Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

   For the past few weeks my sister-in-law, Jill, has been visiting. She came for a visit once or twice when we lived in Hoonah, so it was nice for her to get to see something totally different this time around. This past Saturday, we drove to Hatcher Pass, about forty-five minutes away. The bottom three pictures are from there. The week before we took about a four hour trip, one way, to Denali National Park.  It was Labor Day weekend, and I was a little leery of all the traffic, but it wasn't too bad. Once inside the park, you can only drive about twenty miles to Savage River, and there really isn't all that much to see. There is an unpaved road beyond that but you have to take a tour bus or some such thing in order to run on that. I'm not sure how far it goes or if you ever get to see the mountain (Denali) once you get to the end. There were several spots along the way while we were still about a hundred miles away where we could pull off and stop, but of course we didn...

A week before last Sunday I was feeling a little antsy. Though the winter has been really mild by Alaska standards, I had been spending way too much time inside and was suffering from a little cabin fever. It just so happened that the day was turning out to be pretty nice, kind of sunny and not too cold. The tide was in my favor too, so I called my oldest daughter, Jen and my grandaughter Kaylahni and we went out to the cannery with Jan's metal detector to scour the beach. Frankly, I wasn't expecting to get all that much. We've been up and down that stretch of beach five or six times in the past digging up lead from the seine nets that used to be in the old web house that burned down. I understand that the cannery used to store the seine nets in the house until the seine season started in the summer. I have no idea how many nets were there when it burned down, but as I mentioned, every time we've been out there digging, we've come up with buried treasure. Several ...