotional, and sometimes not English (Tagalog?) long prayer/praise session.

The potluck was wonderful, with many different dishes, including spaghetti and meatballs and chicken cacciatore, as well as fruits and pies, finished off with ice cream. The people were lively and I had some interesting conversations.

Then, after a quick visit to the Tourist Information Center, it was time to battle the headwind again. A glance at the map suggested that this would be the only problem, since the road appears to run alongside the Tanana River all the way to Fairbanks. This turns out to be misleading, but it was indeed dead flat and dead straight for the next 12 miles, funneling the wind and offering no shelter from it. However, on the north side of the road a bicycle path ran as far as the Indian village of Tanacross, and for a while I rode on this. Here the pines provided a slight wind break when the wind shifted a little to the north. But I soon gave it up, as the trail was badly (or not at all) maintained, with gravel cover near every driveway crossing and roots with occasionally sharp knees penetrating the tarmac everywhere, necessitating constant vigilance and swerving. In spite of this, the ride was a little easier than it had been before church and my excellent lunch. At Tanacross the bike path ended, and the road began to curve up into the mountains.

It was well on into the afternoon, and a few miles further on was Moon Lake State Recreation Site, a pretty spot where a few families were barbecuing and preparing to launch boats. There were also a large number of rather noisy teenagers who reminded me of Robert at home, and seemed vaguely threatening with their shrieking voices, exceedingly casual clothes and the drinks in their hands. Also, I could see no tent sites or showers and nobody was in the water, which looked cold. Camping here seemed a bit iffy in terms of getting clean or having any peace and quiet, and besides I had only done about 40 miles at that point, so I continued on. About 10 miles further on, just as the hills were getting rather steep, and the scenery beginning to be spectacular, I saw a sign announcing Cathedral Creeks B & B and Trailer Park on the left.

At first there seemed to be nobody around but two rather noisy dogs, but eventually a lanky man appeared, introduced himself as Art Blair, and showed me a rather nice cabin, complete with a stove in which a fire had already been laid. There was no running water, but a shower was available in the main house, and there was a dunny behind the cabin. A small electric cook stove enabled me to prepare a noodle dinner.

Art looked rather like Ned Slagle, an old colleague of mine from Sylva, North Carolina, and a bushy to beat all bushies. Tall, with wiry angular frame and features, and a wiry moustache. The cabin he showed me was, however, decorated in a very feminine fashion, and it turned out that Art was not the owner: he was a friend who was house-sitting while the owner, a Dutch lady named Chris Bentele, was back in Europe visiting relatives. I had a very good night's sleep, and next morning (Monday), Art cooked me a huge breakfast of eggs, bacon, tomato and pancakes. While doing so he told me some of the tragic history of the place: Chris and her husband had settled here and built a beautiful large house. One day they came back from a trip to town and found it burned down to the ground, possibly due to lightning. They had made the best of a bad deal and, with their two daughters, moved back into the older house on the site. Then Chris' husband had died suddenly, and she was left to raise her two daughters alone in the Alaskan bush.

The Cathedral Creeks are three small creeks that tumble from the mountains to the south into the Tanana River where it makes a bend around Cathedral Bluffs. The B & B lies between the two eastern creeks, and their soothing burble can be heard at night from the cabin.

May 26th (Monday): Cathedral Creeks to Delta Junction, AK: 85 miles

Road log: http://www.bellsalaska.com/myalaska/akhwypg5.html

Soon after leaving Cathedral Creeks I crossed Sheep Creek, the first small example of a very common phenomenon along the Alaska Highway: you go up hill to the creek and then down hill after you cross it. This is because most of the creeks have built alluvial fans or cones where they leave the mountains. Five miles later I crossed the Robertson River, a much larger stream whose sources are glaciers surrounding Mt. Kimbal (10,350 feet) at the east end of the Alaska Range. It, too, flows near the apex of a large flattened cone. Neither in Dot Lake (population 19) nor in Dry Creek was there anywhere to eat, but at Dry Creek there were ploughed fields north of the road, the first ones I had seen since leaving Bellingham.

Fig. 23: The Johnson River, AK.

The tremendous load of sediment from the Johnson River completely overwhelms the Tanana River where they join just north of Dry Creek: for many miles below this the Tanana is a braided river, whereas above it it is a "normal" meandering river.

Twelve miles north of Dry Creek the road crosses the Gerstle River on the Black Veterans' Memorial Bridge. This very impressive bridge was originally built in 1944 and is one of four "steel through truss-style" bridges on the Highway. It was renamed in 1993 as a tribute to 3,695 soldiers of the Army and the Corps of Engineers for their contribution in constructing the Alaska Highway. Just before I reached this bridge a huge moose elegantly ambled across the road a couple of hundred yards in front of me, silhouetted against the glow of the evening sun. The road now seemed to be passing through "civilization" – there were ploughed fields on both sides and signs for real estate developments along the north side. I passed a roadhouse, the Silver Fox, but decided not to stop, and then saw the Adam's Ribs BBQ on the left hand side. It appeared somewhat run-down but interesting, being housed in what looked like old Nissen huts. When I went inside it was huge – two large eating areas separated by a bar and service area – and not at all run down. The food was excellent, and my waitress was the lady who owned the place, along with her husband. They were from the lower 48 originally, but had been in Alaska a while, and by her account, seemed to have ended in the restaurant business almost by happenstance.

After finishing my meal, and having a very interesting chat with a couple from Fairbanks, Ruth and Larry Knapman, I cycled the remaining 10 miles into Delta Junction rather easily. However, by this time it was almost 10 pm, and I was very cold and could not understand how the teenagers sitting at the benches outside the Ice Cream Hut could be so comfortable in their minimal clothing. I had seen no place to stay as I came into Delta Junction, and there was nowhere open except the Ice Cream Hut. When I asked John, the owner, where there was to stay, he immediately offered me the use of one of the cabins that he had built, but never yet opened to guests, behind his business. There was no water, but he gave me a key to the bathroom at the Ice Cream Hut, and I was able to get fairly clean there before going to bed, and to use it in the night and again for my morning wash. The cabin was dusty from standing vacant so long, but otherwise very cosy: there was a good camp bed in it and a chair. I had a good night's sleep, but woke with some fibrillation.

May 27th (Tuesday): Delta Junction to Shaw Creek, AK: 22 miles, and Fairbanks.

The Alaska Highway ends officially at Delta Junction, but I felt so poorly and sore that I forgot to photograph myself and the bike at the official marker.

Still the infernal headwind, but otherwise a nice ride on a sunny but cool morning to Big Delta, where both the Richardson Highway and the Alyeska Pipeline cross the Tanana River. Here there is Rika's Roadhouse and Landing, originally owned by the Swedish widow of a local settler, it is now owned by a church group which farms in the area, and is heavily patronized by buses full of cruise-ship passengers. Here I had the best and cheapest food of the trip so far, and ate two breakfasts, but still could not shake the cold that seemed to permeate my body. I encountered the Knapmans again, and explored the grounds, which are an Alaska State Historical Park, with them. They were very knowledgeable about the history of the place, and I gradually warmed up in the bright sunshine.

Fig. 24: At Rika's Roadhouse, with the Alyeska pipeline crossing of the Tanana river behind me. I was chilled to the bone and very sore at this point.

I got back on the bike and headed towards Fairbanks, but my body was screaming with pain, and I only made it 11 miles, to the rather picturesque little inlet of Shaw Creek, before deciding that I had had enough, and put my thumb out for a lift. I only had to wait a few moments before Pat Doogan, driving a beat-up old red pickup, and pulling a boat trailer, stopped and offered me a lift. Pat turned out to be the recently-retired Assistant Attorney-General for Fairbanks, with a long history of working as a prosecutor in far-flung areas of Alaska. We had a very interesting conversation about crime and its causes as we approached Fairbanks past a couple of military airports and the commercial clutter around the town of North Pole, AK. We did not stop in North Pole, and I never went back there to sample its tourist delights, a very minor regret. As we passed through it I called my Fairbanks host, Milton Wiltse, and got directions to his house, and Pat insisted on driving me the whole way there.

That evening I had a wonderful shower and slept in a nice soft bed in a cozy warm room for the first time in eight nights. But I quickly found that sleep was impossible, as my face burned and there was an intense pain deep within my hands, very similar to the pain one feels on warming one's hands at a fire after getting them thoroughly chilled outside on a cold day. I had to get up twice to take aspirin before the pain subsided enough for me to sleep.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

E.N.BERRY, 2001: An Application of Butler’s (1980) Tourist Area Life Cycle Theory to the Cairns Region, Australia, 1876-1998. Unpub. Ph.D. thesis, James Cook Univ., Cairns, QLD.

Bicycle Alaska 2008: Instalment 1

noreply@blogger.com (John Berry) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:41:00 +0000

BICYCLE ALASKA, 2008

by

John Berry

Installment 1: Bellingham, WA, to Skagway, AK.

On May 7th (Wednesday) I left Austin, in the midst of a last minute rush creasted by my recent hospitalization (see previous post) and exacerbated by some unexpected items of work, for Seattle. At Seattle I found the Airporter Shuttle bus for Bellingham easily, but also found that there was great reluctance to carry my boxed bike on the bus, in spite of what I had been told by the company over the phone, and there was a charge for the bike that I had not been told about at all.

The Val-U Inn, at the bus terminal in Bellingham, turned out to be much nicer than its name. The first person I met there was a gentleman my age named Clint, from North Carolina, who was off on a shakedown test of his bike and BOB trailer as I arrived. He was going to do the Adventure Cycling Northern Tier route across the USA back to North Carolina. I immediately unboxed and reassembled the bike, only to find that the head preload bolt, a very vital part, was missing. I was able to ride the bike over to a nearby REI, where a kindly mechanic found a similar bolt and installed it. I bought a cooking set and fuel at the same time, as well as some waterproofing spray, and spent most of the evening spraying my panniers, tent bag, and windcheater, creating a nasty chemical odor in my room. This turned out to be one of the smartest things I have ever done, since most of my rides for the next ten days would involve rain or sleet.

I had allowed two nights at Bellingham so that I could solve any problems like the head bolt, and also provision myself at “Lower 48” prices. So the next day I loaded up the bike and went on a 12-mile shakedown ride to Fairhaven and the Chuckanut Ridge road in order to find out where the ferry terminal was and to make sure the bike was functioning perfectly. All was well with the bike and other equipment. The weather was sunny but very cool, and many trees had barely leafed out. “A very late spring,” they said. This was to be a constant refrain for the next month.

Chuckanut Ridge Drive had been highly recommended to me as a ride, but just as it started to get rural and beautiful there was a sign on a bridge with no shoulder and no sidewalk saying “No Bicycles on Roadway!” Soon after turning back I met two cyclists traveling south from Vancouver, BC, to San Diego. I warned them about the offending sign just ahead of them. I spent part of the evening shopping for items such as mosquito spray, freeze-dried meals and so on, at Fred Myers, the local version of Kroger, and the rest of it finishing up some paper work and preparing it to be mailed home.

May 9th (Friday):
Fig. 1: Waiting to Board the ferry 'Matanuska' at Fairhaven, Bellingham, WA

I packed, finished some correspondence, pedaled off to mail everything from the Post Office in Bellingham, and then onwards to the Ferry Terminal in Fairhaven, a pretty old town that has become a suburb of Bellingham. At the terminal I met Bill Walters, from Miami, Florida. Bill had a nice mountain bike he had spray-painted a uniform military drab and to the rear carrier of which he had strapped a plastic milk crate full of supplies. The rest of his equipment was in a giant rucksack on his back. Bill was planning to spend a month or so fishing the streams and lakes near the small towns of the Alaska Panhandle, and the bike was to get him from town to his fishing spots. It was painted olive drab to disguise the fact that it was an expensive bike, so that he could leave it in the bushes and it would not attract the attention of thieves.

On board the ferry Matanuska we went up to the Solarium, a covered portion of the upper after deck, and grabbed a plastic recliner each. Later arrivals pitched their tents on the unprotected part of the deck. There was a family (mother, father and teenager) from Maine ensconced on the starboard side under cover, and several older men as well as a young couple from Spain amidships, whereas the tents out on the deck were mainly occupied by young people, including several with musical instruments. Many of the tents were stuck to the deck with liberal amounts of duct tape. One of the older men in the group was Edison Shaw, an environmentalist, ham radio enthusiast and professional musician from Liberty, WA, who was on his way up to spend a week camping and fishing in the wilderness of Prince of Wales Island with a group of friends he had known for 15 years, but only over the airwaves.

We set sail into a cool, clear evening, with a tiny Coastguard cutter on each flank as “protection”, causing some amusement among the passengers as the machine guns on the cutters seemed from where we were to be little more than toys. The cutters stayed with us for nearly two hours before peeling off into the gathering dusk near the Canadian border.
Shortly thereafter we passed some of the deep-sea terminals of the port of Vancouver, and for a while we could se the lights of the ski resort on the mountain north of the city. But we saw little evidence of the city itself, and by the time we had passed the Vancouver area it was quite dark, and beginning to rain.

Edison set up his antenna on the ship’s railing and conversed with his ham friends ahead, and also told us about his eco-friendly life in the old Washington state mining district of Republic: he neither drove a car nor was on the electricity grid, but generated his own solar power, which was sufficient for his ham radio hobby and also for driving all his music-related equipment. He burned only two cords of wood each year for heating. He still traveled to gigs, courtesy of people who did have transport, and reminisced about some of the famous people he had played with in the past, including Austin’s Willie Nelson. Meanwhile the younger gang of tent dwellers got out their three guitars and one banjo and started to improvise in spite of the cold, wind and rain out there on the unprotected part of the deck.

May 10th (Saturday)

We woke up in the morning to more rain, but with steep mountain slopes plunging from the low cloud to the dark grey sea close at hand to both port and starboard. A tiny settlement on the western shore was disappearing into the mist behind us, and deep snow could be glimpsed on higher slopes to port through the occasional breaks in the lower cloud layer. This was, indeed the Inside Passage, with Vancouver Island on our left and the mainland to our right. A few of the deeper gullies were snow-filled to the sea: others contained roaring white waterfalls that leapt from rock to rock and then directly to salt water. And thus it continued all day.

In the evening all the musicians gathered in the bar and, led by Edison, ran through songs ranging from Negro Spirituals to Appalachian hymns, and from folk songs of the sixties to popular music of the nineties, including some original pieces. No-one enjoyed all this more than a very nice lady who was severely handicapped by cerebral palsy, and could only communicate by rushing all of her words out in a torrent between convulsions. I spent most of the time talking to Gary Clingman, district judge in the 5th Judicial District of New Mexico, and his son Phil, a Halliburton employee. Phil told me that all the employers in the oil patch are desperate for labor, and all a young man such as our son Robert would have to do is go to, for example, Midland, and visit the drillers’ pipe yards to offer his services.

May 11th (Sunday):

I was awoken very early in the morning by the distinct motion of the vessel in swell, so that I knew we were nearing Ketchikan. Passing us to port was a large cruise ship, the Celebrity Infinity. However, as we neared Ketchikan the weather deteriorated, again becoming overcast and cold. We played a game of tag with the cruise ship, but eventually she was allowed through the final narrows ahead of us, and we docked in Ketchikan after her. Bill and I untied our bicycles and set off to explore the town, the center of which was about 2 km from the ferry terminal. Bill, who had opted to carry relatively little of his gear in the milk crate attached to the rear of his bike, and most of it in a rucksack on his back, soon found that riding was very difficult and strenuous. We were given varied directions to the hostel, and eventually found ourselves at about 9 a.m. at the Methodist church, which ran a hostel, but had not yet opened it for the season. The kindly minister there looked up the number for the other hostel in town, but both Bill and I got very bad “vibes” from speaking to the manager there, and independently concluded it would not be a good place to stay. The Methodist minister then told us that this man had sued his church for running a hostel and not paying the business franchise taxes.

Bill and I went down to the information center to see about other accommodations, but I had already decided to catch the late evening ferry coming from Prince Rupert, BC, and bound for Sitka. I had also got directions to the Lutheran Church, and decided to go to the service, arriving just in time as it was held at 10.30 rather than 11.00 am. A Norwegian gentleman took me in tow, and helped me stow my bike out of the drizzle. Proceedings began with a baptism and five confirmations – the names were Christianson, Christensen, Horik, Potter, and Pankow. It being Pentecost, for the prayers of the people they had people scattered about the church praying “in tongues” – I identified Latin, Greek, Spanish, Norwegian, etc. The service was somewhat charismatic, and the people were warm, but I found interim minister Connie McConnell’s voice rather cold. I was to learn that this was just the Alaskan “accent”. There was the usual social hour afterward, at which several people showed great interest in my trip. Several members of the congregation had done some bicycle riding between Alaska and Canada.

After the service I rode down to the native Museum at Saxman, about 6 miles south of town. This has the largest collection of totem poles anywhere, but unfortunately the Long House and the carving center were closed, so I contented myself with photos and rode back to town to eat brunch at the Pioneer Café, which had been recommended. This was just beyond the range of the cruise passengers, was very grungy, but still very expensive. I did not think that the food lived up to its reputation. By this time it was beginning to rain more heavily, so I toured the famous street (Creek Street) that had been, as recently as 50 years ago, a red light district built out over pilings in the river. Not much trace left of that, but the best tourist shop, selling minerals and artifacts, was owned by a lady from Australia. Another shop, the Fish Creek Company, had absolutely enthralling wildlife photos, and was owned by the photographer Hamilton Gelhar and his wife. Hamilton very kindly gave me two cards made from his photos, one a spectacular shot of a seagull in the act of taking off. The city museum had a 1920s photograph of a floating salmon cannery that just could have been the “Star of India” (then “Euterpe”), a steel three-masted sailing ship now in San Diego, but built in 1874 in Ramsey, Isle of Man, a few hundred yards from our grandparents’ hotel.

I thought that Bill and I had made arrangements to meet at the Information Center, but there was no sign of him there or along the road to the Ferry Dock, even though I rode some of it twice over in intensifying and cold rain. Very close to the Ferry Dock was a Best Western Hotel with a restaurant, The Landing, that had been recommended by a couple of people. So I parked the bike where Bill would see it, and went in, by now thoroughly chilled and soaked, for coffee. Somewhat alarmingly, the core of my body was chilled, and I had to keep my wet windbreaker on while in the café in an attempt to conserve heat. This was the beginning of a cold and sore throat that lasted for a week.

There I got talking to Tom Mullins, an ex-gold miner of somewhat prophetic aspect: he had long hair and beard, and carried a large and fantastically gnarled walking stick to compensate for his pronounced limp. He had been disabled in a mining accident and was in constant pain. He had worked at Bingham Canyon, UT, but had also prospected and mined extensively in SE Alaska before injuring his back. Bill Walters arrived at 7.00 p.m., and announced that he, to, was going on to Sitka, because there was nowhere to stay and little prospect of good fishing in this town. It was now very wet outside, and we had five hours to wait before we could even get onto the ferry. However, the restaurant staff, particularly one of the waitresses, were very kind and let us stay. When the restaurant closed we were able to wait the last couple of hours in the hotel lobby, which was not quite as warm. Bill chatted up the kind waitress as she came off shift, and suggested a series of ideas for businesses (focusing on a mobile coffee wagon) that she could open and succeed at. It was quite embarrassing.

Finally, at midnight, we were able to enter the ferry terminal and buy tickets for Sitka. We again found comfortable plastic reclining deck chairs under the canopy on the solarium deck, and immediately turned in. A couple of young guys who were already there were talking, mainly one of them telling about how he had been sentenced to prison for five years because, according to the story, a third person had been fatally shot when he had tried to disarm one of his friends who was trying to commit suicide.

May 12th (Monday)

This ferry, the Taku, was the most fun of all, partly because there were several families of Australian and New Zealand travelers of about my age on board, including one couple who had been on the Matanuska.

Again we were woken up in the early morning by the motion of the ship in swell, signaling that we were close to Wrangell. The approaches to Wrangell were along a very narrow channel with tidal currents so strong that waterfalls formed over rocky obstructions. On arrival Bill and I walked into the town (the only one along the ferry route in which the ferry docked close to downtown).

The Taku then proceeded through the famous Wrangell narrows to Petersburg. These narrows were, however, not as spectacular as those south of Wrangell.

I got very friendly with Bob and Jan Johnston, from Christchurch, New Zealand, and also a mother and daughter from Australia. There were several younger Aussies on board, as well as a nice couple from Liverpool. There was also a rather prissy fellow, Dana Conley, who was the mayor of Deer Island, New Brunswick, right on the USA border.

At Petersburg a group of us tried to walk to town, but there was only time to get to the very edge: I stopped behind the others to buy a cup of coffee and ask the young girl selling it about the Norwegian heritage of the town. Her grandfather had come out from Norway as a child of 5, but nobody in the family now spoke Norwegian, and only a few people in the town. Petersburg is very compact and has hundreds of boats squeezed into its harbor. It is the one town in the panhandle that I wish I could have spent more time in.

Our stop in Kake was as brief as that in Petersburg, with no chance to go to town – however, we did get to a hotel run by the native corporation, and several of us photographed a spectacularly moss-covered roof nearby. As we left Kake I was able to use the cell phone to book a room for two at the Super 8 Motel in Sitka, thus removing a huge worry, since arrival in Sitka is scheduled for 12.30 a.m., the weather was cold and threatening, and the ferry dock is 7 miles from town.

After leaving Kake we entered Chatham Sound, which had a large swell coming straight from the ocean. The wind became quite strong and there was a lot of rain with some sleet. Here we saw a humpback whale and porpoises. I listened in to old fishermen telling about bad storms in this area, and near fatal experiences after being capsized in Peril Strait. By the time we entered the narrow, and very impressive, channel leading to Sitka it was almost dark.

The ride in from the ferry terminal was like the one at Ketchikan, except that it was dark and neither of us had a headlight, although I had a rear light. I had a headlight with me, but it was useless because my new handlebar bag was mounted so high on the bars that it completely blocked its light. It was impossible to see the road against the headlights of the rare vehicles, and barely possible to see it when there were no cars. It was also bitterly cold, with snow flurries: my fingers were completely numb for the first of many times on this trip. Bill was again riding very slowly because of the pack on his back, and I lost him near the end, when he stopped to make an adjustment of some sort and didn’t yell to let me know. He arrived as I was checking in to the Super 8 at 2.00 a.m.: it had taken an hour and a half to ride 7 miles!

May 13th (Tuesday):

Bill got up at 8.30 am and went off to Victoria’s Café, which was strongly recommended by the motel staff. I followed, but while passing the Russian Cathedral I saw some ladies watering and weeding flower boxes. They were members of the Lutheran Church doing a work day, and I was led in to meet their pastor and leader, and to be given a tour of the church. From the outside it is inconspicuous, as it is a modern concrete building and an integral part of the commercial buildings. This is because it has burned down twice in its history, the last time having been in 1993, when all that was saved was the most precious contents of the church and one concrete wall. This fire started in the heating system. The previous fire, in 1966, had burned down a large section of downtown, including St. Michael’s orthodox cathedral. The latter had been rebuilt exactly as it was, but the Lutherans had rebuilt in more modern style. They had saved a very old organ, some paintings and altar furnishings from both fires, and the original font had been located being used as a birdbath several years after the second fire, and is now back in the church.
Fig. 2: Old house in Sitka.

In other ways the histories of the two churches are closely linked. Finnish carpenters (many of them ethnic Swedes, judging by their names) were brought out by the Russian America company to build Sitka in 1843, and they petitioned for their own church. They were given a piece of ground next to the site for St. Michael’s Cathedral as long as they built the Cathedral first, which they did.

Bill and I spent some time looking around the Murray Pacific fishermen’s outfitting store: this was fascinating as it catered to the commercial fishermen and had hooks and lures of types and in large sizes that I had never seen before. It also had very reasonable prices on many things, including weatherproof clothing. Before leaving Sitka I bought a pair of rubber gloves there, but I chose unwisely. They kept the wind from my fingers, but otherwise provided no warmth, and constricted the blood supply. Everywhere he went Bill interrogated people about the fishing, and everywhere got different answers. After climbing Castle Hill (the site of the original Russian fort and later, of the Russian governor’s mansion) we had a good lunch at “The Deli” nearby. Bill and I then split up, he to find out more about fishing and me to tour St. Michael’s cathedral and the Museum, which had very interesting displays about WWII, especially the Japanese invasion of the Aleutians and the American evacuation and poor treatment of the Aleutian people. A display there said that Sven Waxell (a Swede?) on Vitus Bering’s (definitely a Dane) expedition discovered Alaska for the Russians on July 16, 1744.

I then rode out to the Sheldon Jackson Museum of ethnological artifacts. This is a mile or two out of town on the campus of Sheldon Jackson College, which went bankrupt and closed down almost without notice a year or two ago, stranding many students within a year of obtaining a degree. Sheldon Jackson was a Presbyterian missionary, one of several given Federal approval to set up schools around Alaska at a time when the Federal Government had no funds to do so. He was the most able, and was also a fanatical collector of the native cultural artifacts. The museum is excellent, though rather overwhelming. It is separately funded from the College, as is a fish hatchery across the road, so these two institutions have survived the fall of the college. I visited the fish hatchery, but learned little, as there were no guides or explanations, it being run by volunteers.

I then continued on the bicycle to the Sitka National Historical Park, which covers the site of an important 1804 battle between the Russians and the Tlingit, and has a museum with several very old totem poles as well as good explanations of the motives for carving poles and the motifs that are carved on them. The park also has many trails leading to the site of a Russian fort and to a memorial marker for the Russians and Tlingit who lost their lives in the battle. There are totem poles with explanations along all of these trails. In several places in the park were very obvious blowdowns, with uprooted trees all lying in the same direction. Judging from the moss cover and the state of decay of the trees, these were of several different ages. People I asked about it had no idea of when they might have occurred. The winds causing them seem to have been mainly from the southeast.

Fig. 3: Memorial marker for the Russians killed in battle with the Tlingit, Sitka National Historical Park.

After a search I found a restaurant cheap enough to eat dinner at, the Wok and Teriyaki, and had a good meal of Mongolian Beef. The sun had come out for a couple of hours in the afternoon, but this was still a raw day, especially in the evening.

Bill had ridden up to Blue Lake, the water supply for Sitka and a famous fishing spot. He had met there a fisheries biologist in full diving gear, who had told him that the fishing was no good because the water was still too cold.

May 14th (Wednesday)

The day began early again with breakfast at Victoria’s Restaurant, enlivened by the presence of Sasha, a very nice brand new Ukrainian waitress, and the ejection of a crazy woman who wanted to be given money to go back to California, but who also told of having been previously given the fare and having used it for something else. Then in came an older local on a bicycle, who Bill grilled about fishing and from whom he received a report about Blue Lake that completely contradicted what he had learned the previous evening from the biologist. But he also learned that the lake and river flowing through town were good fishing spots. This local gentleman turned out to have owned a series of motorbikes, including a Honda 50c.c.in the 60s. In the same era he had toured Canada on a Honda 160 c.c., a machine very similar to my Honda Dream. He is the only other person I have met who has done a major tour in North America on so small a motorbike. So we had a good conversation about old Hondas!

After breakfast I toured the old Russian Bishop’s House, which is very Finnish in construction – the original round logs were adzed flat on the inside of the house after it was finished! Lots of moss and dried grass was used for chinking the walls and also for insulation under the false floor. I then went to the Tlingit Dance demonstration in the cultural center. This was quite interesting and very charming, for the announcer was a teenage girl and one of the principal dancers a boy of about nine. Another dancer was a young lady with an infant on her hip (Fig.4).

Fig. 4: Tlingit Dancer, Sitka Tlingit Cultural Center.

I checked out of the hotel, went to Murray Pacific and bought the useless gloves, and cycled off to the ferry terminal. By the time I got there a steady rain had set in, and I had stupidly decided not to stop and put garbage bags over all my panniers and other bags, so I arrived at the terminal soaking wet and with my belongings soaking wet, including some of my papers.

At the terminal I met Sarah Wallace, from Glasgow, who had been on the Taku all the way from Ketchikan. She is a law student at Glasgow University who has just finished a year of studying abroad in Vancouver. When we got aboard the ferry I met Helena Hrubesova, from Prague, who again had also been on the Taku. I introduced the two young ladies, who got along famously and compared their plans for their lives, which in both cases involved lots of travel and, perhaps, settling down to practice law in a foreign country. After this trip Sarah would meet her parents in Vancouver for a tour of Canada, but Helena was off to Whitehorse, Yukon, to work for the summer.

Bob and Jan, and Kieran and her mother from Melbourne were also on this ferry, the MV Fairweather, a smaller but faster vessel than the previous two ships, but with a similar layout except for the lack of staterooms. We ended up with a fluid group of Aussies and New Zealanders in the observation lounge, with Bob and I running out periodically to take photographs. There was also a very pleasant family from Michigan, who seemed to have traveled the world on a low budget.

We arrived at Juneau at 4 pm in driving rain. The ferry terminal is 13 miles from downtown, and so ensued the “ride from hell” into town in the teeth of a nasty headwind and blinding wind, with the temperature no more than 40°F (5°C). The only road, Egan Drive, soon turned into a virtual freeway, and there were some honks from impatient drivers, especially where there was an interchange under construction and the road was hemmed in by concrete barriers. The edges of the road were thick with black volcanic mud that had been used during the winter for de-icing, so me and the bike were both soon filthy also. I was frozen and exhausted, my nose running like the Mississippi by the time I got into town and stopped at a takeout pizza place to get directions to the hostel. There was some discussion about where the hostel actually was, and it turned out to be some distance up a very steep hill near the center of town: the hill was so steep, in fact, that I could only push the bike a few paces at a time before having to rest.

The Juneau International Hostel is just a little house, men’s dorm in the basement, women upstairs. My bike was caked with mud from the road, and I was frozen and soaked. It may have been on this ride that my fingers began to lose sensation. The first thing I had to do, as on the boat from Ketchikan, was to try to clean and dry everything. The flap of one of my new panniers had filled with water because the zip had not been closed all the way, but otherwise they were waterproof. But my clothes and the panniers themselves were all filthy, and some of the papers in my handle bar bag were wet. It took a couple of hours to sort everything out, and I had no dinner before going to bed. Dana Conley from New Brunswick was in the next cot to mine, and Helena Hrubesova and her boyfriend were also there – he had also been on the Taku. The Hostel is right around the corner from the Russian Orthodox Church, which was built in Russia and brought to Juneau in 1894 at the request of the Sauke Bay Tlingit, who had decided that they wanted to adopt Christianity in its Russian form. Unfortunately, the church was locked the whole time I was in Juneau.

May 15th (Thursday)

After having breakfast at the Silverbow Backroom Deli/Coffee shop, which was good, though expensive, I wandered downtown. The Celebrity Mercury was in dock, the town was full of tourists, and there was a row of booths at the cruise ship quay where touts were selling bus tours, whale watching tours, and flight-seeing.
Fig. 5: Juneau: view from the waterfront showing avalanche-prone slopes overhanging the city.

Several booths were offering inexpensive bus trips to the Mendenhall Glacier. The driver of our bus gave a running commentary on the history of Juneau and the glacier as we drove out. On arrival at the glacier I took the East Glacier Trail, which is about 3 miles long and goes closest to the glacier. Because the glacier has retreated considerably since the trails were laid out, it no longer goes as far as the glacier. The trail turned out to climb high up the mountainside and to offer magnificent views of the glacier snout. About ½ mile into the trail I encountered four people walking as fast as they could back to the Visitor Center. They warned me not to proceed because they had encountered a bear ahead – he had been up a tree and had clambered down onto the trail. I continued, but began clearing my throat repeatedly, which was easy because of my developing sore throat. I saw plenty of bear prints on the trail, but no bear and only four people on the whole length of the trail.

Fig. 6: On the trail above Nugget Creek, Mendenhall National Park.

This trail ends high above Nugget Creek, which falls spectacularly into Mendenhall Lake, which itself was covered with small icebergs calved from the Glacier. Apparently the ice on the lake had only broken up that weekend (May 10th). From its high point the trail drops steeply by means of about 150 wooden steps through moss-blanketed rainforest. Here the salmonberries were in glorious pink flower, and the thorny Devil’s Club had green tips, while there still patches of snow several hundreds of yards long to be crossed. Occasional periods of sunlight turned the wet green world glisteningly magical. Here a local lady who was almost running the trail took a photograph for me.

After spending some time listening to the presentations in the Visitors’ Center, and trying to find someone to identify the plants I had seen, I went down to the beach, where I ran into

Fig. 7: Snout of the Mendenhall Glacier.

Helena Hrubesova and her boyfriend as well as Bob and Janet Johnston and Dana Conley. Helena and boyfriend were burdened with their full backpacks, as they had decided to visit the glacier on their way back to the ferry terminal. Bob and Janet had somehow got themselves onto a boat on the lake, and had driven it in among the icebergs to the foot of the glacier, ignoring warning signs. Dana and I walked to the foot of Nugget Falls. I then walked the nature trail, which had explanations of the Beaver Dams to be seen, but had to cut that short to catch the bus back to Juneau.

Fig. 8: At the foot of Nugget Falls, Mendenhall Glacier.

Back in Juneau I visited the Red Dog saloon in search of a very late lunch, but found it crowded with tourists and lacking service, although there was a very humorous musician performing. I eventually found a very expensive and not very good lunch of hamburger and fries at the Raven's Café, inside the Imperial Bar on Front Street. I then visited the Alaska State Museum, which is mostly about wildlife and ethnography, and largely duplicates the Sheldon Jackson Museum in Sitka.
I climbed the stairs from there to the Governor’s Mansion, and met a man called David, an ex-Alaska Marine Highway employee, with whom I had had a long conversation about politics and energy on the Taku en route to Sitka. On the way back to the hostel I stopped at Rainbow Foods, Juneau’s natural food stores and a rather squirly place, to buy dinner (chowder, trail mix for the cycle ride, and fruit). I was not feeling very well – chilled and a sore throat, and so read the newspaper at the hostel and lost the chance to take a ride along Basin Road, which apparently goes past the old A-J mine workings.

During the evening I found that one of my fellow guests was a keen cyclist and bike mechanic from Colorado. He volunteered to go over my bike: I had been having some trouble with the derailleur adjustment. We checked the head tightness again and found that it needed tightening again. We also cleaned the bike, lubricated the drive mechanism, and adjusted the gears.

May 16th (Friday)

Woke up to heavy rain, but was offered pancakes for breakfast by the nice family from Michigan, first met on the way here on the MV Fairweather. I stored my packed bags in the outside shed (found with some difficulty and some help from Dana Conley), and set off to tour the Alaska Capitol, which is the ugliest and strangest that I have seen. It appears to be an ordinary early 20th Century office building, onto the front of which someone has added four Corinthian columns to give it dignity, but with no attempt to integrate them with the design of the rest of the building. The columns are of a schistose impure marble which was either never polished or has weathered badly. This colonnaded front entrance is in the middle of the block on a narrow street, and so neither commands a view nor can be seen from anywhere except the street directly in front of it. Inside, however, the building is a true capitol with the usual senate and house rooms, committee rooms, and member offices. The walls are lined with interesting historical photographs.

I also visited the Juneau Museum briefly. Here are documented the beginnings of Juneau in 1880 as a gold camp, and its flourishing through the operations of the Treadwell and Ready Bullion Mines across the Gastineau Channel in Douglas, to its peak with the Alaska-Juneau (“A-J”) Mine (practically in downtown Juneau), the biggest and best run gold mine of its time. This mine did not shut down until it was declared non-essential to the war effort in 1944.

I returned to the hostel, loaded the bike, and gingerly set off down some side streets to avoid the very steep hill on Harris. I was told by the driver of an AT&T van that I was going the wrong way on a one-way street, and took the opportunity to ask him about cycle shops. He strongly recommended Glacier Cycles on the way to the airport and lent me his cell phone to talk to them, and also told me how to find and stay on the cycle track out to the airport. This I did, enjoying a much more pleasant ride because of the lack of traffic, but enduring again the cold and the increasing rain.

By the time I found the bike shop, at the entrance to the airport, I was cold and miserable. The forks were tightened, and I remembered to buy an extra puncture repair kit. I then set off in search of a restaurant. There were no obvious choices, and my directions were a bit confusing, so I stopped a couple of times for advice. I finally settled on the Canton House Chinese Restaurant, which was quite posh and where the staff looked somewhat askance at a wet and messy cyclist. On looking for my blue plastic British Rail ticket holder, which I use as a bill-fold to hold my most important documents (driver's license, Visa card, medical card and a $20 bill) when running, I found it missing. In rising panic I considered all the places where I could have packed it or left it, and paid the bill with my MasterCard. Just as I was doing so my cell phone rang. It was Cherry Hamilton from the The Hearing Center, next to where I had first stopped to ask someone for directions to a restaurant. She had found it on the ground, gone back to her office and looked me up on the internet White Pages, immediately found my telephone number, and called me. Cherry even asked me some questions to verify that she had the right person before telling me that she had found the billfold. What an enormous feeling of relief: the trip would not end here in Juneau in disgrace, but would go on! I immediately went to The Hearing Center to pick up my billfold, and gave Cherry a grateful hug. She was a lovely lady! I must remember to send her a gift when I get home (I sent her a stuffed Armadillo).

The rest of the journey to the Ferry Terminal was, as usual, wet and cold, but when I got on board the Malaspina (departed Juneau 4.30pm, arrived Skagway 11.00pm) I immediately encountered Bob and Jan from Christchurch and Kieran and her mother from Melbourne, as well as a nice couple from Manchester. Bob and Jan had taken the public bus to the end of the line, and then walked the last two miles in the rain with their rucksacks on their backs. Again we had a moveable feast going in the observation lounge, and spotted some whales and many eagles among the rocks. Darkness fell as we approached Haines.

At Skagway I cycled directly to the hostel, but got the wrong house on the first attempt, and woke the owner/manager’s husband when I got it right, since she had left him in bed while she collected the customers from the ferry. This was a very strange hostel: there was an outside dorm in what had probably been a garage, and several inside dorms. At first I was put in the outside dorm, but it was full, so I was put in an inside dorm with three young Americorps women leaders and one other guy. The hostel was very untidy and somewhat disorganized, but the owner (Alice?) prepared home-made read every day.

May 17th (Saturday).

This day was spent unnecessarily in Skagway – there is not enough to do there (even with some errands to run) to fill two whole days, and I could have taken the noon train out. The weather, though, was still cold with a very low overcast and occasional rain, so perhaps by delaying I ensured better weather for the beginning of my ride. I had the bike checked again (the gears were not quite right), bought pepper spray (all the shops in Skagway were out of proper bear spray) and a water filter system that would fit on the bicycle, and visited the local museum, which again focused on the gold rush days. I did not figure out how to use the filter system until I got to Fairbanks, which meant that I had to beg water on a couple of occasions while on the Alcan Highway.

At the station I bought my ticket to Fraser, BC, on the White Pass and Yukon railroad, and at the National Park Service office, also in the station, I watched the movie "City of Gold," narrated by Pierre Berton, a prominent Canadian journalist and TV personality. This movie won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1957 and was nominated for an Oscar: it is a documentary about Berton's hometown, Dawson City, Yukon, during the gold rush. The photography is beautiful and the shots of buildings that had been in glamorous use during Berton's childhood but that were abandoned and tumbling down by the fifties are heart-rending. In his calm, soothing voice Berton tells of the slow death of Dawson in the form of a series of reminiscences of his childhood. He also points out that during its heyday in the Gold Rush the Mounties exerted such firm control that there was not one murder in the city, and that all business activities shut for Sunday so that church services could be held. The relationship between Skagway and Dawson City is interesting: Skagway seems to play Mr. Hyde to Dawson's Dr. Jekyll. In Skagway much is made of the efforts of the Mounties to ensure that everyone had adequate supplies to survive the winter, and the control they maintained over the Chilkoot Pass and in Dawson. In Dawson much is made of the glamorous, corrupt and violent side of life in Gold rush Skagway. They both seem to feed on each other's past: Dawson is incomplete without the excitement of Skagway, and Skagway needs the calm control of Dawson as counterpoint to its own lack of control.

I visited the city museum in the McCabe College building, an impressive 2½-storey granite edifice put up in 1899 to house Alaska's first institution of higher learning. It is somewhat hidden in the woods three blocks off Main Street, and backs up to the White Pass and Yukon tracks. Since 1961 it has served both as the Museum and as City Hall. On the lot to the south is nothing but a lonely chimney, all that remains of the once famous Pullen Hotel, which closed and was abandoned in 1957. The Museum has a fairly impressive collection of gold rush era artifacts, as well as the usual large collection of Native American objects.

The business area of Skagway is nothing but a tourist trap, living off the faded glory of the gold rush and off the hordes of passengers disgorged daily from the cruise ships. Like all cruise ports of call, it is filled with jeweler's shops, art galleries, and shops selling small but expensive trinkets.

I spent a chunk of the evening having a wide-ranging and frustrating discussion about energy and environmental issues with the slightly disabled nephew of the owner of the hostel. He seemed to be staying there long term while he desultorarily looked for work.
He was a greeny and a believer in conspiracies by the powerful to keep the rest of us poor and in the dark.

By bike from Texas to Alaska, or vice versa

noreply@blogger.com (John Berry) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:39:00 +0000

On Sunday, May 3rd, I will swim in the Capitol 2K race on Lady Bird Lake. The race starts at Red Bud Island, just below the Tom Miller Dam in West Austin, and ends at the Rowing Dock. My wife will be on board the local fake paddle steamer watching me - last year the boat nearly ran me down, since I finished almost last (in exactly one hour), and was almost the oldest participant.

We will then go to an ANZAC Day Barbecue, hosted near the Pemberton Castle by our new Austin New Zealand Australia Circle. Anzac Day commemorates Australian and New Zealand troops who fought at Gallipoli in World War I, and since two of my Scouser great uncles, Paul and Leonard Gaskell, ran away at the age of 16 and joined the 6th Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, which arrived at "that ill-fated battlefield" (in Paul's words - he wrote a small book about his experiences) on the 4th July, 1915, the occasion is very appropriate. Both uncles were wounded, repatriated, and discharged. They then started dating and going out to dances, and one of them was handed a white feather later in the war by a woman who was unaware that he had already done his duty by his country. Anyone who has read the book "The Four Feathers", by A.E.W.Mason, or any of the numerous films based upon it, will know what this meant. During World War I there was a movement, The Order of the White Feather, to coerce men into joining up by persuading women to present them with a white feather if they were not wearing a uniform. Both men died relatively young (before age 50) as a result of their wounds.

The next morning, Monday the 4th, I plan to leave for Homer, Alaska, by bicycle. This will be the second-half of my trip from the northeasternmost accessible point on the North American continent to the most southern point of the continental USA, and then up to the northernmost and northwesternmost points accesible by road. This trip is also an excuse to visit my brother Ted, who lives in Bethel, AK.

As I write everything is almost ready, except for my body: I have barely been on the bike in the last three months. So I'll have to start off slowly!

NOTE: many months later (Dec). Things did not turn out quite this way. I ended up being hospitalized for a heart catheterization just before the Cap 2K swim. A routine check at the cardiologist revealed a lengthened Q-T interval which, if I have the medical science and terminology right, suggested that I was due for a major heart attack. However, the catheterization revealed no blockages, and my doctor concluded that I had merely strained my heart in a recent 10K race. He therefore reluctantly gave his "approval" for me to go to Alaska.
Due to the late date of my departure and the schedules of some people I wanted to visit in Alaska, I reversed my route, and flew to Seattle on May 7th. The story is told in the following instalments.

Zambian Stories

noreply@blogger.com (John Berry) — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 23:45:00 +0000

The windows of the house falling out, and Artie Nel.

On arrival in Kitwe in July 1966, Arlene and I spent the first 10 days in the brand-new Edinburgh Hotel, while the company made a house ready for us. What luxury – Crayfish Meuniere at 15/- (about $US$2.00), and a good Tournedo for even less! Never had either of us had it so good.

But all good things must come to an end, and after 10 days we moved into a house in “The Gulch” – a crescent of semi-detached bungalows near the Convent in which Anglo American Corp put all of its new employees. The evening that we moved in, we realized that the place was literally seething with cockroaches, and so, after killing as many as we could and unpacking our suitcases (it would be a couple of months before any trunks arrived: they had been shipped to “Chartered Exploration – Lusaka. In bond via Beira”) we fell into an exhausted sleep.

The next morning I went to see Mr. Nel, over in the AAC offices opposite Coronation Square - the rumor was that the bigwigs over there refused to have the exploration offices in their building, because we geologists left big muddy bootprints all over their nice clean carpets. Mr. Nel obviously DID NOT like it that I was complaining, and immediately launched into an emphatic speech: “Look, Mr. Berry, we are not in London and we are not in New York, we are in the middle of Effrika, and there is nothing I can dew about a few cockroaches. You will just have to learn to live with them!” So I went over to Diamond’s Supermarket and bought a Communist Chinese stirrup pump and some really nasty bilious yellow poison to go in it.

That evening we sprayed in all the nooks and crannies in the kitchen, and at everything that moved. I was really angry at Artie Nel, so I gathered a couple of hundred dead or dying cockroaches into the pages of the day’s “Times of Zambia”, and went to bed.

The next morning I went over to his office again, newspaper in hand, to be greeted by the same tirade: “Look Mr. Berry, I have told you once and I will tell you again, you are not in London and you are not in New York….” I interrupted his speech by dumping the dead and sticky cockroaches all over his desk, and walked out. The next day the exterminators came around to the house.

About a week later, as I shut the door of the living room on the way to bed, the entire outside wall of the room fell out, with a mighty crash of breaking glass. The wall consisted of a wooden frame holding a row of louvered windows which ran the length of the room: the frame had been completely consumed by termites. Again, I went over to Artie Nel’s office, to be greeted by, “Gott, Mr. Berry, I hev told you before and I’ll tell you again, we are not in New …” This time, however, he was obviously fed up with my complaints and was not going to do anything about it, even if the sky had fallen in. I had no evidence to dump on him, so I had to get my boss, Pete Freeman, involved, and we got the maintenance crew out within a couple of days.

The fire at the petrol depot

One Sunday soon after we arrived we were awoken from a mid-afternoon nap by the shouts of children outside, and immediately realized from the low rumble, almost pressure waves rather than audible sound, that permeated the air, that something was badly wrong. Leaping up, we could see from the window a huge column of black smoke rising from the Light Industrial Area. We jumped into the car and drove out to the Chingola Road, from where we could soon see that one of the large tanks at the Petrol Depot, the only one in town, was ablaze. We drove down the London Road and joined a small knot of spectators watching workmen rolling 44-gallon drums of petrol away from the blazing tank, through thick smoke and enormous heat. The men were showing incredible courage, and managed to get most of the 44-gallon drums away from the fire.

However, we heard later and read in the morning papers that, on the other side of the fire, the side that adjoined an African township, UNIP Youth agitators had incited a small riot against whites. This had spilled over onto the main road, where rocks were thrown at the cars coming into town from Chingola. A lady was killed by a rock that came through her windscreen.

This incident caused a drop in the petrol ration from 10 imperial gallons per month to 8 gallons, which was a real hardship for anybody who did not live close to work.

Robson's Old Shoes

Our gardener was an older African, a Lunda by tribe, named Robson. Robson was a tiny person, hardly over 5 feet tall, with a shiny bald head.

One day while I was out supervising his work, I noticed as he knelt down to plant something that the upper of one of his boots had come completely adrift from the sole. I pointed this out to Robson, and asked him if he needed money to get repairs made, to which the answer was "Azikulo indaba, Bwana, ena fanikaso lo clocodile!" (No problem, Boss, the boot is just like a crocodile!).

When a Child is Ready for School.

After working for us for a while, Robson moved his much younger wife and small son into the khaiya, or servants' quarters, adjoining our garage. The little boy was soon helping Robson with various gardening tasks, although he was no more than just four years old. Pretty soon we noticed that, not only did he speak ChiLunda, Robson's language, but he was also learning a lot of ChiBemba, the dominant African language of the Copperbelt, as well as a little English.

We thought he seemed pretty smart, so one day we asked Robson why he hadn't sent him to school. Robson called the child over and gave him what seemed to be an order. The boy reached over his head with his right arm and attempted to touch his left ear. Of course, he could not, as his head was still much too large in relation to the length of his arm. Whereupon Robson announced, "You see, Bwana, he can not bite him hear." "We said, "Robson, what has that got to do with school?" "Ah, Bwana, when he can bite him hear, then he is old enough to go for sukool! See?", and he reached over his own head and could easily grab hold of his ear on the other side.

The Biggest Snake in the World.

One day, I was trying, with Robson's assistance, to clear the drain of a little concrete pond in our back yard. The drain was a buried 1-inch I.D. iron pipe. Standing water was a problem in Zambia, as it quickly attracted mosquitoes and these brought malaria. I had a very long piece of wire, long enough to reach all the way from the outflow back to the pond, but for a long time I could not get it go far in, and had difficulty getting it back out of the pipe. Suddenly it came free, and with it not only a rush of putrid water but a 7-foot long, thin black snake which fortunately was very nearly asleep, since it matched exactly the description and picture of a Black Mamba (this was in the Zambian winter, when night-time temperatures regularly drop to around 40 degrees F.).

We quickly killed the snake with a hoe, and then got to talking about snakes in general. Robson: "Bwana, what is the biggest snake in the world?"
"I'm not sure Robson, but I think the South American Anaconda must be the biggest. It's a constrictor, like a python."
"How big is this Anaconda, Bwana?"
"Oh, I think it can reach 70 feet."
Robson looks appraisingly across the yard, which we both know is about 120 feet, and then
"Aikhona, Bwana! That is not a very big snake!"
"What do you mean Robson."
"Ah, Bwana, a long time ago, before the Mzungu (white man) came, my father was on the way going to Mwata Yamvo to see the King."

Mwata Yamvo, now in the Congo about 200 miles north of the northwesternmost corner of Zambia, was the capital of the western Lunda Empire. Before dividing into two halves in the nineteenth century, the Lunda Empire had controlled the entire south-central part of Africa, including parts of Angola, most of Zambia, all of southern Congo, and even parts of Tanzania and Malawi. The Lunda had for centuries been strong enough to prevent any over land contact between the Portuguese colonies of Angola on the west coast and Mozambique on the east coast. During the grab for Africa the western Lunda lands had been divided accidentally and almost equally between Zambia, the Congo, and Angola.

"Robson, that's a long way. Why did your father have to go to see Mwata Yamvo."
"Bwana, my father was a very important man, a councillor, that is why. It was eight days to Mwata Yamvo and eight days back again."
"And so, your father saw a big snake."
"Ah, Bwana: he is being for five days on the road, and he is coming to a mukulu kamuti (a big tree lying down across the way). This kamuti is so mukulu he is for cutting another chimuti (tree) to make a ladder. He is for leaning the ladder up against the kamuti, he is for climbing up the ladder, ten steps, eleven.....twelef...Ah! The kamuti is for moving! It is a snake! My father he is for jumping off and hiding behind a big tree. After a while no more movement, so my father he turns to the left and he goes half a day through the bhundu (bush). Always the snake on the right. So he is for turning around and going for a half day to the right. Still the snake. Then he goes another two hours and finally he is come to the tail of the snake, and he is for walking around it and carrying on to Mwata Yamvo."

"Bwana, THAT is a mukulu snake!!"

The Witch

The watchman in my camp on the Chibuluma Road was Samson, who was a wizened madala (old man) of 59. One day Samson was on the way to the neighboring village when he met Lashwell's 7-year-old daughter coming home to camp, crying bitterly. Samson, who was a kind man and a Christian, stopped and asked her what was the problem.

"Ai, maningi indaba, Bwana Samsoni, I have dropped the bottle of salad (cooking oil) that my mother sent me to get, and it is broken. I will be beaten at home."

Samson reached in his pocket and gave the girl a susu (sixpence, about a nickel in American money in those days), and told her to go and buy another bottle.

Several weeks later, the girl's little brother James, about four years old, became exceedingly sick. He already had a distended belly and was very weak, but he was now covered in sores and declining further. My head-man, Chileshe, asked me to talk to the parents, because he and the others in camp recognized the symptoms of kwashiorkor, and they knew that the family's diet consisted almost entirely of sudza (mealie or corn meal) and Fanta orange soda.
I tried to explain to the parents that they needed to eat some relish (the local word for any protein or vegetable that was eaten along with the mealie meal staple), and gave them some examples. However, the situation grew worse and I had to take little James to hospital.

In the midst of all this Samson told me that he had to go to the Local Court. There were two systems of justice in Zambia, the "European" system and the local system. Serious crimes and those involving expatriates were tried in the European Courts, which functioned basically under English Common Law. Minor offences were tried under the local system, in which the court consisted mainly of the village chief and his advisers.

I didn't think much about Samson's visit to court until Chileshe told me that Samson needed to borrow some money, because he had been fined. So I asked Samson what it was all about.

He told me the story of his encounter with Lashwell's daughter and his gift of sixpence to her. And then he told me that her parents therefore suspected that he had bewitched their son James and it was he, Samson, who was killing the boy. I couldn't believe this, so I asked Chileshe to explain it to me.

"Well, Bwana, Samson is not related to Lashwell or his family - in fact, he is from a different tribe. Therefore he has no reason to feel sorrow for the little girl or to help her. So the only reason he could have to help her is to gain occult power over her or one of her family members. So the parents believe that is why the boy is dying."

"But, Chileshe, why would Samson want to kill Lashwell's boy?"

"Aikona Bwana (I don't know), but Samson ena madala (is an old man). Maybe that is why."

"And the court believed Lashwell?"

"Ei, Mkwai (Yes, Sir), because Samson is very old, he should not be alive."

"And you believe this, too, Chileshe? How much was the fine?"

"I don't know if I believe it, Bwana, but Samson ena maningi madala (is VERY old). The fine was sine Kwacha, Bwana" (Four Kwacha (= six dollars)), Sir.)

This event gave me a completely different view of the New Testament stories of Jesus healing strangers and His parable of the Good Samaritan. From within the Christian tradition we have no difficulty in seeing a stranger in need as our brother, although we may have great difficulty in actually acting on the knowledge. But in Jesus' time, everybody would have had the attitude of the people in my camp: we see this even now in various parts of the world, including the Middle East. No-one would help a person who was not in some way bound to them, whether by kinship or other social bond. And we know from our own traditions and stories that most witches are old and wizened. So Samson's only crime was to have survived beyond the normal lifespan (about 50 in Zambia) and to have shown kindness.