Archive for the ‘Alaska’ Category

Today I am proud to present the greatest photo I never took.

Whilst in Alaska last year, I stayed for a week in Craig where my cousin’s husband was working. It’s a 2 hour ferry and hour’s drive from Ketchikan (itself only accessible by ferry or plane) so it’s kind of remote. To make the most of the beautiful, still weather they were enjoying (made more eerie by the haze from huge forest fires across the border in British Columbia), after work, Michael took us all out in a skiff for a spot of fishing.

The water was glassy, with not a breath of wind and we shot out into the bay for about 30 minutes heading for an area where the seabed rose up to within 15 feet of the surface, a good fishing spot I was reliably informed. And, it proved to be, Michael reeling in a tasty dinner every 5 minutes or so. Even I managed to snag a couple of rockfish, which I was all excited about, but one disdainful look from Valerie told me all I needed to know, and we threw it back.

It floated slowly away from the boat, and we got on with catching some more serious fish. At this point we were around half a mile away from the shore, with nothing else around and surrounded by total silence (the occasional noise of a whale exhaling could be heard).

A couple of minutes after the fish had gone back in the water, Valerie spotted a black shape in the distance flying towards us. “An eagle” she said, “It’s seen the rockfish.” And sure enough, having seen the fish in the water from half a mile away, a bald eagle was flying towards us, looking for dinner. It flew past us once to check out what was floating in the water, looped round and in one fluid movement, scooped my luckless fishy friend from the water, 15 feet away from the boat.

I had brought my camera along, and Valerie was holding it when the eagle swooped, and she managed to get a shot of it’s tailfeathers as it flew off. Her son Simon however, managed to get the perfect shot, so I will always have a reminder of what has to be the most incredible thing I have ever been lucky enough to have witnessed.

Was in a bookshop today and saw one of those 1000 X to Y Before You Die books. You know the ones, Places to See, Wines to Drink, Products to Boycott, Hotels to Feel Smug In, that sort of thing.

So seeing as I’ve done some pretty cool things in the past few months, and in my life, even if I say so myself here is my Top 10 Things I Have Done (So Far) Before I’m Dead:

10.  Had dinner and been to the house of an astronaut (twice). OK, so it’s the same guy, Jeff Hoffman, but I’ve been to his house in Houston and Paris and been out to dinner with him both times. He’s been up 5 times, including going up with his space spanners to fix the Hubble Telescope back in 1993. Basically, my mum went to school with his wife, that’s how we know him. It’s a very cool thing to tell people, but I kinda wish it had involved more of actually being in space myself rather than talking to somebody who’s done it, if you know what I mean.

9. Seen both sunset and sunrise over the Grand Canyon. Yup, the big one. The BBC got into the Before You Die thing and The Grand Canyon was the Number One place to see. Well, I don’t wish to sound ungrateful but I wasn’t overly impressed. Well, OK, I was. You are, after all, stood on the edge of a 10 mile wide, 1 mile deep, 250 mile long hole. But then that’s all you do. You stand there. Admittedly I could have stayed a little longer and hiked down it, although that would of course entailed hiking back up it which is not so much fun. But I didn’t, I stood there and stared. For well over an hour I promise. Both in the evening to watch the sun go down and again at 515 in the morning to watch it come back up again (I didn’t sleep very well in my tent).

8. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower so drunk I couldn’t remember having done it in the morning. True story. Don’t judge me.

7. Seen the Milky Way. Stars, lots of stars, like a cloud of stars. Seen it twice, both times freezing my bits off, unable to sleep. First time at -20c at 4300m in Bolivia, second time -3c at 2500m in Yellowstone Park. Suitably extreme I feel.

6. When we did the Machu Picchu 4 day “hike”, day 1 was cycling down a mountain. There were 9 of us, 3 Canadians and 6 people in my group. The Canadians seemed OK, all big and outdoorsy, but nice enough. That was until we got onto the bikes and one of them shot off and got all showy, doing little kicks to get rocks out of the way and that sort of showy-off stuff we Brits frown on. Got talking to one of his friends later and turns out he’s the Downhill Freestyle Mountain Bike World Champion. Seriously, he does this, and was a thoroughly nice chap! And I went cycling with him!

5. Seen a 2-metre-long whale’s penis. Well, what do  you want? Pictures?

4. Hitchhiked in the back of a pickup truck. There’s more info and a picture of this in my Tierra del Fuego post, but it was one of the highlights of my trip so far. Nothing beats the feeling of a climbing into bed, dusty and cold after a day trucking across the southernmost landmass in the world. Was fantastic.

3. Stroked a tiger. It was Grrrrrrreat! Sorry.

2. Been fishing for salmon in Alaska. Again, lots more salmon-related stuff in earlier posts, but being out there in a 14ft skiff with newly-found family-members, in Alaska, with a fishing rod and beer in my hand, was  great moment. Made all the greater by the eagle. In fact the eagle is one of the coolest things I have ever seen.

1. But it doesn’t beat…

..What you think I’m going to be able to pick one event from all the fantastic things I’ve seen and done just to bundle it up into a neat Number One in a list? Ain’t gonna happen. 10 months, 20,000 miles, 8 countries, that’s your number One right there ;o)

If you want to be shot in Alaska, other than doing it yourself (which, given the low levels of sunlight in winter it seems a lot of people do. The state has the highest per capita suicide rate in the US), there are 2 ways. Say the wrong thing about Sarah Palin to the wrong person or announce loudly and proudly that you eat farmed fish. Man, they hate that. On the surface (or under it at least, ha ha!) farming seems a sensible solution. In areas where the salmon population has been overfished, give the wild ones a chance to recover by placing huge net cages near the shore and grow the little blighters like chickens. That way, the supermarkets remain stocked with nutritious tasty fishies, jobs are provided for areas hit by a collapsed fishing industry (by necessity, fish farms are set up in areas where the salmon occur naturally, often at the mouth of a spawning stream) and nature is untouched to carry on doing what it does. Right?

Well, no as it happens. The fish farms are messing up the environment just as much, if not more as fishing. Fish, like chickens, are not designed to confined to a cage in huge numbers. When one fish gets an infection, a lot of the other salmon, being in close proximity, also become infected. The infection affects the skin and the fish shed flakes of infected scales. As they are in a net, these flakes float out into the sea, where the wild salmon either leaving or returning to their natal stream swim through a huge cloud of horribleness. Wild fish in turn become infected, making it very hard for the natural population to recover and/or stay healthy.

Strike one for the fish farms. Strike two is the fact that in order to combat the infections, fish farms pump a lot of antibiotics into the water, which not only cause mutations in the farmed salmon (which we then eat, even the mututated ones), also of course cause untold damage to the wild population beyond the nets. And thirdly, farmed fish tastes awful, really fucking bad. As I said earlier, I used to think I didn’t like fish, I know realise I love fish, just none of the fish I’ve eaten before. I’ve been lucky enough to eat a lot of fresh seafood in the last 3 weeks. Halibut, rockfish, lingcod, shrimps, crab and, of course, salmon. It truly and honestly tastes fantastic – fresh, delicate and healthy. I’ve eaten it every day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. I’ve not eaten meat for 3 weeks (aside from a hot dog, gimme a break, I was drunk) and have felt no desire to. From a raw chunk sliced from a beautiful, whole, deep red coho (sockeye), rockfish tacos, home-smoked king salmon to crab cakes, I’ve stuffed my face.

I’ve eaten corn-fed beef from happy cows and it does taste “nicer” than feedlot cattle, but the difference between farmed salmon and wild salmon is staggering. It’s a million miles from what we in Europe (or me at least) know as fish. I loved it. Obviously, I was lucky enough to be in a place where some of the world’s finest is plucked directly from the ocean, if you catch it yourself, sea to plate in 3 hours. Very few of the 175 million make their way to Europe and when they do the price is often prohibitive for mere mortals, but if you ever get the chance to try it, leap (see what I did there?) at it. And do us all a favour, when you eat fish, eat sustainably caught fish and secondly, you’d always buy free-range chickens so please don’t eat farmed fish, it’s really not worth it.

Let’s play a game. How about Word Association? I’ll say a word and you come up with a word or phrase it makes you think of. First thing that pops into your head. OK? Ready? Here goes…

…Salmon.

You probably (bear with me here) came up with “fish” or maybe “leap” or more likely “flaccid piece of pale pink something in a polysterene tray from Tesco, but it’s full of omega 3 therefore healthy and I feel virtuous”. Amirite?

Of course I am, that’s what salmon means in the UK. Well, not in Alaska it doesn’t, and particularly not in Ketchikan, the Salmon Capital of the World. Salmon in Alaska is a way of life. Getting the ferry up, in the middle of day 2 I started seeing ripples in the water and got all excited (it was 38 hours on a boat, didn’t take much), wondering what mighty sea creature could be causing this. Before I long I caught sight of the culprit, none other than a large salmon leaping a good two feet out of the water, a quick shimmy and splashing back in to the water. I watched for a while and time and again I saw fish doing this. Sometimes just the once, other times clearly the same fish jumping out of the water 3 or 4 times in quick succession. I thought it was fantastic and very novel.

I’ve since realised that salmon do this all the time, particularly in the summer just prior to their spawning run, and I’ve grown very blasé about it. Whenever there is a bit of sea here, salmon are jumping out of it. It’s very cool. I’ve heard three theories as to why they do it, first they’re catching insects. Second it’s in their blood, it’s how they get upstream and they’re just practicing. Thirdly, it’s only females and they do it to force their eggs nearer to the business end so it’s easier for laying. One & three came from non-Alaskans I met on the ferry and the second one was my cousin, so I’m going with the local knowledge.

I don’t eat a lot of fish, I know I should eat more, but the fact is I don’t really like it that much. Plus I remember reading an article once where it pointed out that some vegetarians like to take the moral ground about not eating meat, saying it is immoral, all the while eating fish, which is taken from the wild rather than farmed. The author made the point that if all the cows in the world disappeared, no natural ecosystem would suffer, finish off one species of fish and it’s a different matter entirely. Countless other species would suffer.

If salmon were the species wiped out, then not only would a few summer barbeques suffer. Salmon not only feed us, but at the various stages of their life they also feed bears, eagles, otters and many larger fish to name but a few. They are born and grow in a stream, spend 1-5 years in the ocean and then return to the same stream (nobody knows how they find it) to spawn and die. Once spawned, their decaying bodies in the thousands of streams and lakes provide nutrients to the soil which improves the berries growing nearby, which feed birds, deer and bears (again). It’s an amazing, finely balanced, well established cycle of life and death.

Until the human race comes along of course. Alaska prides itself on having a sustainable salmon population. Fishing and bycatch is well-monitored and blackouts can be (and are) declared if returning salmon numbers are low. The state runs hatcheries to increase the numbers of young salmon entering the streams, fish ladders are installed to allow returning fish to bypass hydroelectric installations. Which is just as well, seeing as even given all that Alaska takes 175,000,000 salmon out of the sea each year. That’s 175 million legal fish, not counting the untold numbers caught by illegal Chinese, Russian and Japanese boats. Overall is does seem to be a healthy system and the the Alaskans seem to have understood that we can’t just take as many fish out of the sea as want, without disaster, not least the collapse of the fishing industry.

Back on the good ship Columbia. Of all the places I’ve left in the last few months, leaving Ketchikan was the hardest. It was always the aim of my trip, originally the plan was to get there overland from Buenos Aires. Well, that didn’t quite work out, but nevertheless, I got there. I made it. Look at it on a map, seriously, do it, 7 months ago I was in Ushuaia. Look where that is and look where Ketchikan is. It doesn’t matter that I “cheated” and flew a big chunk of the middle, even coming from San Diego up to there overland is more than most Americans will ever do.

But that aside, leaving the place itself has hit me hard. I don’t have a very big family and having 3 of my 5 cousins living in the US, one of them in Alaska, it has been in my consciousness for a long time. Up until a couple of years ago I hadn’t seen Valerie (my Alaskan cousin) since 1986 and something like only 5 times in my life, so getting up there and seeing it and her was a big deal. It’s been such a great experience on 2 levels.

Firstly the place itself is beautiful and wild, outside of the largely fat and clueless tourists from cruise ships crawling up and down the dock, barely touched by tourism. I was very lucky with the weather (locals kept telling me how it was the best summer for 20 years), and have been fishing twice (and ate my catch), flown on a float plane over Misty Fjords National Park, driven a 4 wheel-drive buggy along old logging roads, seen bears plucking salmon from a river, eagles swooping down, taking fish from the sea, whales breaching, sea otters looking cute, salmon leaping upstream and countless other incredible sights. It all seems so once-in-a-lifetime like.

And secondly, I’ve spent time with my cousin and seen where she lives, seen what she has done, tasted what she has lived through, and bugger me, it’s one hell of a story and one hell of a place. It’s kind of hard to forget when in Ketchup itself, but this place is seriously isolated (literally). It’s on Revilla Gegido island and can only be reached by boat (from the south it is 6hrs from Prince Rupert in Canada or 38hrs from Bellingham in Washington State, from the north, the nearest large town is Juneau nearly 24hrs away) or by plane (2hrs from Seattle or Anchorage). There’s only 30 miles of road, and it just stops at each end. It’s wild. The week before I arrived a bear walked through her back garden. A bear. People here don’t bat an eyelid about bears. I do. Lots of eyelids.

Ketchikan is big round here, referred to simply as “town”. After I’d been there a week we caught a 3 hour ferry to Hollis on Prince of Wales Island, drove 45 minutes to get to the town of Craig where Valerie’s husband Michael is building a bank. Not quite single-handedly, he has Jimmy and Matt, but the 3 of them are building a bank. He builds lot of things. Anyway, Craig was mighty change from Ketchikan, smaller of course, but much more of a frontier town. I felt very self-concisous driving round in Valerie’s “normal” car. We didn’t have a pick-up, we must have stood out a mile. And it’s beautiful, surrounded on all three sides by the sea, backed by huge mountains covered in pine forest (apart from the bits that have had the hell logged out of them). Yet, not a tourist in sight. Just fishermen and 3 blokes building a bank.

Valerie and Michael had lived in Craig for a short time and she had not been back since moving to “town” 15 years ago. It was quite an emotional trip for her, a serious trip down memory lane. The last time she’d been there there were no paved roads. Yet, even more incredibly, at one time they had considered Craig as “town”. For over 10 years they lived in Edna Bay, on an island off Prince of Wales, a 2 hour boat ride from Craig. Edna Bay has a population of 49. Not 49,000, just 49. Although when they lived there the population was 68. This is two hippies who met in the early 80s and basically decided they would live in Alaska, and fish for a living. They’d never done it before, Valerie is from Connecticut and Michael is from Utah. Not many salmon there.

As I listened to their stories the enormity of what they had achieved hit me. Early on, and luckily for them, there were “adopted” by an older native Indian couple, David and Alice, who took them under their wing and started to show them the ropes. Where the fishing was best, underwater hazards to avoid, what can be eaten (beach asparagus anyone?), what can’t (Devil’s club), that sort of thing. For years they lived on a float house. Which is not a houseboat, it’s a house (doors, roof, kitchen, bathroom, garden, shed, workshop) that floats. On logs. To get it to Edna Bay they towed it from Garcia Bay near Craig for 36 hours against the tide. With barely the slightest clue of what they were doing. That’s what I call moving house. After the float house got a bit old and leaky, Michael built them a real house. They chopped down trees to get the wood, and built everything. Water tanks, walkway through the wood to the beach, septic system, everything.

And all the while they were making a living (of sorts) by fishing and Valerie taught at the school (16 pupils between the ages of 4 and 18) and bringing up 4 children. They had an old boat (which was held together by the woodworms holding hands) and fished. Salmon, halibut (flat fish that can grow up to 6 feet long – you don’t just bop them on the head to kill them, you shoot them with a .44), dived for abalone. 2 people who just decided to live like that and made it a success (those 4 children are all grown up now and are wonderful, it’s been great meeting them). I’d heard of Edna Bay, heard a couple of the tales, and told lots of people about my cousin in Alaska (without knowing any of the details) but seeing it all, imagining what they had been through, the things they had seen and achieved, it really hit home. I can’t even begin to picture the highs and lows such a life would bring. It was a privilege to share a small part of it with them and it is an honour to be part of their family. Although Valerie was too chicken to take me on at crib…

I’ve just boarded the venerable MV Colombia which, in a mere 38 hours, will deliver me to Ketchikan, Alaska where I will be staying for a week or two with my cousin. In the last 3 weeks I’ve made my way up from San Diego, via Los Angeles, Monterey, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. I’ve enjoyed it, seen some wonderful things, jaw-dropping scenery on the Pacific Coast Highway, strolled down Hollywood Boulevard, been record shopping in Haight Ashbury and sampled some of (and when I say some, I mean a lot) the local Portland brews.

But there’s been something missing. Travelling “alone” in South America never actually meant that. I can only think of a couple of days in all the weeks I was “alone” when I was actually on my own. As long as you stuck more or less to the backpack trail, you could always spend time with other like-minded travellers, perfectly happy to chat, share a beer or go exploring. Often at the same time. Some I’ve stayed in touch with, others just spent the day with and can’t actually remember their names. And all of them have added something positive to the trip (with the exception of Sally, the eager yet oh so boring English teacher).

However, travelling alone here seems to mean, at least for me, truly alone. Outside of the people I’ve stayed with (and a big shout goes out to all of them, love you guys!) I’ve barely spoken to a soul. Some of this is pure laziness or grumpiness on my behalf but people here seem so much more self-absorbed and unapproachable. Maybe this has something to do with most people travelling in couples or groups, but I’m not sure. People will talk, if you start a conversation, but then the conversation is all about them. You don’t get a look in, they show absolutely no interest in listening to anything you say. Kind of annoys me. Hence the grumpiness. I am enjoying it, missing Laura, but enjoying it nonetheless, and glad to be doing it – catching up with people and, through them, meeting new ones. Just looking forward to getting back to Argentina, not for the first time!

Note, what do you know!, in the 15 hours since I wrote this, I have spoken to some very nice people – 3 50 -somethings on a Harley trip to Alaska they’ve been planning for 2 years and a couple of others. Some idiot who said the dolphins we saw were killer whales. I’m no marine scientist but know when you see killer whales, these things are the size of tanks, and these were not. Nice dolphins (good dolphins) though, pretty damn cool.