onderroad

Juneau, AK Photographs

Downtown; Juneau, Alaska

Juneau Taxi; Juneau, Alaska

Juneau overlook from Mt Roberts Trail; Juneau, Alaska

Mendenhall Glacier; Juneau, Alaska

Iceberg off Mendelhall Glacier; Juneau, Alaska

Mendenhall Glacier; Juneau, Alaska

Mendenhall Glacier Closeup; Juneau, Alaska

Railing at Mendehnall Glacier; Juneau, Alaska

Speedy porcupine on Mt Robert Trail; Juneau, Alaska

Fall flower detail; Juneau, Alaska

Raven creation myth mural; Juneau, Alaska

Totem pole detail; Juneau, Alaska

Fall colors; Juneau, Alaska

Sitka, AK Photographs 2/2

Fall colors; Sitka, Alaska

Totem pole; Sitka, Alaska

Forest undercover; Sitka, Alaska

Russian canon detail; Sitka, Alaska

Cemetary @ sunset; Sitka, Alaska

Rust; Sitka, Alaska

Sunset; Sitka, Alaska

Rowboat; Sitka, Alaska

Seagulls; Sitka, Alaska

Greek Orthodox Cross; Sitka, Alaska

Leaves; Sitka, Alaska

Cross; Sitka, Alaska

Flowers; Sitka, Alaska

Russian cemetary detail; Sitka, Alaska

Sitka, AK Photographs 1/2

M/V Aurora and ferry loading lanes; Juneau, AK

St Michael's and main street; Sitka, Alaska

St. Michael's Cathedral; Sitka, Alaska

St Michael's Catedral; Sitka, Alaska

O'Connell bridge and coast guard boat; Sitka, Alaska

Sitka Harbor and Mt. Edgecomb; Sitka, AK

O'Connell Bridge; Sitka, Alaska

O'Connell Bridge at sunset; Sitka, Alaska

Fishing harbor and mountains at sunset; Sitka, Alaska

Haines, AK Photographs

Fort Seward; Haines, Alaska

Haines is 75 miles north of Juneau (by boat) and about 860 miles from Anchorage (by road). It was originally settled by the Chilkat Tlinglit Indians. During the gold rush, it was overrun by prospectors and was an important route to the Klondike. In 1897 the Dalton Trail was founded and became a toll road for miners reaching the Klondike. In 1900 the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad put the Dalton Trail out of business and shifted business to Skagway.

Ft Seward was built in 1903 and became the first permanent Army post in Alaska. World War II prompted the construction of the 160 mile Haines Highway, to provide a possible evacuation route from Alaska.

A (rare) clear day around Haines; Haines, Alaska

Haines is located on the Lynn Canal between the Chilkoot and Chilkat

Motorcycle along the banks of the Chilkoot River; Near Haines, Alaska

Chilkoot River Fjord; Near Haines, Alaska

Dried flowers; Haines, Alaska

Seagulls on the Chilkoot River; Near Haines, Alaska

Small spit formation on the Chilkoot River; Near Haines, Alaska

Lady Luck Pull Tabs sign @ The Fogcutter; Haines, Alaska

What would Scooby Do; Haines, Alaska

Motorcycle loaded and tied down on the M/V Malaspina; Haines, Alaska

Skagway is the northern terminus of the Alaska Marine Highway System. Haines is the second to the last stop, and saves about 60 miles of driving for people headed to/from interior Alaska versus Skagway.

Northern Lights; Juneau, Alaska

Back home in Minneapolis

I'm home.

I have been wearing the same 2 pair of jeans, 1 pair of boots, 4 pair of underwear and a couple of shirts for the past 3 months. It was overwhelming to go up to my closet and pick from many, many options of clothing. What a luxury.

Also a luxury is logging onto the internet and surfing with my DSL connection and 21 inch monitor. I rehooked up my digital cable service and the guy showed up on Friday. I decided to get a digital video recorder for only three dollars extra. I can now record my favorite shows, or pause live action if I wish. What a wonderful, wonderful world.

On the flip side, I feel overwhelmed with maintenance activities. After 3 months on the road, with only a few packs of stuff on my bike, I am now home with many rooms and piles of stuff. It really drives the point home of wanting to simplify my life. I don't need all the stuff, and the attention and energy the stuff requires. When you're home, you have a much higher percentage of your energy going to maintenance. I need to make sure I keep a good balance on maintenance versus creative energy. When you're travelling, you don't have a choice.

Clues - something to pay attention to.

It's cold here. It was in the single digits last night, with highs in the thirties today. It is supposed to warm up through the week. This is pretty much the temperature I am used to and have exprienced the last month (maybe a little bit cooler), so I am used to it.

I cooked a fillet from my salmon cache on the grill today and it was excellent. Firm, excellent tasting, not fishy. I am going to enjoy the other 65 pounds in my refrigerator.

Seattle

After a couple of months in Alaska, I felt overwhelmed with the choices I had in Seattle. Restaurants, live music, bars, hotels, retail. I realized that I was starting to feel a little bit of island fever being up in Alaska. I love the outdoors and all the recreation opporunities, but there are so many roads, and it is quite a ride out, so it's very much like being on an island, albeit, a very big island.

I did some antiquing around town, caught up with some old friends and work acquaintances. It was unseasonably cold in Seattle, but it was clear - except the first day, it was bright blue clear skies. I checked out my old house, some of my old haunts. In some ways, Seattle was the same as when I left in 1998, but some areas had changed dramatically. One of those was the Fremont area - it used to be hippie/alternative/funky, and it still had a little flavor of that, but now it was yuppie, due mostly to Adobe building it's headquarters in the neighborhood.

There is an unbelievable buzz on the streets of Seattle. I was walking around on a Sunday night and there were thousands of people out on the streets. On Minneapolis on a Sunday, it is dead downtown.

I checked out RideWest BMW in Seattle. What a great store. I have not been many places where the bike store has a good selection of touring gear, clothing, and equipment, but this was the best. I had the thought that there is a market for good touring stores with good selction of in-stock gear.

Another odd thing from someone from the midwest is that football games are on at 10:00am in the morning. It's odd, but nice to watch a game when you're barely out of bed. I'm more used to the midwest where games come on at noon.

I enjoyed my stay in the Grand Hyatt, but I could feel I was ready to go home. On Tuesday, I found a storage place for my motorcycle - an ordinary 5x8 cubicle in a heated storage facility. I had to wrestle the bike into the elevator and around the corners on the floor of the storage unit, and had to remove both my rear mirror views to squeeze the bike into the storage cube. It is going to cost $80.00 per month - higher than I expected. I found a Harley dealer in Bellingham who had storage for $38 a month. If I did it again, I think it would be worth the hassle of driving my bike an hour and half north to Bellingham and leaving it at the dealer for half the cost, but I ran out of time and had to settle for plan b.

I took the city bus back to my hotel, collected my bags, and caught the shuttle to the airport. I had used some of my frequent flyer miles to get a round trip ticket on Northwest from Seattle to Minneapolis. I checked my bags, got on board the flight and in three hours I was back in Minneapolis.

It's kind of surreal to be gone for 3 months, to travel eight thousand miles on motorcycle, and then get on a plane and be back home in 3 hours. Strange world.

Arriving in Washington State

After 3 nights and 4 days, Friday morning brought us through another bright sunny morning, motoring through the San Juan Islands. The ferry arrived in Bellingham about 7:00am on Friday morning. After the go-ahead, we all were cleared to go down to the car deck and get in our vehicles.

I went over to my bike, and started packing up my bags. I happened to look at the rear tire and noticed it to be low. I looked closer and determined that it was beyond low, some would call it flat.

How could this happen. My bike was sitting on the ferry for 4 days. I had only ridden around 20 miles in Sitka, including covering most of the 14 miles of road in Sitka. Just then one of the ferry maintenance workers came up and started chatting about his motorcycle, in Sitka. I mentioned I had a flat. He disappeared and showed up a couple of minutes later with an airhose and a gauge. I filled up the tire and was able to ride off the ferry.

I went into Bellingham, asked around and eventually found a Harley Davidson dealer. Steven, the service manager, was very friendly and called around town to find a tire. I also had a great conversation with Mike, who worked in the sales department. Steve sent me over to Champion Cycle who had a Dunlop tire that would fit my rim. I met Howard and Bob. Not only did I get my rear tire replaced, I ended up buying a heated vest and gloves from a small company on the Oympic Peninsula. They gave me directions to pick up my new gear at the factory, and I headed out.

On the way to the Olympic Peninsula I had to take the Kingston Ferry from Whidbey Island to Port Townsend. Waiting for the ferry, I met 5 other motorcyclists, including 3 from Vancouver. I realized that this was the first time I had seen touring motorcyclists in over 6 weeks. It was a real treat to swap stories and here about other adventures.

The ferry disembarked in Port Townsend and it was about 70 miles to where the Gebring factory was. It was a beautiful drive, but got chilly along the way as the sun set. I stopped and called the factory and said I was going to be late, and they said they would stay until I arrived. I got there about 5:30PM, picked up and put on my new heated gear and heated to Seattle.

It was about a 90 minute drive through Olympia and Tacoma back to Seattle. It was 30 degrees and cool, but the elecric warmers kept me cozy and it was a pleasant ride into town.

I ended up checking into the Hyatt Grand Regency. What a beautiful hotel. It's brand new and I ended up in suite with a TV and computer connection, an oversized tub and shower, and a separate bathroom. It was a corner suite and looked over Lake Union, Queen Anne, Capitol Hill and downtown. I layed in bed and watched the seaplanes come in, bank a U-turn and land in Lake Union.

It's great to be in Seattle.

A passage to Bellingham

I got on the Malapina, a 300+ foot ferry of the Alaskan Marine Highway system, on Tuesday evening in Sitka. The ferry stops in Petersburg, Wrangell, and Ketchikan before arriving in Bellingham, Washington on Friday morning.

The ride to Washington State takes 3 nights. I did not have a cabin reserved, so I set up my Thermarest mattress and down sleeping bag on a deck recliner in the Solarium of the ferry. The solarium is kind of an experience by iteself. It is kind of like a hostel on a boat, it's own little counter-culture, with lots of people with backpacks hanging out, sleeping, eating, conversing. It is on the top level of the boat and is an open space, although it is protected on the front and sides by windows, and on the top by skylights. There are infrared heaters installed to try and take the chill out. Because of the generally northerly wind and cool weather the solarium was very cool. I used the solarium to sleep and store my stuff, and spent most of the time in the forward viewing lounge, the cafeteria, walking around the boat, or in the bar.

Southeast Alaska is typically one of the wettest places in the United States, but on this occasion we had 4 straight days of high pressure, windy, and clear skies. I did not see a cloud in the sky from Monday in Sitka until Saturday in Seattle - very rare for this area, particularly this time of year. It was a pleasure to see the sun and the blue sky after 7 straight rainy days in Juneau and Sitka.

You get into a kind of pattern on the boat. I would find myself timing my activites around the meals. Coffee in the morning, sit in the front viewing lounge and watch the beautiful scenery going by, eat breakfast, read for awhile, watch scenery, lunch, read, watch scenery, sit out on the deck and enjoy the beautiful sunny days, read, eat dinner, read, talk to a fellow passenger, hit the bar in the late evening, go to bed, repeat. There's not a lot to do, but it's kind of like being stuck in a doctors office, knowing you can't or shouldn't be anywhere else, or doing anything different, you are stuck. There's a kind of relaxing feeling to that flow. I found my eyes glued to the scenery - I would track where we were on an inland passageway map, and I did a lot less reading than I thought I might.

The rythym was punctuated when we stopped in the various ports. Petersburg we reached at 2:00am and only had a 45 minute stop. I woke up for at Petersburg and sat in the front viewing lounge as we passed through Wrangell narrows. Going through Wrangell Narrows is quite an experience. The boat draws about 15 feet of water and through the narrows the channel is as shallow as 20 feet. The turns have to be executed precisely to make it through the channel without grounding on the rocks. It is so narrow at places that the lights from the boat light up the trees on either side of the channelk, and you can see the silhouettes of the pine trees against the sky.

The last week has seen an extraordinary amount of solar activity. This has resulted in a spectacular series of views of the northern lights. While the lights were'nt as bright and colorful as places far and north, they were extensive. The entire sky was filled with a cone of light, all leading to a point directly overhead, like a huge upside down coffee filter.

On some of the open passages the wind really started rolling in and the boat swayed in the wind and waves.
It was amazing to have straight days of sunshine.

Sitka (Tuesday, October 28, 2003)

I left Sitka and took the milk run ferry to Sitka. The ship was the Aurora and it was packed with 240 people, most of them going to the Tlingit villages of Hoonah and Angoon. There was some kind of 'Give it Back' Potlatch going on in Hoonah, explaining the large number of people. The lounges were crammed with families and kids running around in packs, having a field day and the run of the ship. The weather was very blustery - the wind blew hard and the rain came down in sheets throughout the night. On some of the more open water, the boat rocked from side to side as the flag in the back looked like it a stiff piece of plastic, sticking straight out.

The ferry leaves Juneau about 4pm, gets to Hoonah about 6:30pm, Tenakee about 9pm and Angoon after midnight, and arrives in Sitka about 7:00am the next morning. There was hardly anyone on board when we arrived in Sitka. I was reading the ships documents and it turns out the Aurora was built in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin by the Peterson Ship Builders. My grandmother grew up in Sturgeon Bay and we spent part of each summer as kids visiting family and staying in a cottage on Door County. Sturgeon Bay is at the base of the Door County peninsula, the thumb that sticks out into Lake Michigan.

I arrived in Sitka and it was overcast but not raining. I had arranged to stay at a B&B in town, but it was only 7:00am, so I had to kill some time. I went to a coffee shop and hung out for a while, then drove around town, got my bearings and checked out most of the 14 miles of road in town. Sitka is situated on Baranov Island. It has a rich Russian and native history. The Russians used Sitka as the center of their holdings in America. The Russian American Company's American operations were located in Sitka. Sitka was also an important center of the Tlingit native people. There are a number of interesting structures and museums, including a Totem park. Like Juneau, you can only reach it by boat or air.

Sitka is stunningly beautiful. It sits on a small sliver of flat ground, wedging between the mountains and the ocean. The sides of the mountains are covered with very dense stands of spruce trees. The ocean is scattered with small, pine covered islands all around. Across the sound, the cone shaped summit of Mt Edgecomb towers over it's surroundings.

It rained just about every day, but not all the time. It would be overcast, you might see a sun break or a bit of blue sky (I think one of the locals called them sucker holes), and within minutes it would be drizzling, changing into hard, cold rain. If you don't like the weather, just wait. When the sun comes out, you find your heart beating fast.

At my B&B, I had a nice bedroom and private bath, with a common living area with TV. My B&B mates showed up and it turns out they were artists from Juneau showing their work at a trade fair at the Sitka convention center. We all hit it off and I ended up hanging around with Lisa, Sherri and Nel and Don, a friend of theirs who lives in Sitka. We hung out in the B&B and had an impromptu party and the next night, after the show, went out for drinks and had home made pizza at Don's house. Sherri is a book binder and I quizzed her about her work; Lisa is a potter, and Nel works in stained glass. Don works in telecommunications and used to live in Juneau.

I was walking around downtown and a police officer drove up next to me and said 'Excuse me, is that your motorcycle.'. Naturally, I'm never too comfortable with that question from an officer, but we started talking and it turns out he had 5 BMW motorcycles. His name is Gary and he used to live in Seattle but he loves the small town atmosphere of Sitka. I asked him how he gets people to work on his bike. He made friends with a guy who works on BMW's in Montana and one time he traded the guy a trip to Alaska with his wife, if he worked on reconditioning one of his older bikes.

My last day in Sitka, I woke up, looked out the window and saw clear sky. Yahoo! The sun came up and what few clouds existed, dissolved. The entire day was crystal clear, blue skies. The rain of the last several days had left a cap of snow on the surrounding mountains, and highlighted the extinct-crater shape of Mt Edgecomb. It was a glorius day, the temperature warming up into the 50's.

I had to call the Marine Highway after 1:00pm to determine when I needed to be at the ferry terminal. It turns out I had to be at the ferry terminal for checkin at 4:00pm, for a 5:00pm departure for Bellingham.

No journaling

I spent 4 days in Juneau. Juneau, although on the mainland, is like an island. There are no roads in - you can get there only by water or air. Juneau is the capital of Alaska, and has a couple of unique seasons. There is the tourist season during the summer, where hordes of day-tourists disembark from the cruise ships and wander around town with cameras around their necks and hands in their pockets (not that I didn't do that too!). The other season is the legislative season which begins each year in January and lasts for 4 months, where legistators from around the state overwhelm the town.

One of the interesting sights in Juneau is the Mendenhall Glacier. You are driving down a road in the Mendenhall Valley, sub-divisions, street lights, normal Alaska suburb and all of a sudden you see this tremendous whitish-blue glacier spilling out of the mountains and looming over the valley. It is a surreal experience. You can drive up to within a mile of the face, and hike closer. The glacier has been rapidly receding over the past years. In the span of a lifetime of some of the people that live in Juneau, it has receded over a mile, leaving a melt water filled lake and a lot of gravel. When you're donevisiting the glacier, you drive down the road and go shopping at the grocery store.

Errands

-Post office
-Dry cleaner
-Glacier
-Groceries (milk, orange juice, etc)

I also went for a hike on the Mt Roberts trail. Juneau is some great hiking trails. You walk down a few blocks to the end of the road, up some stairs past some funky houses, and bang, you are in the middle of the wilderness. It is quite amazing, how accessible the wilderness is.

I went to a little dive bar in town called the Rendezvous. I was sitting at the bar writing in the journal and a man came up to me and introduced himself as the owner of the bar. He was very nice about it but he said that I could not take notes in the bar. I told him I wasn't taking notes, but rather keeping a journal and he said 'No journaling in the bar'. He offered to have the bartender hold my journal while I was in the bar, but I told him I would stash it in my pocket. The biker guy next to me said I better do as he says, that he was probably worried I was writing about people in the bar. I wasn't up to then, but I am now!

I enjoyed staying at the Capital Inn Bed and Breakfast. Mark and Linda are the proprietors, and they have a beautiful old house that they renovated themselves, provide great hospitality and conversation, and make a mean breakfast. Linda said that the house deserves to have people in it, and I couldn't agree more. They have created a social environment in their home.