Hey, Claps, thanks for a lead in. I'd better finish my last Alaska trip B4 I get back from the next...
Radar and the Kid Do Denali...
" Fri, 6/8... This was kind of a quiet day; we decided to take the shuttle bus to the Eilson visitor center, the temporary end of the line. The remainder of the road to Wonder Lake is still closed due to boggy conditions. We didn't see a hell of a lot of wildlife on the way out-as a matter of fact, no mammals at all. It was nice, tho, 'cuz we had taken the last bus out, and by the time we got to Eilson, we were the only passengers.
The driver pointed out where The Mountain (McKinley, Denali, Big Mac, whatever) was; I saw a diagonal line thru the clouds, but thought it to be a cloud bank. Actually, it was the mountain, but I didn't really see that until the clouds started breaking after we got to Eilson. It is hard to believe that anything is that big. It's bulk is even more than that of Whitney and pals from Owens Valley, the huge block along the eastern flank of the Sierras. The only other time I got that feeling was driving thru the pine forests and coming to a grove of Big Trees, and of seeing Mt. Shasta for the first time. They are all truly the foundations from which people create legends. Saw a grizz on the way back, and again, had a nice trip on an MT bus. We went to the hotel for pizza and beer, and to see if anything was happening. It wasn't, and so, to bed.
6/10 I'm writing this on 6/22 (Well actually, today is 11/23/81, but originally it was 6/22/79- well, actually, originally, it was 6/10, but I digress...) [ed note..if yer confus-ed by now, it is really 6/2/03, not even the same century ].So, my memory is rather dim at this point. We played around on the weekend- nature hikes, discovery hikes, campfires, and a movie ("Midnght Express"). Heavy flick.
We met some nice people on one of the discovery hikes. There was Dorothy, a teacher at an Eskimo school in Bethel, an isolated town west of Anchorage, who is from Fresno, and Ed, a cowboy/ engineer from Morgan Hill. We spent a lot of time drinking coffee and rapping with them, and made up to meet them, or at least Ed, for slide shows when we get home. Dorothy is headed for Banff/Jasper and then Fresno, B4 heading back to Bethel-talk about culture shock. She is going to go from 9 months with the temperature never 60 degrees, and only rarely that warm, mainly on the way home, to Fresno in July. Bethel has no roads out of town; no trains and no boats in or out. She pays $375 for a 1-2 bedroom house without indoor plumbing, flush toilets, or any other modern type convenience.
" Mon, 6./11..."and on the 7th day, God rested", and now it looks like she wants us to do the same thing. The weather has turned cold and windy, "and it looks like rain and and feels like rain; here comes the rain." We decided we should hang out here today instead of hitting the trail because of an approaching storm. Neither of us feels like going on a macho trip by showing how tough we are, unlike the Turkeys from Texas, who arrived last night. I know from Canada that I can hike and camp in constant rain, and, having learned how to survive, don't feel that I can learn anymore by charging out into a storm. This doesn't feel like all the other showers from last week.
We'll probably do laundry, write, drink coffee, get loaded, and try to find a guitar for Steve to play over the weekend.
Later. We did find a guitar- Jeff, the naturalist who we met the first day, has one that he "wants Steve to tune". We also met Christine, another naturalist, who is in charge of music. She has a fiddle, and said to drop by any ol' time. So we will.
Next; 6/11 continued..Denali does Radar and The Kid.
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