Alaska or Bust: Close encounter of the BEAR kind!!

August 8... Happy 22nd birthday Hanna! I miss you!!

Yesterday we drove from Fairbanks to Haines Junction, Yukon. Haines Junction is the gateway to the Kluane National Park of Canada. It is an awesome area and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It backs up to Wrangell-St ELias National Park in the US (our largest national park). I liked Haines Junction except for not having any cell service. We had a trail head into Kluane NP right in our campground :-).

Today we drove down to Haines, AK, making yet another US-Canada border crossing. It was a beautiful drive even with overcast skies. The border patrol guy was really nice and had Tom fill out some extra paperwork so the halibut that he caught in Homer wouldn't be confiscated when we cross the border into Montana in a couple of weeks. Much different from the border agents on the bridge to WIndsor!

Haines is a great little town and very friendly. We are in a nice little water front campground, the owner lady is very sweet and is a gem at directing people backing up campers, BLESS HER HEART!! I love the smell of the ocean and watching the fishing boats come in with their catch. An added bonus today is that the salmon are running on the Chilkoot River just a few miles down from the campground and the bears were out feeding. I was able to get some shots of a sow with her twin cubs that are in their 2nd summer. After watching them for awhile, they came right up on the road, I kid you not, they were 5 feet from Tom's truck. Wow to watch people scatter! There was an Alaska Parks Ranger there and when the bears started coming close to shore, the ranger asked everyone to move back and let the bears pass. I was IN the truck by that point! There is a short section in the road where people are not allowed to walk or stop their vehicles so the bears can walk up the road to the fish wier. A fish wier can be different things but is used to block the passage of fish, in this case it is a fence of wooden slats meant to slow the progress of salmon going out to the ocean so the Alaska Dept of Fish and Wildlife can get an estimate of how many salmon will return to to the river to spawn in 5 - 7 years. The bears love it since they can hang out by the fence and easily catch fish. But when we saw them they were out in the open river actively catching fish. The wier does come down before the salmon run in the fall when the the mature salmon are returning from the ocean to spawn.

To top off a very good day, we went to the outskirts of town (ok, so Haines is really a mini skirt so we didn't have to go very far) to a place called Dalton City to visit Haines Brewery. Dalton City was built as the set for the movie White Fang and it has since been taken over by small businesses from Haines. There was the brewery, the Klondike Restaurant, a knitting shop, a massage therapist and a couple of other places. Speaking of movies and tv, as we were coming into town, we saw the area where part of the show Gold Rush was filmed, Porcupine Creek... All very cool.

Tomorrow we're on standby to go on a fjord trip to Juneau for the day, 90 nautical miles. I'm guessing that we're not going to get on the trip so we'll have to find something else exciting to do. Wednesday evening we're taking the Alaska Marine Ferry from Haines to Skagway. It's only 15 miles but will save us about a 350 mile drive around the mountains. On Thursday, we start our 5 day backpacking trip on the Chilkoot Trail out of Skagway. Then we will begin the trip back to Michigan...

Kate