Hello Microsuck! I'm back!
I spent a long and beautiful month in Alaska and on the way there and back from Fredericton, NB. This also served as a fitting end to my year in Canada.
The Microsuck website - the one I missed the most during this agonising off-line month. I am now on dialup, and that is charged by the minute here in the Czech Republic, therefore I will not be too active on-line until I get broadband. And I'm working on that.
Canada is a vast country. The most dominant landscape is the forest. Very dense undergrowth, but sparse trees. The Trans-Canada Highway (and more so the northern route between North Bay and Nipigon) is a barely populated scar in the otherwise untouched nature - of a scale we, Europeans, can hardly imagine. The only places you can really feel like you're in a civilised place are the major cities on the way - Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa and the smaller ones.
An interesting change comes on the Alberta/British Columbia border: The agriculture stops suddenly. As if the BC-ers simply relied on the other provinces for produce and livestock.
From Dawson Creek up, on the Alaska Hwy, the road gets incredibly boring. Straight, tree-lined and boring. There's a small national park close to the Yukon border - and that's where we had our first animal sightings. Several mountain goats, caribou and perhaps some elk.
Whitehorse is a fairly civilised area, after a long reach of the woods...
Alaska is a special place. We paid a private airline (Warbelow's) to fly us to the Gates of the Arctic NP&P and hiked for four days up there. One of the guides said walking on permafrost in the summer is like walking on basketballs. Close. Imagine a marsh with foot-and-a-half wide tufts of grass, each of wich wobbles dangerously on its thin stem of uneroded soil. I must say the guide forgot to tell us that it was more like a bunch of basketballs - floating on a swimmingpool. Oh, how could I forget! It was raining all four days... We returned absolutely drenched and shivering from head to toe. That was indeed the ultimate national park experience.
The village where we started, Anaktuvuk Pass, was an eskymo village founded 1949. Two tribes met, and decided to found a settlement right there for two reasons. One: the caribou migrate through the pass twice a year. Two: the US government built a post office there. The reason for thet is quite obscure to me...
The North Slope Burrow funded the construction of real houses to replace the tents and sod houses in the seventies from taxes - on oilwells mainly. The region is very socialist.
We also got to walk on the ROOT Glacier (I just looove the name) in Wrangell-St. Elias NP. That is the site of Kennicott mine - an old copper mine that has yielded in excess of $250 M in copper. It also contains the richest copper ore in the world (around 70%) and the
largest framed structure.
The glacier itself is unbelievable. I might get to post a few pics later on. It is a universe of its own. Little trickles of water cut through everywhere, and they not only converge to form larger ones - these alse diverge again into smaller ones only to meet again in the end. It is full of oval holes going straigh down. My guess is the sun heating up patches of black sand. We saw the "young" holes that were only a few cm deep: simply flat bottommed and covered in a single-grain layer of sand.
You cover very short distances on foot, on both tundra and glacier.
Another, less amusing part we saw were the Kenai Fjords, where the glaciers break off into the ocean. We didn't see them actually break, though. We did see a few humpback whales and Steller sea lions.
Anchorage, though not the capital, holds half the state's population. The capital, Juneau, is not accessible by car. :confused:
Me and my friend met a bear, face to face, while my father was jogging towards Chilkoot Pass. You wouldn't believe how incredibly cute those things are! You would just love to pet them! NOT RECOMMENDED. The bear didn't show much interest in us, despite the fact that we interupted his feeding right on the trail, when we made the decision to retreat and turn back.
My father reached Chilkoot Pass without any encounters. That is a 60 km jog with a 600m elevation change and he's fifty-five! It took him about nine hours.
Well, that's all from me for now. I hope I didn't bore you
Jenda
