Bicycle Alaska 2008: Instalment 1

BICYCLE ALASKA, 2008

by

John Berry


Installment 1: Bellingham, WA, to Skagway, AK.

On May 7th (Wednesday) I left Austin, in the midst of a last minute rush creasted by my recent hospitalization (see previous post) and exacerbated by some unexpected items of work, for Seattle. At Seattle I found the Airporter Shuttle bus for Bellingham easily, but also found that there was great reluctance to carry my boxed bike on the bus, in spite of what I had been told by the company over the phone, and there was a charge for the bike that I had not been told about at all.

The Val-U Inn, at the bus terminal in Bellingham, turned out to be much nicer than its name. The first person I met there was a gentleman my age named Clint, from North Carolina, who was off on a shakedown test of his bike and BOB trailer as I arrived. He was going to do the Adventure Cycling Northern Tier route across the USA back to North Carolina. I immediately unboxed and reassembled the bike, only to find that the head preload bolt, a very vital part, was missing. I was able to ride the bike over to a nearby REI, where a kindly mechanic found a similar bolt and installed it. I bought a cooking set and fuel at the same time, as well as some waterproofing spray, and spent most of the evening spraying my panniers, tent bag, and windcheater, creating a nasty chemical odor in my room. This turned out to be one of the smartest things I have ever done, since most of my rides for the next ten days would involve rain or sleet.

I had allowed two nights at Bellingham so that I could solve any problems like the head bolt, and also provision myself at “Lower 48” prices. So the next day I loaded up the bike and went on a 12-mile shakedown ride to Fairhaven and the Chuckanut Ridge road in order to find out where the ferry terminal was and to make sure the bike was functioning perfectly. All was well with the bike and other equipment. The weather was sunny but very cool, and many trees had barely leafed out. “A very late spring,” they said. This was to be a constant refrain for the next month.

Chuckanut Ridge Drive had been highly recommended to me as a ride, but just as it started to get rural and beautiful there was a sign on a bridge with no shoulder and no sidewalk saying “No Bicycles on Roadway!” Soon after turning back I met two cyclists traveling south from Vancouver, BC, to San Diego. I warned them about the offending sign just ahead of them. I spent part of the evening shopping for items such as mosquito spray, freeze-dried meals and so on, at Fred Myers, the local version of Kroger, and the rest of it finishing up some paper work and preparing it to be mailed home.

May 9th (Friday):
Fig. 1: Waiting to Board the ferry 'Matanuska' at Fairhaven, Bellingham, WA

I packed, finished some correspondence, pedaled off to mail everything from the Post Office in Bellingham, and then onwards to the Ferry Terminal in Fairhaven, a pretty old town that has become a suburb of Bellingham. At the terminal I met Bill Walters, from Miami, Florida. Bill had a nice mountain bike he had spray-painted a uniform military drab and to the rear carrier of which he had strapped a plastic milk crate full of supplies. The rest of his equipment was in a giant rucksack on his back. Bill was planning to spend a month or so fishing the streams and lakes near the small towns of the Alaska Panhandle, and the bike was to get him from town to his fishing spots. It was painted olive drab to disguise the fact that it was an expensive bike, so that he could leave it in the bushes and it would not attract the attention of thieves.

On board the ferry Matanuska we went up to the Solarium, a covered portion of the upper after deck, and grabbed a plastic recliner each. Later arrivals pitched their tents on the unprotected part of the deck. There was a family (mother, father and teenager) from Maine ensconced on the starboard side under cover, and several older men as well as a young couple from Spain amidships, whereas the tents out on the deck were mainly occupied by young people, including several with musical instruments. Many of the tents were stuck to the deck with liberal amounts of duct tape. One of the older men in the group was Edison Shaw, an environmentalist, ham radio enthusiast and professional musician from Liberty, WA, who was on his way up to spend a week camping and fishing in the wilderness of Prince of Wales Island with a group of friends he had known for 15 years, but only over the airwaves.

We set sail into a cool, clear evening, with a tiny Coastguard cutter on each flank as “protection”, causing some amusement among the passengers as the machine guns on the cutters seemed from where we were to be little more than toys. The cutters stayed with us for nearly two hours before peeling off into the gathering dusk near the Canadian border.
Shortly thereafter we passed some of the deep-sea terminals of the port of Vancouver, and for a while we could se the lights of the ski resort on the mountain north of the city. But we saw little evidence of the city itself, and by the time we had passed the Vancouver area it was quite dark, and beginning to rain.

Edison set up his antenna on the ship’s railing and conversed with his ham friends ahead, and also told us about his eco-friendly life in the old Washington state mining district of Republic: he neither drove a car nor was on the electricity grid, but generated his own solar power, which was sufficient for his ham radio hobby and also for driving all his music-related equipment. He burned only two cords of wood each year for heating. He still traveled to gigs, courtesy of people who did have transport, and reminisced about some of the famous people he had played with in the past, including Austin’s Willie Nelson. Meanwhile the younger gang of tent dwellers got out their three guitars and one banjo and started to improvise in spite of the cold, wind and rain out there on the unprotected part of the deck.

May 10th (Saturday)

We woke up in the morning to more rain, but with steep mountain slopes plunging from the low cloud to the dark grey sea close at hand to both port and starboard. A tiny settlement on the western shore was disappearing into the mist behind us, and deep snow could be glimpsed on higher slopes to port through the occasional breaks in the lower cloud layer. This was, indeed the Inside Passage, with Vancouver Island on our left and the mainland to our right. A few of the deeper gullies were snow-filled to the sea: others contained roaring white waterfalls that leapt from rock to rock and then directly to salt water. And thus it continued all day.

In the evening all the musicians gathered in the bar and, led by Edison, ran through songs ranging from Negro Spirituals to Appalachian hymns, and from folk songs of the sixties to popular music of the nineties, including some original pieces. No-one enjoyed all this more than a very nice lady who was severely handicapped by cerebral palsy, and could only communicate by rushing all of her words out in a torrent between convulsions. I spent most of the time talking to Gary Clingman, district judge in the 5th Judicial District of New Mexico, and his son Phil, a Halliburton employee. Phil told me that all the employers in the oil patch are desperate for labor, and all a young man such as our son Robert would have to do is go to, for example, Midland, and visit the drillers’ pipe yards to offer his services.

May 11th (Sunday):

I was awoken very early in the morning by the distinct motion of the vessel in swell, so that I knew we were nearing Ketchikan. Passing us to port was a large cruise ship, the Celebrity Infinity. However, as we neared Ketchikan the weather deteriorated, again becoming overcast and cold. We played a game of tag with the cruise ship, but eventually she was allowed through the final narrows ahead of us, and we docked in Ketchikan after her. Bill and I untied our bicycles and set off to explore the town, the center of which was about 2 km from the ferry terminal. Bill, who had opted to carry relatively little of his gear in the milk crate attached to the rear of his bike, and most of it in a rucksack on his back, soon found that riding was very difficult and strenuous. We were given varied directions to the hostel, and eventually found ourselves at about 9 a.m. at the Methodist church, which ran a hostel, but had not yet opened it for the season. The kindly minister there looked up the number for the other hostel in town, but both Bill and I got very bad “vibes” from speaking to the manager there, and independently concluded it would not be a good place to stay. The Methodist minister then told us that this man had sued his church for running a hostel and not paying the business franchise taxes.

Bill and I went down to the information center to see about other accommodations, but I had already decided to catch the late evening ferry coming from Prince Rupert, BC, and bound for Sitka. I had also got directions to the Lutheran Church, and decided to go to the service, arriving just in time as it was held at 10.30 rather than 11.00 am. A Norwegian gentleman took me in tow, and helped me stow my bike out of the drizzle. Proceedings began with a baptism and five confirmations – the names were Christianson, Christensen, Horik, Potter, and Pankow. It being Pentecost, for the prayers of the people they had people scattered about the church praying “in tongues” – I identified Latin, Greek, Spanish, Norwegian, etc. The service was somewhat charismatic, and the people were warm, but I found interim minister Connie McConnell’s voice rather cold. I was to learn that this was just the Alaskan “accent”. There was the usual social hour afterward, at which several people showed great interest in my trip. Several members of the congregation had done some bicycle riding between Alaska and Canada.

After the service I rode down to the native Museum at Saxman, about 6 miles south of town. This has the largest collection of totem poles anywhere, but unfortunately the Long House and the carving center were closed, so I contented myself with photos and rode back to town to eat brunch at the Pioneer Café, which had been recommended. This was just beyond the range of the cruise passengers, was very grungy, but still very expensive. I did not think that the food lived up to its reputation. By this time it was beginning to rain more heavily, so I toured the famous street (Creek Street) that had been, as recently as 50 years ago, a red light district built out over pilings in the river. Not much trace left of that, but the best tourist shop, selling minerals and artifacts, was owned by a lady from Australia. Another shop, the Fish Creek Company, had absolutely enthralling wildlife photos, and was owned by the photographer Hamilton Gelhar and his wife. Hamilton very kindly gave me two cards made from his photos, one a spectacular shot of a seagull in the act of taking off. The city museum had a 1920s photograph of a floating salmon cannery that just could have been the “Star of India” (then “Euterpe”), a steel three-masted sailing ship now in San Diego, but built in 1874 in Ramsey, Isle of Man, a few hundred yards from our grandparents’ hotel.

I thought that Bill and I had made arrangements to meet at the Information Center, but there was no sign of him there or along the road to the Ferry Dock, even though I rode some of it twice over in intensifying and cold rain. Very close to the Ferry Dock was a Best Western Hotel with a restaurant, The Landing, that had been recommended by a couple of people. So I parked the bike where Bill would see it, and went in, by now thoroughly chilled and soaked, for coffee. Somewhat alarmingly, the core of my body was chilled, and I had to keep my wet windbreaker on while in the café in an attempt to conserve heat. This was the beginning of a cold and sore throat that lasted for a week.

There I got talking to Tom Mullins, an ex-gold miner of somewhat prophetic aspect: he had long hair and beard, and carried a large and fantastically gnarled walking stick to compensate for his pronounced limp. He had been disabled in a mining accident and was in constant pain. He had worked at Bingham Canyon, UT, but had also prospected and mined extensively in SE Alaska before injuring his back. Bill Walters arrived at 7.00 p.m., and announced that he, to, was going on to Sitka, because there was nowhere to stay and little prospect of good fishing in this town. It was now very wet outside, and we had five hours to wait before we could even get onto the ferry. However, the restaurant staff, particularly one of the waitresses, were very kind and let us stay. When the restaurant closed we were able to wait the last couple of hours in the hotel lobby, which was not quite as warm. Bill chatted up the kind waitress as she came off shift, and suggested a series of ideas for businesses (focusing on a mobile coffee wagon) that she could open and succeed at. It was quite embarrassing.

Finally, at midnight, we were able to enter the ferry terminal and buy tickets for Sitka. We again found comfortable plastic reclining deck chairs under the canopy on the solarium deck, and immediately turned in. A couple of young guys who were already there were talking, mainly one of them telling about how he had been sentenced to prison for five years because, according to the story, a third person had been fatally shot when he had tried to disarm one of his friends who was trying to commit suicide.

May 12th (Monday)

This ferry, the Taku, was the most fun of all, partly because there were several families of Australian and New Zealand travelers of about my age on board, including one couple who had been on the Matanuska.

Again we were woken up in the early morning by the motion of the ship in swell, signaling that we were close to Wrangell. The approaches to Wrangell were along a very narrow channel with tidal currents so strong that waterfalls formed over rocky obstructions. On arrival Bill and I walked into the town (the only one along the ferry route in which the ferry docked close to downtown).

The Taku then proceeded through the famous Wrangell narrows to Petersburg. These narrows were, however, not as spectacular as those south of Wrangell.

I got very friendly with Bob and Jan Johnston, from Christchurch, New Zealand, and also a mother and daughter from Australia. There were several younger Aussies on board, as well as a nice couple from Liverpool. There was also a rather prissy fellow, Dana Conley, who was the mayor of Deer Island, New Brunswick, right on the USA border.

At Petersburg a group of us tried to walk to town, but there was only time to get to the very edge: I stopped behind the others to buy a cup of coffee and ask the young girl selling it about the Norwegian heritage of the town. Her grandfather had come out from Norway as a child of 5, but nobody in the family now spoke Norwegian, and only a few people in the town. Petersburg is very compact and has hundreds of boats squeezed into its harbor. It is the one town in the panhandle that I wish I could have spent more time in.

Our stop in Kake was as brief as that in Petersburg, with no chance to go to town – however, we did get to a hotel run by the native corporation, and several of us photographed a spectacularly moss-covered roof nearby. As we left Kake I was able to use the cell phone to book a room for two at the Super 8 Motel in Sitka, thus removing a huge worry, since arrival in Sitka is scheduled for 12.30 a.m., the weather was cold and threatening, and the ferry dock is 7 miles from town.

After leaving Kake we entered Chatham Sound, which had a large swell coming straight from the ocean. The wind became quite strong and there was a lot of rain with some sleet. Here we saw a humpback whale and porpoises. I listened in to old fishermen telling about bad storms in this area, and near fatal experiences after being capsized in Peril Strait. By the time we entered the narrow, and very impressive, channel leading to Sitka it was almost dark.

The ride in from the ferry terminal was like the one at Ketchikan, except that it was dark and neither of us had a headlight, although I had a rear light. I had a headlight with me, but it was useless because my new handlebar bag was mounted so high on the bars that it completely blocked its light. It was impossible to see the road against the headlights of the rare vehicles, and barely possible to see it when there were no cars. It was also bitterly cold, with snow flurries: my fingers were completely numb for the first of many times on this trip. Bill was again riding very slowly because of the pack on his back, and I lost him near the end, when he stopped to make an adjustment of some sort and didn’t yell to let me know. He arrived as I was checking in to the Super 8 at 2.00 a.m.: it had taken an hour and a half to ride 7 miles!

May 13th (Tuesday):

Bill got up at 8.30 am and went off to Victoria’s Café, which was strongly recommended by the motel staff. I followed, but while passing the Russian Cathedral I saw some ladies watering and weeding flower boxes. They were members of the Lutheran Church doing a work day, and I was led in to meet their pastor and leader, and to be given a tour of the church. From the outside it is inconspicuous, as it is a modern concrete building and an integral part of the commercial buildings. This is because it has burned down twice in its history, the last time having been in 1993, when all that was saved was the most precious contents of the church and one concrete wall. This fire started in the heating system. The previous fire, in 1966, had burned down a large section of downtown, including St. Michael’s orthodox cathedral. The latter had been rebuilt exactly as it was, but the Lutherans had rebuilt in more modern style. They had saved a very old organ, some paintings and altar furnishings from both fires, and the original font had been located being used as a birdbath several years after the second fire, and is now back in the church.
Fig. 2: Old house in Sitka.

In other ways the histories of the two churches are closely linked. Finnish carpenters (many of them ethnic Swedes, judging by their names) were brought out by the Russian America company to build Sitka in 1843, and they petitioned for their own church. They were given a piece of ground next to the site for St. Michael’s Cathedral as long as they built the Cathedral first, which they did.

Bill and I spent some time looking around the Murray Pacific fishermen’s outfitting store: this was fascinating as it catered to the commercial fishermen and had hooks and lures of types and in large sizes that I had never seen before. It also had very reasonable prices on many things, including weatherproof clothing. Before leaving Sitka I bought a pair of rubber gloves there, but I chose unwisely. They kept the wind from my fingers, but otherwise provided no warmth, and constricted the blood supply. Everywhere he went Bill interrogated people about the fishing, and everywhere got different answers. After climbing Castle Hill (the site of the original Russian fort and later, of the Russian governor’s mansion) we had a good lunch at “The Deli” nearby. Bill and I then split up, he to find out more about fishing and me to tour St. Michael’s cathedral and the Museum, which had very interesting displays about WWII, especially the Japanese invasion of the Aleutians and the American evacuation and poor treatment of the Aleutian people. A display there said that Sven Waxell (a Swede?) on Vitus Bering’s (definitely a Dane) expedition discovered Alaska for the Russians on July 16, 1744.

I then rode out to the Sheldon Jackson Museum of ethnological artifacts. This is a mile or two out of town on the campus of Sheldon Jackson College, which went bankrupt and closed down almost without notice a year or two ago, stranding many students within a year of obtaining a degree. Sheldon Jackson was a Presbyterian missionary, one of several given Federal approval to set up schools around Alaska at a time when the Federal Government had no funds to do so. He was the most able, and was also a fanatical collector of the native cultural artifacts. The museum is excellent, though rather overwhelming. It is separately funded from the College, as is a fish hatchery across the road, so these two institutions have survived the fall of the college. I visited the fish hatchery, but learned little, as there were no guides or explanations, it being run by volunteers.

I then continued on the bicycle to the Sitka National Historical Park, which covers the site of an important 1804 battle between the Russians and the Tlingit, and has a museum with several very old totem poles as well as good explanations of the motives for carving poles and the motifs that are carved on them. The park also has many trails leading to the site of a Russian fort and to a memorial marker for the Russians and Tlingit who lost their lives in the battle. There are totem poles with explanations along all of these trails. In several places in the park were very obvious blowdowns, with uprooted trees all lying in the same direction. Judging from the moss cover and the state of decay of the trees, these were of several different ages. People I asked about it had no idea of when they might have occurred. The winds causing them seem to have been mainly from the southeast.

Fig. 3: Memorial marker for the Russians killed in battle with the Tlingit, Sitka National Historical Park.

After a search I found a restaurant cheap enough to eat dinner at, the Wok and Teriyaki, and had a good meal of Mongolian Beef. The sun had come out for a couple of hours in the afternoon, but this was still a raw day, especially in the evening.

Bill had ridden up to Blue Lake, the water supply for Sitka and a famous fishing spot. He had met there a fisheries biologist in full diving gear, who had told him that the fishing was no good because the water was still too cold.

May 14th (Wednesday)

The day began early again with breakfast at Victoria’s Restaurant, enlivened by the presence of Sasha, a very nice brand new Ukrainian waitress, and the ejection of a crazy woman who wanted to be given money to go back to California, but who also told of having been previously given the fare and having used it for something else. Then in came an older local on a bicycle, who Bill grilled about fishing and from whom he received a report about Blue Lake that completely contradicted what he had learned the previous evening from the biologist. But he also learned that the lake and river flowing through town were good fishing spots. This local gentleman turned out to have owned a series of motorbikes, including a Honda 50c.c.in the 60s. In the same era he had toured Canada on a Honda 160 c.c., a machine very similar to my Honda Dream. He is the only other person I have met who has done a major tour in North America on so small a motorbike. So we had a good conversation about old Hondas!

After breakfast I toured the old Russian Bishop’s House, which is very Finnish in construction – the original round logs were adzed flat on the inside of the house after it was finished! Lots of moss and dried grass was used for chinking the walls and also for insulation under the false floor. I then went to the Tlingit Dance demonstration in the cultural center. This was quite interesting and very charming, for the announcer was a teenage girl and one of the principal dancers a boy of about nine. Another dancer was a young lady with an infant on her hip (Fig.4).

Fig. 4: Tlingit Dancer, Sitka Tlingit Cultural Center.

I checked out of the hotel, went to Murray Pacific and bought the useless gloves, and cycled off to the ferry terminal. By the time I got there a steady rain had set in, and I had stupidly decided not to stop and put garbage bags over all my panniers and other bags, so I arrived at the terminal soaking wet and with my belongings soaking wet, including some of my papers.

At the terminal I met Sarah Wallace, from Glasgow, who had been on the Taku all the way from Ketchikan. She is a law student at Glasgow University who has just finished a year of studying abroad in Vancouver. When we got aboard the ferry I met Helena Hrubesova, from Prague, who again had also been on the Taku. I introduced the two young ladies, who got along famously and compared their plans for their lives, which in both cases involved lots of travel and, perhaps, settling down to practice law in a foreign country. After this trip Sarah would meet her parents in Vancouver for a tour of Canada, but Helena was off to Whitehorse, Yukon, to work for the summer.

Bob and Jan, and Kieran and her mother from Melbourne were also on this ferry, the MV Fairweather, a smaller but faster vessel than the previous two ships, but with a similar layout except for the lack of staterooms. We ended up with a fluid group of Aussies and New Zealanders in the observation lounge, with Bob and I running out periodically to take photographs. There was also a very pleasant family from Michigan, who seemed to have traveled the world on a low budget.

We arrived at Juneau at 4 pm in driving rain. The ferry terminal is 13 miles from downtown, and so ensued the “ride from hell” into town in the teeth of a nasty headwind and blinding wind, with the temperature no more than 40°F (5°C). The only road, Egan Drive, soon turned into a virtual freeway, and there were some honks from impatient drivers, especially where there was an interchange under construction and the road was hemmed in by concrete barriers. The edges of the road were thick with black volcanic mud that had been used during the winter for de-icing, so me and the bike were both soon filthy also. I was frozen and exhausted, my nose running like the Mississippi by the time I got into town and stopped at a takeout pizza place to get directions to the hostel. There was some discussion about where the hostel actually was, and it turned out to be some distance up a very steep hill near the center of town: the hill was so steep, in fact, that I could only push the bike a few paces at a time before having to rest.

The Juneau International Hostel is just a little house, men’s dorm in the basement, women upstairs. My bike was caked with mud from the road, and I was frozen and soaked. It may have been on this ride that my fingers began to lose sensation. The first thing I had to do, as on the boat from Ketchikan, was to try to clean and dry everything. The flap of one of my new panniers had filled with water because the zip had not been closed all the way, but otherwise they were waterproof. But my clothes and the panniers themselves were all filthy, and some of the papers in my handle bar bag were wet. It took a couple of hours to sort everything out, and I had no dinner before going to bed. Dana Conley from New Brunswick was in the next cot to mine, and Helena Hrubesova and her boyfriend were also there – he had also been on the Taku. The Hostel is right around the corner from the Russian Orthodox Church, which was built in Russia and brought to Juneau in 1894 at the request of the Sauke Bay Tlingit, who had decided that they wanted to adopt Christianity in its Russian form. Unfortunately, the church was locked the whole time I was in Juneau.

May 15th (Thursday)

After having breakfast at the Silverbow Backroom Deli/Coffee shop, which was good, though expensive, I wandered downtown. The Celebrity Mercury was in dock, the town was full of tourists, and there was a row of booths at the cruise ship quay where touts were selling bus tours, whale watching tours, and flight-seeing.
Fig. 5: Juneau: view from the waterfront showing avalanche-prone slopes overhanging the city.

Several booths were offering inexpensive bus trips to the Mendenhall Glacier. The driver of our bus gave a running commentary on the history of Juneau and the glacier as we drove out. On arrival at the glacier I took the East Glacier Trail, which is about 3 miles long and goes closest to the glacier. Because the glacier has retreated considerably since the trails were laid out, it no longer goes as far as the glacier. The trail turned out to climb high up the mountainside and to offer magnificent views of the glacier snout. About ½ mile into the trail I encountered four people walking as fast as they could back to the Visitor Center. They warned me not to proceed because they had encountered a bear ahead – he had been up a tree and had clambered down onto the trail. I continued, but began clearing my throat repeatedly, which was easy because of my developing sore throat. I saw plenty of bear prints on the trail, but no bear and only four people on the whole length of the trail.

Fig. 6: On the trail above Nugget Creek, Mendenhall National Park.

This trail ends high above Nugget Creek, which falls spectacularly into Mendenhall Lake, which itself was covered with small icebergs calved from the Glacier. Apparently the ice on the lake had only broken up that weekend (May 10th). From its high point the trail drops steeply by means of about 150 wooden steps through moss-blanketed rainforest. Here the salmonberries were in glorious pink flower, and the thorny Devil’s Club had green tips, while there still patches of snow several hundreds of yards long to be crossed. Occasional periods of sunlight turned the wet green world glisteningly magical. Here a local lady who was almost running the trail took a photograph for me.

After spending some time listening to the presentations in the Visitors’ Center, and trying to find someone to identify the plants I had seen, I went down to the beach, where I ran into

Fig. 7: Snout of the Mendenhall Glacier.

Helena Hrubesova and her boyfriend as well as Bob and Janet Johnston and Dana Conley. Helena and boyfriend were burdened with their full backpacks, as they had decided to visit the glacier on their way back to the ferry terminal. Bob and Janet had somehow got themselves onto a boat on the lake, and had driven it in among the icebergs to the foot of the glacier, ignoring warning signs. Dana and I walked to the foot of Nugget Falls. I then walked the nature trail, which had explanations of the Beaver Dams to be seen, but had to cut that short to catch the bus back to Juneau.

Fig. 8: At the foot of Nugget Falls, Mendenhall Glacier.

Back in Juneau I visited the Red Dog saloon in search of a very late lunch, but found it crowded with tourists and lacking service, although there was a very humorous musician performing. I eventually found a very expensive and not very good lunch of hamburger and fries at the Raven's Café, inside the Imperial Bar on Front Street. I then visited the Alaska State Museum, which is mostly about wildlife and ethnography, and largely duplicates the Sheldon Jackson Museum in Sitka.
I climbed the stairs from there to the Governor’s Mansion, and met a man called David, an ex-Alaska Marine Highway employee, with whom I had had a long conversation about politics and energy on the Taku en route to Sitka. On the way back to the hostel I stopped at Rainbow Foods, Juneau’s natural food stores and a rather squirly place, to buy dinner (chowder, trail mix for the cycle ride, and fruit). I was not feeling very well – chilled and a sore throat, and so read the newspaper at the hostel and lost the chance to take a ride along Basin Road, which apparently goes past the old A-J mine workings.

During the evening I found that one of my fellow guests was a keen cyclist and bike mechanic from Colorado. He volunteered to go over my bike: I had been having some trouble with the derailleur adjustment. We checked the head tightness again and found that it needed tightening again. We also cleaned the bike, lubricated the drive mechanism, and adjusted the gears.

May 16th (Friday)

Woke up to heavy rain, but was offered pancakes for breakfast by the nice family from Michigan, first met on the way here on the MV Fairweather. I stored my packed bags in the outside shed (found with some difficulty and some help from Dana Conley), and set off to tour the Alaska Capitol, which is the ugliest and strangest that I have seen. It appears to be an ordinary early 20th Century office building, onto the front of which someone has added four Corinthian columns to give it dignity, but with no attempt to integrate them with the design of the rest of the building. The columns are of a schistose impure marble which was either never polished or has weathered badly. This colonnaded front entrance is in the middle of the block on a narrow street, and so neither commands a view nor can be seen from anywhere except the street directly in front of it. Inside, however, the building is a true capitol with the usual senate and house rooms, committee rooms, and member offices. The walls are lined with interesting historical photographs.

I also visited the Juneau Museum briefly. Here are documented the beginnings of Juneau in 1880 as a gold camp, and its flourishing through the operations of the Treadwell and Ready Bullion Mines across the Gastineau Channel in Douglas, to its peak with the Alaska-Juneau (“A-J”) Mine (practically in downtown Juneau), the biggest and best run gold mine of its time. This mine did not shut down until it was declared non-essential to the war effort in 1944.

I returned to the hostel, loaded the bike, and gingerly set off down some side streets to avoid the very steep hill on Harris. I was told by the driver of an AT&T van that I was going the wrong way on a one-way street, and took the opportunity to ask him about cycle shops. He strongly recommended Glacier Cycles on the way to the airport and lent me his cell phone to talk to them, and also told me how to find and stay on the cycle track out to the airport. This I did, enjoying a much more pleasant ride because of the lack of traffic, but enduring again the cold and the increasing rain.

By the time I found the bike shop, at the entrance to the airport, I was cold and miserable. The forks were tightened, and I remembered to buy an extra puncture repair kit. I then set off in search of a restaurant. There were no obvious choices, and my directions were a bit confusing, so I stopped a couple of times for advice. I finally settled on the Canton House Chinese Restaurant, which was quite posh and where the staff looked somewhat askance at a wet and messy cyclist. On looking for my blue plastic British Rail ticket holder, which I use as a bill-fold to hold my most important documents (driver's license, Visa card, medical card and a $20 bill) when running, I found it missing. In rising panic I considered all the places where I could have packed it or left it, and paid the bill with my MasterCard. Just as I was doing so my cell phone rang. It was Cherry Hamilton from the The Hearing Center, next to where I had first stopped to ask someone for directions to a restaurant. She had found it on the ground, gone back to her office and looked me up on the internet White Pages, immediately found my telephone number, and called me. Cherry even asked me some questions to verify that she had the right person before telling me that she had found the billfold. What an enormous feeling of relief: the trip would not end here in Juneau in disgrace, but would go on! I immediately went to The Hearing Center to pick up my billfold, and gave Cherry a grateful hug. She was a lovely lady! I must remember to send her a gift when I get home (I sent her a stuffed Armadillo).

The rest of the journey to the Ferry Terminal was, as usual, wet and cold, but when I got on board the Malaspina (departed Juneau 4.30pm, arrived Skagway 11.00pm) I immediately encountered Bob and Jan from Christchurch and Kieran and her mother from Melbourne, as well as a nice couple from Manchester. Bob and Jan had taken the public bus to the end of the line, and then walked the last two miles in the rain with their rucksacks on their backs. Again we had a moveable feast going in the observation lounge, and spotted some whales and many eagles among the rocks. Darkness fell as we approached Haines.

At Skagway I cycled directly to the hostel, but got the wrong house on the first attempt, and woke the owner/manager’s husband when I got it right, since she had left him in bed while she collected the customers from the ferry. This was a very strange hostel: there was an outside dorm in what had probably been a garage, and several inside dorms. At first I was put in the outside dorm, but it was full, so I was put in an inside dorm with three young Americorps women leaders and one other guy. The hostel was very untidy and somewhat disorganized, but the owner (Alice?) prepared home-made read every day.

May 17th (Saturday).

This day was spent unnecessarily in Skagway – there is not enough to do there (even with some errands to run) to fill two whole days, and I could have taken the noon train out. The weather, though, was still cold with a very low overcast and occasional rain, so perhaps by delaying I ensured better weather for the beginning of my ride. I had the bike checked again (the gears were not quite right), bought pepper spray (all the shops in Skagway were out of proper bear spray) and a water filter system that would fit on the bicycle, and visited the local museum, which again focused on the gold rush days. I did not figure out how to use the filter system until I got to Fairbanks, which meant that I had to beg water on a couple of occasions while on the Alcan Highway.

At the station I bought my ticket to Fraser, BC, on the White Pass and Yukon railroad, and at the National Park Service office, also in the station, I watched the movie "City of Gold," narrated by Pierre Berton, a prominent Canadian journalist and TV personality. This movie won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1957 and was nominated for an Oscar: it is a documentary about Berton's hometown, Dawson City, Yukon, during the gold rush. The photography is beautiful and the shots of buildings that had been in glamorous use during Berton's childhood but that were abandoned and tumbling down by the fifties are heart-rending. In his calm, soothing voice Berton tells of the slow death of Dawson in the form of a series of reminiscences of his childhood. He also points out that during its heyday in the Gold Rush the Mounties exerted such firm control that there was not one murder in the city, and that all business activities shut for Sunday so that church services could be held. The relationship between Skagway and Dawson City is interesting: Skagway seems to play Mr. Hyde to Dawson's Dr. Jekyll. In Skagway much is made of the efforts of the Mounties to ensure that everyone had adequate supplies to survive the winter, and the control they maintained over the Chilkoot Pass and in Dawson. In Dawson much is made of the glamorous, corrupt and violent side of life in Gold rush Skagway. They both seem to feed on each other's past: Dawson is incomplete without the excitement of Skagway, and Skagway needs the calm control of Dawson as counterpoint to its own lack of control.

I visited the city museum in the McCabe College building, an impressive 2½-storey granite edifice put up in 1899 to house Alaska's first institution of higher learning. It is somewhat hidden in the woods three blocks off Main Street, and backs up to the White Pass and Yukon tracks. Since 1961 it has served both as the Museum and as City Hall. On the lot to the south is nothing but a lonely chimney, all that remains of the once famous Pullen Hotel, which closed and was abandoned in 1957. The Museum has a fairly impressive collection of gold rush era artifacts, as well as the usual large collection of Native American objects.

The business area of Skagway is nothing but a tourist trap, living off the faded glory of the gold rush and off the hordes of passengers disgorged daily from the cruise ships. Like all cruise ports of call, it is filled with jeweler's shops, art galleries, and shops selling small but expensive trinkets.

I spent a chunk of the evening having a wide-ranging and frustrating discussion about energy and environmental issues with the slightly disabled nephew of the owner of the hostel. He seemed to be staying there long term while he desultorarily looked for work.
He was a greeny and a believer in conspiracies by the powerful to keep the rest of us poor and in the dark.