I recently had some interesting news. This crazy little site received over 12,000 hits lats year. I know that’s nothing in the scope of web site hits, but I only send an email notice to a short list of friends when I have something new. I would be happy with just my friends checking it out. Check out the archived link on the right side of this page, and click on the top one to see more traffic. The photo below is the traffic in just four days. Who the hell are you people and why don’t you identify yourselves. You’re driving me crazy. I know it’s the CIA. It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you.
Check out this post I wrote two years ago on the same subject.
Winter is now on the way. This is the “termination dust” that is the harbinger of winter. This means that the old miners had six weeks to “terminate” their activities and prepare for winter.
While I was in Homer, AK I participated in the Save our Seas boat ensemble and photo shoot. The objective was to promote the problem that our seas are getting more acidic. This photo shoot featuring over one hundred boats in the shape of a giant SOS was supposed to go smoothly. The morning weather was perfect with blue skies and a few clouds. Five minutes before the shoot, a fog bank blew in and made the shoot quite difficult. The photographers were up in a helicopter trying to peek through the fog after the boats were in position. The “O” in SOS was easy. It was made up of kayaks tied together and anchored. The “S” on either side was made up of some very large fishing and crabbing boats that powered through the “S” for it’s shape. Each “S” had to begin at the same time, go the same speed, and turn in and around a couple of buoys to form the “S” in SOS. We had to do the maneuver six times until the helicopter could see the formation through the fog. As soon as the boats finished, the fog bank quickly left. Ain’t that the way it is.
Visited the Salty Dawg Saloon in Homer, AK to check out if the dollar my son and I stuck to the wall was still there. Couldn’t find it. I guess someone needed it for a beer.
Alaska is one of the best fishing destinations in the world. I have been fishing a few times but have yet to catch a fish. I have gone with real pros and have all of the right gear, but I just don’t get it. I guess that’s why they call it fishing and not catching. I go now to enjoy the outdoors with friends.
Went fishing and this was the most exciting thing we way that morning. Beluga whales were feeding in this cove. It was so quiet you could hear them breathing.
My son Chris and I went on an Alaskan adventure vacation to have the glacier experience. We were going to take the ferry from Whittier, AK to Valdez. Our first stop was Whittier. This city was created by the Army during WWII as an ice-free port that was kept secret from the Japanese. A two-mile tunnel had to be constructed through the mountains to access this small sliver of land. It initially had a railroad spur whereby the Army could unload supplies for the war effort in Alaska. It is a creepy little isolated town with a reputation for housing residents who want to be left alone – if you get my drift. I can hear the banjos playing off in the distance. Much of the city is an abandoned Army depot with a huge government building that can’t be demolished because it has asbestos and would all have to be trucked out through the tunnel at an amazing cost. So it stands calling to tourists and thrill seekers who want the scariest experience of their life if they have the courage to enter the facility at night.
The Alaska Marine Highway System begins many of their journeys from this port.
Waiting to enter the tunnel. One trip in each direction every half hour.
Cruising on the ferry from Whittier, AK to Valdez went through many islands and channels. It was raining most of the time so the visibility of wildlife was poor.
Cruising the channel.
More cruising.
Valdez oil facility. This is the end of the Alaskan Oil Pipeline and where the Exxon/Valdez oil spill began eighteen years ago.
Kayaking on the Columbia Glacier was an amazing experience. It rained all night but cleared up to be a wonderful day of paddling through the glacier waters. Check out the videos of paddling and then of the glacier areas.
Paddling the Columbia Glacier
Columbia Glacier
Does it get anymore amazing then this? YES!
Relaxing on an iceberg.
Notice who is doing the paddling.
On the boat to the glacier.
Blowing the rape whistle to keep him away.
Those two guys again but from another angle.
Our gang – and they all spoke French.
Found my chaise lounge.
Columbia Glacier is over forty miles long.
Looking out on to the ice flow. Next photo we will be on that point on the right.
McCarthy, AK is in the middle of nowhere. It is accessed by the outsiders via a foot and 4-wheeler bridge only. The forty residents pay $300 per year to access the private bridge down river. Ironically, there is fine dining in this rustic town. You can have a multi-star meal and then hike off to your tent.
In the middle of nowhere.
Original hotel from the mining days of the Kennecott mine five miles up the road.
This town is a gunslinger’s delight. You could have a great shoot-out here on this street.
This is Alaska, man, 4-wheeler, and large dog (translation, no wife).
Petting the OCD dog that only wanted to play stick.
One of the cool bridges on the 60-mile dirt road you have to drive to get there.
I have finally found where Tom Waits got his inspiration for his song Chocolate Jesus. It is from this little church in the middle of nowhere – McCarthy, AK. This simple looking church has it’s own prophet and other magical things.
My son Chris and I went on an all-day glacier hike. It just happened that we were the only ones on this tour so we had our own private guide – Kate. We hiked a couple hours into the glacier to the big stuff – crevasses, ice caverns, water falls, ice flows, huge ice valleys and mountains and little did we know – dangerous conditions. Check out our journey.
Don’t fall in there!
Don’t swim in there!
That’s all ice in those cone shapes.
More cones.
We walked across this peak without ropes. Scared the shit out of me.
Chris and Kate.
Don’t fall in there.
During the hike in – that’s all ice over 1,000 feet thick.
Ice boys.
Kate and Scott.
This was really steep! It looks deceiving.
Gonna take a dive to never never land.
River disappearing into a big frozen place a thousand feet into the glacier.
Don’t slip there!
Can’t see the bottom.
The new style – coolots on a glacier. Had to jack up my pants because the crampons kept grabbing my pants and trying to trip me at – always in inappropriate time – like when we were on a steep cliff of traversing a crevasse.
Drinking thousand year old pure water.
As the annual glacier rings are formed the ice can roll and turn over creating these flat trails between ice blocks.
The Kennicott copper mine near McCarthy, AK was a very productive mine from 1910 to 1938. It produced over $200 million of copper and in today’s money would be a couple of billion. It primarily fed the voracious appetite for copper to build the electrical wiring network on the East coast. The mine is five miles up in the mountains and transported the copper ore to the processing facility via overhead tram. These red buildings are the processing and sorting facility where they smashed and separated the copper from other rocks, bagged it and sent it via train to Cordova, AK and then to a smelter in Tacoma, WA via ship. The facility is fourteen stories high and utilized gravity to assist in the sorting process.
Now a national park with daily tours.
From the top.
On to Kennecott and the glacier.
Ore smashers.
Bulk sorting table.
Crusty miner at one of the sorting tables.
A few of the forty sorting tables.
Sorting table works just like panning for gold. Copper has a heavier specific gravity then the other minerals surrounding it and these mechanized tables shook the ore into these grooves where it was collected at one end as the waste flowed to the other side.
Ammonia tanks to leach out the remaining copper from the waste ore.
On our glacier hiking adventure we encountered some difficult terrain. This crevasse was about five feet wide, five feet deep with two feet of fast moving glacier water flowing through it. It snaked around to the right of the photo for another hundred yards and dropped into a forty foot waterfall. The jump went from a flat surface to a vertical ice wall. I was supposed to jump and fly my crampons into the wall and Kate our guide would grab me. Sounds easy. My right ankle snapped during this jump and swelled up as if I had gout or elephantiasis. We iced it up (with glacier ice no less) and I had to then hike out two hours still on the crampons.
Later that night I had a nightmare of me falling into the water on my back and shooting around the corner in a water-slide luge ride disappearing over the water fall – never to be seen again. A couple of years ago a student at my university while on a glacier adventure bent over to get a drink from a glacier stream, stumbled and fell in and was swept down and into an ice hole never to be seen again. These ice holes and under-glacier rivers can be 1,000 feet under the ice flow and if you go there you ain’t never coming back. Should’ve had ropes. Oh well, it was an adventure I lived through and have it on tape to remind myself to never do this again.
After my ankle incident, I couldn’t go ice climbing so I went on a short air cruise into the numerous glaciers in the area. It was a little smoky because of the recent forest fires in the area. Here are the amazing photos.
Circular view of the mountains from the McCarthy airport.
Looking from the airport towards the glaciers.
That’s the Kennecott mine in the distance.
Kennecott mine in the distance. What looks like tailings is rock covered glacier.
That’s all glacier. The rocks on the top are 1” to 6’ thick with the ice up to 1,000’ thick underneath.
Camped there.
Ever changing sand barges in one of the surrounding glacier rivers.
This is a rock glacier = 80% rock 20% ice.
These are huge glacier blocks hundreds of feet thick. The white ones recently flipped over to show their clean bottom. When they flip in a small lake like this it can make a wave like a huge tsunami.
Going into that glacier.
This ice fall is 7,000 feet tall.
Heading into the glacier.
Each one of those blocks is 300 feet high.
Ice blocks are 200 – 400 feet high.
Each ring is the annual growth push of the glacier – just like tree rings.
Heading into another glacier.
Melted glacier water pools are blue because they are so dense that only the blue spectrum of the sun can’t penetrate the oxygen free water and ice and is reflected.
Low on the deck flying down the glacier flow.
More blue pools.
Each crevasse is several hundred feet deep.
Each block hundreds of feet high.
This was a lake last year until it finally broke through the ice wall and flooded creating I was told an amazing wall of water flowing over the ice.
One of the copper mines perched on a cliff overlooking the glacier. You would think how in the world did they get the copper to market? This mine was connected in the back with over 70 miles of tunnels to the main Kennecott mines miles away. It’s amazing to think they drilled this rabbit warren of tunnels throughout this mountain in search of copper to feed the need to electrically wire the east coast during 1911 – 38.
This riever eventually disappeared into a hole in the ice.
The hole.
All ice up to 1,000 feet thick.
Kennicott production facility. Mine is five miles up the mountain.
