Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

  For all intents and purposes, summer has arrived in Hoonah. School is out, the leaves on all the trees have finally shown, the flowers on the salmon berry bushes are blooming, as are the Forget Me Not's. The hummingbirds have made there way  here on their annual migration north, and while the bugs haven't hatched yet, the tourists certainly have. They've arrived en-mass on the cruise ships, crowding the streets, hopping on buses and taking pictures of whatever they find photo worthy, which apparently is almost everything. After a two week stint of rainy, mostly normal weather for Southeast, we've gotten a break and the sun has been out for the past few days. It always amazes me that we can go from needing a jacket to wishing that running around nude was an acceptable practice here, all in the course of a single day. When the sun  comes out this time of year, it can be intense. Of course sunny days mean beautiful sunsets, and as of late we've had...

  I like sunny days, I really do. It makes you feel good to wake up in the morning and see the sun shining bright. The birds are all singing, the flowers are thriving and everyone is in a generally good mood. That's in the morning. By afternoon when the heat is really revving up and the wind is blowing the tops off the whitecaps I'm praying for a little cloud cover and a shower. Yesterday when I got in from fishing, fixed some supper and took care of some other chores, I decided to take the dog for a walk out to the cannery. It was hotter than blazes and we needed to get a break from the heat. This Celebrity ship was just leaving at 10:30. It was the second ship that day. I think it's pretty excessive to discharge all those tourists on this small town in one day. It's getting increasingly difficult to get around as now, not only do we have buses and touring vans from the cannery, but there is an influx of private vans and touring buses as well as...

Here's a shot of one of the tour boats that anchor out by the cannery. This is looking through the tunnel on the way out to Icy Strait Point. Everyone here has always called it Cannery Point, but once tourism took hold I guess the powers that be felt like it had to have a classier name or some such thing. Most of the locals still just call it Cannery Point though. That's not all that's changed with the coming of tourism to Hoonah. On the days when the ships are in there is a steady stream of busses and large vans up and down the roads, as well as hundreds of people walking up and down the roads. The town has roughly 850 people, so when you throw in another 500- to 1,000, it makes an impact. Then to have six or eight large city busses running through a town that doesn't even have a stop light, it starts feeling kind of crowded. I'm not overly enamored with the whole tourism thing. My biggest complaint is that so many seemed to have left common courtesy and common ...