June 25, 2010

When I bought my gun, I was as concerned about strange people in Alaska as I was about bears.  In five years, I had one mildly negative encounter with a bear so I was probably due for a negative encounter with a person.  A strange man knocked on our door sometime after 10 PM on Tuesday.  He told us, “it’s Earl”, and mumbled something about the mosquitoes.  We told him repeatedly to move along, that he had the wrong trailer, but he just hung around.  At one point he got a bit profane with us so we called the police.  He left right about that time, riding away on his bicycle.  The police arrived very quickly and drove through the campground several times with several cars.  One of the officers stopped and chatted with us.  He told us to call immediately if we saw the guy again, but that they would be out looking for him. 

It was an odd encounter.  Our best guess is that this native guy was a bit confused, perhaps used to a culture where one can find shelter by knocking on any door and announcing oneself.  His behavior and mannerisms struck me as someone who was drunk or on drugs, but I can’t be sure.  Regardless, we will never know his intentions and we may have learned a thing or two.  We are well prepared, but we weren’t necessarily thinking clearly.

So a weird encounter disrupted our sleep a little, but we were quickly back to normal life.  We got a good start to the day on Wednesday and headed down the road to Long Lake.  We have been eying this lake since we drove up to Alaska, but today we finally explored it.  We kayaked the three mile perimeter while occasionally trying unsuccessfully for fish.  The lake was interesting with shallow ledges and deep drop-offs.  I found the existence of this lake difficult to comprehend, hanging high on the side of the Matanuska Valley with no visible evidence of a second glacier that could have left this lake in its retreat.  The highway runs along the lake, although it is a couple hundred feet above it in places.  A destroyed pickup truck piled near the shore answered the question of what happens if you drive off the road.  The noise of the highway interfered with the scene, but the wind drown it out much of the time.  We did see a moose grazing along the shore which always makes my day.

We are enjoying traveling with a trailer.  It is nice to pull off anywhere and have lunch.  It is nice not having to search for rest areas.  I haven’t used outhouses much at all this year.  We are fully self-contained.

Wednesday night we camped in a nice site right on Tolsona Creek.  I kept looking out the kitchen window to see if any grayling were feeding.  The site was one of the nicest I have seen with water and electric and our Passport America discount made it almost as cheap as boondocking.  Kris enjoyed turning on the lights.  I enjoyed running the exhaust fan while cooking fish for dinner.  These not-so-modern conveniences are easier to appreciate when you go without for a few days.

We debated staying another night while we fished the creek that morning.  A few grayling showed themselves to us, but the muddy water was interfering with successful fishing.  We decided to move along.  The drive was pretty slow with frost heaved roads that are a real rollercoaster ride with the trailer.  The cat seemed to hate the road and made horrible noises after every dip and bump.  We stopped at Squirrel Creek campground and backed into a nice campsite along the lake for lunch.  We fished from shore for a half hour, but didn’t see any fish.  We decided to continue on to our original plan, Blueberry Lake.

Blueberry Lake is a small alpine lake tucked just beneath Thompson Pass.  A campground with a newly paved road seemed inviting, but after trying unsuccessfully to back into the only available site that was long enough for our rig, we turned around and drove against the one way loop to get a better angle.  That worked well, except we noticed that all the sites are pretty far off level.  It took most of our boards to get close to level, leaving barely enough boards for our stabilizer jacks.  Clearly the people who made this lovely looking campground knew little about RVs.

After dinner, we took a long walk.  We started out a ridgeline behind the trailer and followed it for over a mile.  We came across some old electrical poles on the ridge that could have been part of the old telegraph lines.  The old copper conductors were still up in places.  A few of the glass insulators were still intact.  After returning, we hiked through the campground and found the old left loop of the campground that is now blocked off.  It was a narrow dirt road that followed along the shore of Thompson Lake.  We walked that entire loop back out to the Richardson Highway and then followed the highway back to the entrance to Blueberry Lake.  The traffic was pretty light so hiking the highway wasn’t too bad.  And the Thompson Pass scenery is quite enjoyable from the highway at a walking pace.

We slept in this morning.  It was good sleeping weather and the late evening hike made us pretty sleepy.  We are really starting to settle into the new pace, especially when we aren’t driving.  It seemed like a casual day, but we still managed to kayak both lakes, Thompson and Blueberry. 

We started in the late morning with Thompson because it is stocked with grayling, a better fish in my opinion.  We hadn’t even launched the kayaks when we noticed fish feeding near shore.   We almost felt foolish fishing from the boats so close to where we launched, but it still provides so much more maneuverability.  We each caught a few fish right away.  I couldn’t find a fly that matched the mosquitoes they were feeding on.  I must restock my fly box when I get a chance.  I did manage to fool a few with something close enough.  Kris found intermittent success with a spinner.  Since we were just starting to explore the lake and the fish were pretty small, we decided not to keep any at that time. 

We continued exploring the perimeter of this small alpine lake.  We covered just under three miles in our loop.  We were trying to find the larger grayling, but everywhere that we caught fish, they were the same size, about eight to ten inches.  They were pretty fat so we decided we needed about four of them for a meal.  We were able to get our four without too much effort, although the last one seemed to take awhile.  I cleaned the fish on the shore and loaded the kayaks back on the roof of the van.

We had a snack and hung around the trailer for a few hours.  The weather turned rainy for awhile.  We cooked up our fish for dinner and then dropped the kayaks in Blueberry Lake when the weather broke a little.  This lake is smaller, only a little over a mile around the perimeter.  We fished a little, but couldn’t seem to find any fish.  I even tried finding the bottom of the deep lake, but either I didn’t get anywhere close or the fish weren’t there – possibly both.  We had a run-in with a mother duck that led us away from her babies with an injured duck act that was quite impressive.  The rain came back and we were a little cold and wet by the time we finished.  A warm trailer is a nice thing after an adventure like that. 

We have been without cell service and without internet for a few nights now.  It makes you wonder what you might be missing.  It also means that I haven’t loaded any posts for awhile, but I can just stock them up and upload when I have a chance.