Author: zymurphile

This is an index of posts and updates that adds another dimension to this blog. I’ll update it from time-to-time when I add new content (at the top). Headers link to posts related to these comments.

Lost Wages

Another college caper: How to win at Roulette (not).

Migrant Farmers

I found some nice videos about old-time farming —  combines in particular —  on YouTube. [Palouse, Washington in the mid-1940s – YouTube | To Till a Field: Man and Machine in the Palouse – YouTube]

Learning to read

I went to grade school in the same one-room schoolhouse that dad did. He told me about a practical joke that some of the older students played on a teacher. The teacher rode a motorcycle to work (they were popular in the early part of the 1900s). His motorcycle had a big leather seat with ventilation holes. You stood up while starting it by using the kick starter. A wire from a spark plug passed up through one of those holes provided an electric surprise when he sat down to ride away.

4. AK, BC & YT — Dawson City

I stumbled across a couple of wonderful videos about the Klondike Stampede and the prospectors who went there. My journey was a small shadow compared to their’s, but it left me with a similar pinnacle feeling of adventure. The Palace Grand Theatre is where I went to see the Klondike Follies. [PBS video: The Klondike Gold Rush] [PBS webpage/video: Palace Grand Theatre]

The Whistle

A college caper.

The ferryboat from Haines was newer than the one to Skagway. In particular, there was no tent deck. That meant I had to break regulations and sneak into the observation deck after lights out to sleep. I don’t remember anything else about the first day except trying to read a book by Dean Koontz. It was not a good one. It was one tediously descriptive paragraph after another. It was so bad that I ripped it in two and threw it in the trash. I didn’t want to have some other poor devil waste their time coming to the same conclusion.

According to my notes, I got off the ferry for a walk when we got to Ketchikan. The town was dead as it was Sunday. I had a submarine sandwich and went back to the ferry and watched a sailboat race out in the channel.

The first thing I actually remember was hearing our foghorn at 4:30 am the next morning. We had taken the outside route because the open ocean was calm due to no wind. Of course, that’s why it was foggy out there. The fog lifted around 5:30 am. By then, I had eaten the grapefruit and two muffins I bought in Ketchikan and had some coffee.

The lubrication pump for the reduction gear on one propeller shaft quit running somewhere near Port Hardy. We were now making 8 knots instead of the usual 15.7. They got the emergency power for that shaft running during the night. Now our speed was up to 12 knots.

That would make us three hours late to Bellingham. Cellphones and cellphone service were still a rarity out there back then so I couldn’t contact Charlie. He would just have to wait around for me. (Now that I think about it, there might have been a way. Charlie was a retired Coast Guard captain. I might have been able to have the ship contact the Coast Guard who would have been able to contact Charlie. Oh, well.)

We were treated to Orca Whales spouting and playing along the way. Then we finally got to Bellingham. On the drive back to Mount Lake Terrace, Charlie and I stopped for lunch at Susan’s place in Everett. Susan and Dan came down there the next day for dinner. Barb, Ken, and the kids gave me a ride back to Spokane. They had spent a week at The Breakers down by Ocean Shores.

That was the end of my first epic bicycle tour. The next one was going to be from Surprise, AZ to Key West, Florida. And after that, I was going to make a grand tour of BC. But my heart troubles interfered with those plans. I did make a couple of short tours from Spokane, which I may write about later.

======= Epilogue =======

I was very pleased to stumble on the Yukon Sights blog by Sue Thomas. She has 70% of the pictures that were on my eight rolls of Kodachrome that fell into a black hole. I learned in one of the posts that she grew up in Beaver Creek. I did learn that her dad carved the airstrip there out of woods. [Beaver Creek region]

I’ve remembered an amusing experience at the Beaver Creek border station. I rode up on my bike and presented my passport at the window. The agent spotted my bear spray mounted on the handlebars. Canada requires that any bear spray that you bring in meets their specific requirements. They are very fussy about guns and bear spray there.

The giveaway was mine was not the usual size. I handed it to him and explained that I had bought it in Dawson City. He didn’t believe me so I explained further that it was a second-hand canister I bought at a sporting goods store on 3rd or 4th street. Suddenly he disappeared into the interior of the station. Maybe he checked my story in Dawson City. Maybe he asked his superior, I don’t know. He returned after a while, said it was not legal, and handed it back to me. Strange.

I came to the conclusion in Haines that a guy I met early on the tour was indeed putting me on. He had news about impassable construction on Haines Road, a big forest fire, and bears. Supposedly food was so scarce that summer they were resorting to “grabbing people.” I listened politely but severely doubted his stories. I had heard nothing further about those events by the time I got to Haines, and there was no construction of any kind on Haines Road. Fake News.

Collecting my thoughts for this post evoked much the same feeling I had when I rode down from Haines Juction to the bridge over the Dezadeash River back in the day. It was déjà vu all over again. I was eager to start the ride but I also felt melancholic about leaving. It would have been grand to spend a few more days there, but the ferry wouldn’t wait. It surprised me to have that feeling again.

My notes say I got up at 5:00 am, and that it started to drizzle as I ate breakfast. It stopped after getting things damp, so I was soon on my way. The weather turned out to be nice but windy all day. My feeling began to change as I rode along and thought about the change coming up. The scenery had improved at a steady rate after the unremarkable start at Tok. Reports of what awaited beyond the bridge had been more than enthusiastic.

I’d be climbing the last 5,900 of the total ascent of 25,700 vertical feet from Valdez to Haines, AK. I’d also use up my remaining 1,900 vertical feet of descent to sea level at Haines, AK. That’s a lot of ups and downs.

Remember, climbs burn up a lot of time and energy. You gain back some of the time on descents, but not much. Fast descents are fun but waste most of the energy you’ve earned on the ups. (Air friction at high speeds burns energy at a high rate.) The net result is fewer miles on a day filled with lots of ups and downs. I only managed 55 miles on the first day.

Haines Road goes through a series of valleys most of the way. Those valleys are a couple of miles wide and were ground into solid rock by a mile-thick ice sheet during the last ice age. The result is a vast area of rolling hills and valleys. They lie between sharp, glaciated mountains to the west and the interior plains a hundred or more miles to the east.

My notes claim the scenery is “…impossible to capture with a camera.” It is a verdant-green alpine region with great visibility in all directions. You can get some idea of the scenery from pictures from this route that Sue Thomas has posted. [Kluane (near Haines Junction) to $1,000,000 Falls] [$1,000,000 Falls to Pine Lake (near Haines)]

Most of the energy I had stored up by the time I got to the first major summit was wasted on a magnificent descent to the campground at $1,000,000 Falls. The falls are nice, but salmon are unable to make it past them to spawn.

The trees there were way too small to use for hoisting my food out of the reach of bears. A little investigation of the bear-proof garbage bins there yielded a solution, though. The bins had access doors on the back side, separated from the garbage by a plastic liner. That provided a great place to cache my food and other odiferous items.

A steep climb up Chilkat Pass (not to be confused with Chilkoot) greeted me the next day. Then I faced a stiff headwind at the summit. I had hoped to reach Haines in one day, but I ended up at Mosquito Lake Campground after 81 miles (not a promising name, but they weren’t bad there).

I met a couple from Holland along the way. They were cycling the Haines to Whitehorse to Skagway loop. I told them I had ancestors from Holland and they replied, “We do too.” They told me the loop was famous in Europe, which validated what I’d heard earlier. Duke Ellington would have called it “beyond category.”

I was now 33 miles from Haines. I got up early the next morning at 5:00 am to beat the wind, traffic, and some reported construction (which wasn’t hard to ride on). I was soon there. The campground at Haines was right at the edge of town. A quick stroll around town revealed that most of the business there was art shops catering to patrons from cruise ships. They dock at the edge of town. Some of the art was very nice, but I didn’t have room on my bike for the $2,500 bear carving I liked.

The next two days in Haines were spare days I saved in case of trouble. I had already used one on the ride from Haines Junction. My confidence in how long it would take to ride from Valdez turned out to be justified.

I wrote my notes in the library while I was in Haines. It felt strange to be sitting in a chair and writing at a table. I had breakfast at a restaurant by the water’s edge, lunch at an espresso place and dinner at a bakery/restaurant.

I called Marcia and learned we had a leak in the basement. It could have been the hot water heater or condensation from the heat pump. (There was no need to worry, but I didn’t know until years later that there is a sump under the heat pump which would have taken care of a pretty big leak.) She was getting lonely, and tired of dealing with aggravations. Then I called Charlie. He would drive to Bellingham again and pick me up from the ferry at 8:15 am.

On my last day there, I got everything ready to leave. The forecast was rain so I figured out a way to avoid get soaked while riding to the ferry like I did in Prince Rupert. I had the things I’d need onboard in a plastic bag inside of one nylon bag, and my sleeping bag in another. The rest of it could stay on the bicycle inside the panniers on the voyage.

Then it was off to the ferry the next morning. Of course, there was no rain. The ferry slip is about five miles north of Haines in more sheltered water. I got there early and picked up my ticket. When I changed the date of my reservation while I was in Seward I had been sternly warned not to miss it. But something had gone horribly wrong. I was there on the wrong day. But the ticket agent was a cyclist too and he replied, “We don’t need to say anything more about that.”