Blogs from Soldotna, Alaska, United States, North America - page 2

Friday, June 17, 2011 Johnson Lake Sunny 64 degrees mileage 9990 to start the day Drove back up the Sterling Highway toward the towns of Soldotna and Kenai, which really run together. On the way saw another female moose and her twin calves crossing the road. Apparently around the world, all moose calves are born between the last two weeks in May and the first week of June. If the cow is healthy, then she has twins. This time Valerie was able to stop and get pictures. On the way to the Diamond M Ranch and RV park , where all the Roadtrekers were meeting, we stopped by the city docks overlooking some river marshes/wetlands to check for any ducks or shorebirds. They had a viewing platform in this area and a telescope set up but ... read more

The people who inhabit Alaska’s isolated (and even not-so-isolated) locales are uniquely qualified for their independence. Alaskans tend to be fiercely self-reliant, largely a consequence of the recently initiated and still largely unfinished process of settling this state. There are still homesteaders here. Real homesteaders. Who knew that those kind of people even existed? I know a particularly feisty 90-year-old woman who walked with her husband 50 miles to claim a property (and found the town in which I now live) on a nice place on a river they spotted from his airplane. She celebrated her birthday with an 18-mile backpacking trip into the mountains. This woman hand-dug her 25-foot-deep well, one coffee can at a time, because she had narrower shoulders than her husband and thus had to dig less. All of the homesteaders built ... read more

Since I have been in Alaska I have had the great pleasure of encountering a bear on three occasions. I say “great pleasure” only because none of these encounters ended with me being eaten, mauled, dragged, charged, bluff charged, or slashed open like wrapping paper off your little sister’s zhu-zhu pet by the bear. In Alaska everyone has a bear story. Without fail, everyone that has lived here for longer than about 12 minutes knows someone that has been attacked by a bear. And these aren’t the know-a-friend-who-had-a-coworker-who-had-a-cousin type “know someone” relationships: this is either a friend of theirs or they themselves were attacked by a bear. What makes it even more unsettling is that for some reason or another, Alaskans volunteer these stories with virtually no prompting. Just the mere mention that I do ... read more