We’ve a nice half day at Exit Glacier for a hike, and a sunny day to be on Prince William Sound. No time to write, but lots of photos of landscapes, glaciers and wildlife: Read the rest of this article…
There is something about the light here this past week: soft and heavy and long nearly through the night; long and soft and ineffectual. I find it vaguely depressing, sometimes not so vaguely. An hour of blessed sunshine makes it worse, knowing it will go away and take the mountains and the spectral highlights, the sparkle, with it. The sun, slow to come, always going away, soon. I know I shouldn’t feel this way about the North. I feel guilty about, which doesn’t help any. All the beauty; moose, bears, lakes, mountains, and still snow patches and sometimes glaciers. But the light is just not there, just not right, yet.
There were days during the months we spent in Iceland
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Not long after entering Alaska from Yukon Territory, Claire found a small lake with free camping through the Escapees listings. It was a short drive down a narrow dirt road, just small enough to keep out the big RVs. We were fairly early in the day and got the best lakeside site. We saw quite a few birds, Claire heard a loon, and I saw a pair of tundra swans patrolling the shore. Read the rest of this article…
We moped through the gray afternoon, napping to the shush of the fountain and studying maps to prepare for some sunny day. Throughout the day, a lone figure moved around the park, sometimes contemplating the fountain from a lonely perch on a park bench. As others came and went, this boy stayed. I imagined that he’d planned to study in the library and was stuck waiting for a ride home once a parent got off work. He looked to be a teenager, but he wasn’t talking on a cell phone or listening to music, he was just sitting. Read the rest of this article…
We expected bears or moose, but only had birds and wildflowers for company. The daylight is almost continuous now, and the light, when there is a break in the rainclouds, just fades and warms slowly toward 11pm, and it is light all night. I enjoy waking up and looking at the light at 2am or so, just as morning color begins to wash the sky. Read the rest of this article…
A fun example of the cultural mixing here was the jig contest. Now, I’ve always thought of the jig, danced to a fast fiddle, as an Anglo-Saxon tradition: Irish, Scottish, French, but here it’s a local tradition, with most of the dancers of First Nations descent, with plenty of mixed and white faces giving it a go. Oh, by the way, the really really excellent fiddler seemed to be from the orient. Go figure. Read the rest of this article…
t becomes almost difficult to sleep as we near the Yukon, the days are so long, the nights so short. We close all the blinds in Turtle, and it still is late before we can sleep. Light usually wakes me at 3:30am, but I’m a good sleeper, and Claire’s warmth makes it easy to wait for full sun to warm us through the windshield sometime around 6:30. At that 3:30 awakening, I open the blinds and curtain between our living area and the cab to welcome the sun. A warm house makes it easier to get out of bed at a reasonable hour. Read the rest of this article…
This was taken after 10pm through the window of Turtle at a boondock on the Alaska Highway, or as the Canadians have signed it, the Great Northern. I prefer Great Northern; more romantic than the Alaska Highway.
Long days of slantlong light, and the landscape rolling off to infinity, makes for a magical sense of otherness, of strange timelessness. We love the road, and this one is special. Read the rest of this article…