Nelson taking a picture of the Tanana River with the Kodak DC50 camera
Casio QV-30 photo
We started out by backtracking 2.4 miles to the Salcha River
Lodge for breakfast. The food was excellent, so we lingered. From there
we headed back east along the south end of Harding Lake.
As we headed away from Harding Lake we moved away from civilization; it
is considerably more remote. One time I was driving back from Tok in the
winter and saw flames in the woods about 1/2 mile north of the highway.
I parked my truck on the side of the road and hiked up a two-track trail
to find a cabin engulfed in flames but nobody around. I hiked back out to
the road and drove to the lodge above Harding Lake, where I called the fire
in. As I've said before, life in bush Alaska can be brutal.
We rode for quite some time today along the silt-laden Tanana River (pronounced "Tan-uh-naw," not "Tan-ann-uh" like the baseball player).
There is so much silt in the Tanana River water that if you put your finger
in the water, you would'nt be able to see your fingernail. Rivers like the
Tanana, Yukon and Copper come from glacial melt high in the mountains. As
the glaciers scour their way along the rock surface, they scrape fine pieces
of rock, called "silt" into the ice. Huge runs of salmon can be
literally invisible from shore due to the silt. The silt has been known
to impregnate the fibers of life jackets, weighing them down to the point
of drowning the wearers.
The water is also amazingly cold. In the Copper River right now
near Chitina, Alaska fishermen are "dip netting" for salmon in
the frigid water. Fishermen standing in the water and on the rocky shore
use huge 3' diameter nets on 8'-12' poles to blindly grab the fish as they
swim by (at a rate of 900 per hour per the Fairbanks Daily News Miner this
week). It is no easy task to snatch a 50 lb. fish out of fast water (the
Copper River runs 9 mph) on the end of a 12' pole, while standing in the
same swift current.
One year while I was dip-netting in the Copper River, a fisherman's dog
fell into the water. The fisherman jumped in to save the dog. The fisherman's
brother jumped in the save him. The two men drowned and the dog swam to
shore and walked out.
One Spring, I jumped into the Chena River in Fairbanks to save
a dog that had fallen through the ice. I was driving to the library to pick
my wife up from work, when I saw a crowd looking at the river along First
Street, so stopped. Upon realizing what was happening, I grabbed a 100'
rope from my truck, ran to the edge of the river ice, handed one end of
the rope to a bystander and grabbed the other end in my hand. I then proceeded
to crawl out onto the ice to where the dog had fallen through, managed to
grab the dog-paddling dog by its collar and drag it across the ice to shore.
The dog was hypothermic, but after a few hours at the library bundled in
blankets in front of an electric heater, it managed to walk home, wherever
that was (I wonder if it crossed the river to get home).
We passed Birch Lake and then climbed about 100' over a 1 mile distance,
zooming downhill at a speed of 33.9 mph.
As we headed along the Tanana River again, the temperature on my Trek cyclocomputer
read 88 degrees. [As I traveled through the Lower
48 states, people kept asking me if it was r-e-a-l-l-y cold in Alaska and
I explained that it was 88° near Fairbanks when I left; not cold by
any standard.]
Nelson and I stopped at a roadside turnout and ate a snack. We sat there for quite some time taking in the wonderful summer day in the wilderness. It was really hot in the sun, but, just a half hour later, the temperature dropped about 30 degrees as clouds obscured the sun and we saw our first moose -- a young cow. We also saw what we think was a wolf crossing the road quite a distance ahead of us.
About this point, we were overtaken by a lone bicycle rider moving
far quicker than we were. It was one of our group--Bob--who had left Fairbanks
this morning. He talked to us for a few minutes then took off at racing
speed on his empty bicycle.
We had one really big hill. We went about 2 miles over the course of 1/2
hour and then roared down--about 35 mph. Form there the terrain leveled
out and we found ourselves riding over pretty frequent frost heaves
We crossed the Tanana River at Big Delta. On our right was a cliff face
with names painted high on the cliff we were told by high school graduates,
one of whom had died in attempting to paint her name there. At the Big Delta
crossing the pipeline crosses on its own suspension bridge.
We stopped for a Gatorade and rode into our campsite at Smith's Green Acres
(an excellent campground with really great showers). There we met the rest
of our group. We rode to dinner at Pizza Bella and visited the Visitor Information
Center which marked the end of the Alaska Highway. Then we rode back to
the campground and connected to the Web.
62 miles
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© Ed Noonan 1996, 1997