Worst Political Campaign Slogan of 2014

Alaska has some very active political campaigns going on right now.  It tends to be a conservative state but one of their Senators is a Democrat and is up for re-election.  In a year when control of the US Senate - and the future makeup of the Supreme Court - could easily be determined by a handful of votes in some rural backwater, that makes for some high octane campaigning.  But on our recent trip it was actually the race for Alaska Governor that caught my eye.  There are three fellows running*.  The incumbent Republican, a Democratic challenger, and this guy:

We have here in Wisconsin another fellow named Scott Walker, he is the incumbent Republican Governor and an interesting figure in his own right.  But the Alaskan Walker is a guy named Bill, a lawyer and former mayor of Valdez.

I should be up front about my own politics, I generally lean in a conservative direction on matters of public policy but don't care much about what people do with their personal lives.  Bill Walker's campaign seems to be in line with this viewpoint, I rather like his website that goes on at length about how awful it is that the Governor's Mansion got a sweetheart bid 1.5 Million dollar paint job, and that the spare legislative offices in Anchorage have glass elevators and bathroom stalls with maple doors. So Bill, if you read this blog take what I have to say as the advice of a friend:  Fire your media consultant.

When I saw the first few signs of the type shown above I thought, hmmm, surely this was a slip up. They would never want to draw comparisons to Britain First, the recently emerging far right, anti-immigrant, close to neo-nazi organization in the UK?  (THIS is a partisan but fairly on target summary of the group).

Must have been a slip up, no?

Sigh.  You really have to be careful about this sort of thing.  You would not think well of a Liberal/Progressive candidate who had campaign signs reading "Fellow Citizens, We March Together to the Worker's Paradise!".

So Conservative candidates need to take a little time and try to avoid slogans that sound vaguely like right wing totalitarian nonsense.  I mean, what next, some three part slogan that has the toxic ring of "Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer"?**

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*This being Alaska there are a whole slug of minor and curiosity candidates.  There is a guy who was born on Kodiak island and went to school in a log cabin.  There is a gold miner.  There is a fellow described as an "inn keeper and frequent candidate".

**For the record, Bill Walker is NOT a neo-nazi and would properly regard any such suggestion as a grievous offense.  Everything I have read about him makes him sound like a stand up guy who would make a pretty good elected official.  Remember, this is friendly advice here.  You won't make it to the political big leagues with this kind of campaign decisions.....

White Water and Big Fish

One thing we did when staying in Copper Center was a white water rafting/king salmon fishing charter. We did this through Klutina Salmon Charters and they did a great job.  The trip was worth it for the scenery alone, but you do get occasional reminders that life in Alaska lacks a few of the built in safety features that we assume in day to day matters.

You bounce up and down on class II and III rapids.  Here our able guide Glenn mans the oars.  I was put in the back seat.  This could be because folks were being nice and this is the "splash free zone".  Or maybe they figured that if I were bounced off it would be a while before my absence was noticed....

And the rest of our intrepid crew.

From time to time you get off and fish.  As we are after King salmon this involves heavy tackle and a long day of casting.  But even the ladies showed excellent persistence and good technique all day.

The Klutina river runs through a deep valley, with steep crumbly hills on either side.  A decade or so back one of these hills just collapsed into the river, damming it off for about half an hour. Fortunately the flow was gradually able to sneak through otherwise Copper Center would have had a significant flood.  Oh, and the process of erosion is naturally ongoing.  This section of hillside fell in three days prior to this photo being taken.

Lets just take a closer look, shall we?

Notice those fresh looking fissues? I saw a few chunks still crumbling off this rock face as we floated by at short range.  When I showed these photos to one of my sons who had done the same trip the day before he observed that the collapsed area looked a lot bigger to him.  Fortunately we drifted uneventfully to our destination.  Had the river suddenly gone dry I was prepared to sprint to high ground....carrying the largest salmon I could quickly scoop up as it flopped in some shallow pool.

Ah yes, the fishing.  King salmon of course are fighting the swift current on their way upstream to spawn.  You fish for them with this:

It is a nylon bag filled with salmon eggs.  Nobody is really sure why the salmon bite at these.  The prevailing theory is that their urge to have their offspring live long and prosper makes them want to destroy any competition.  When it comes to bloodthirsty dynastic slaughter salmon are the Borgias of the fish world.

We had a tough day.  One bite the whole 8 hours.  But it came to my line and I did not miss.  This was a very determined fish.  It ran upstream pulling out line for as long as it could.  Tiring a bit it did what we did not want it to do at all, it ran downstream.  Now the fish had the power of the current helping it.  Line was running off the reel like mad.  I tried every trick Glen suggested to me and nothing seemed to be working.  Then he informed me that the fish had taken off all the heavy test line and that I was down to the flimsy monofilament line backing.  The next serious tug would break that stuff easily. So I figured, what the heck. And started slogging downstream as fast as I could in clunky waders, reeling back an inch or two each step.

It was an epic fight.  This is certainly the biggest fish I have ever caught and it is unlikely I will try to top it.  I was too tired to do the usual fisherman's cheat, holding the catch at arms length closer to the camera.

In the end our group of eight caught four Kings.  I wanted more of our Alaska first timers to have the experience but that was not to be.  Maybe four is about right though.  As a species King salmon are hitting a tough patch.  The Kenai river, long the world's premier King salmon fishery, had their season closed in 2014 due to low numbers of returning salmon.  There is some speculation that the closure will be for several years.  As to the four we took, well, our trip to Alaska helped support the economy in direct and indirect ways.  Alaska Fish and Game is a very hard working organization who take conservation seriously.  I hope the money we and other visitors send their way furthers the stocking and research efforts that will make this an experience future generations can continue to enjoy.

The Mordor Bunnies of Alaska

On my first trip to Alaska 8 or 9 years ago my son and I had a long day of flying and then driving.  We pulled in late.  Late enough that even in June there was a twilight dimming of the endless sunshine. I was a little loopy and disoriented so when I saw by the side of the road a large black rabbit I figured I just needed a good night's sleep.

But over the course of our trip we saw these sinister looking bunny rabbits a few more times.  I started to worry a bit.  I have you see read Watership Down and remembered that The Black Rabbit of Inle' was the hippity hop equivalent of The Grim Reaper.

When I mentioned these sightings to other travelers they did not recall seeing such creatures.  My logical assumption of course was that these were simply summer coloration variants of Snowshoe Hares.  But they are usually more of a grey-brown.  Do rabbits and hares have color variation the way black/brown/cinnamon bears do?

That was on the Kenai Penninsula.  On a subsequent trip there and on a later trip to the Copper River region I saw neither hide nor Hare of such critters.

Then this August we pulled into Valdez Alaska, what passes for a metropolis up in these parts, and started seeing all kinds of odd rabbits.  The first we encountered hopping around in the wild was a plain old white rabbit with pink eyes.  Although this did have a sort of Alice in Wonderland effect on me it did not give me the disquieting feeling that the Black Rabbits had.  And then we started seeing more....

And even a few jet black ones....

In addition to the odd color variations there was another strange thing going on. These rabbits did not seem particularly "wild". They were sitting around in people's yards munching on what passes for grass like stuff.  When a couple of the younger, more high spirited members of our party tried to catch one it did not do the flat out sprint you would expect from a wild animal.  It sort of hopped and juked, always switching directions at the right moment but never really attempting to flee the area.  They almost seemed like domestic rabbits.

And they probably are.  My wife frequently talks to strangers and often learns interesting things from them.  She was advised that these actually were domestic rabbits that had been released into the wild. It was assumed that they would not last long there.

My theory is that the black rabbits I saw in both places - and they were separated by 265 road miles or an implausible assortment of mountains, glaciers and bays - were released domestic bunnies of the type called logically enough The Alaskan Rabbit.*  These actually were bred in Germany and were an attempt to replicate the color of the Alaskan Fox.  Intended therefor as a source of fur they never entirely caught on as domestic pets but they are still somewhat popular in Great Britain.  I could easily see folks in Alaska liking them just for their name.

And when you consider how many people come up to Alaska for just the summer or just until whatever wanderlust drove them there wears off, well, it makes sense.

As you pack for the long drive back to "The Lower 48" you have to make executive decisions.  What will come with you.  What is too much bother.  You look over at the bunny hutch and think: bother.

So Miss Muffin Flopears is taken out of her cage, pointed towards Freedom and told:

"Hop away!  Be Free!  Be Happy!  LOOK OUT!!!!!!"

But evidently enough of them avoid the eagles, foxes, bears, wolves etc to maintain little colonies of Mordor Bunnies near the protective shelter of human habitations.
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* or perhaps Havana rabbits but they have white around their eyes and besides, that is not as good a story.

Copper Center Alaska - When the Gold Rush went past

Copper Center is really not a very logical place to build a town.  But of course it was not built in logical times or for logical people.

In the mid to late 1890s Alaska and the adjacent Canadian Yukon region were the site of multiple Gold Rushes.  Many of these were transient or were entirely based on rumor.  But no matter, wherever the gold was thought to be a small army of prospectors would rush out to stake their claims.

In 1898 the golden rumors suggested that all you had to do was take a ship to Valdez Alaska, stroll inland and start picking up nuggets.  Wrong.  Fatally wrong in many cases.  After struggling up the Valdez glacier and trekking to Klutina Lake the miners had to build boats and run the rapids of the Klutina river to its confluence with the Copper river.  At this point some soldiered on to the still distant Klondike gold fields.  Others set up a base to explore the Copper/Klutina region.  This base, at first nothing more than a tent city, became Copper Center.

4000 miners went north in 1898.  Some went on, some went back defeated.  About 300 wintered over in Copper Center suffering through cold, malnutrition and disease.  As there was in fact no significant amount of gold in the area most left in the spring and Copper Center faded to a simple trading post.

But although it contracted it never went entirely "ghost".  The Richardson Highway was built in the late 1890s, at first as a pack trail, then as a proper road.  The glittering illusion of mining riches flickered elsewhere, further north, and Copper Center served its function as a road house and stopping point.  By the time automobile travel began in the 1920s it was an essential place.  Mules and miners can function without gasoline and repairs, Model Ts cannot.

Alaska was a busy place during World War II and the road networks were improved.  Post war people started coming to the interior as tourists.  A New Richardson Highway was constructed putting Copper Center a little more off the beaten track but it hung in there.  After all it had no significant competition.

Today it is a sleepy little place, actually several little clusters of buildings.  Off in the woods, usually beyond No Trespassing signs, you can see the ruins of log cabins.  It is hard to tell how old they really are, the climate of the Last Frontier is not kind to the works of Man.

A series of photos of Copper Center in the summer of 2014.

This is the equivalent of "Main Street".  At the end is the Copper Center Lodge under reconstruction. The cafe is on the right.  The garage on the left.  Empty space and random vehicles are here and there.

The garage.  I suspect that this log structure has repaired pretty much every model of car ever built in America.  The gas pump out front must not have been in service for a while, the price is frozen at 51 cents per gallon.  For my UK readers I should specify that would work out to approximately 60 pence per gallon.  Note that the gauge reads cents per gallon....the notion of a price over a dollar was not considered.

At first glance you would think the strange things in this photo were some sort of pontoon boats. Close but not quite.  They are "fish wheels".  Essentially these are fish traps that float on the rivers here.  The current drives a sort of paddle wheel.  Fish are scooped up and dumped into a submerged basket.  This seems both efficient and unsporting but it is allowed only on a limited basis and only for Native Alaskans.  (that is Native American Alaskans.  Alaskan natives refers to anybody who actually lives there full time as opposed the the more numerous summer visitors).

Our party had to split up for lodging.  The younger generation down at the campground by the river, my wife and I staying here:

This is the Copper Rail Depot Saloon.  An....interesting establishment.  It is in the middle of nowhere. The accommodations are basic.  But it has a fabulous juke box, a wide array of really great micro brews and the most elaborate model train set up I have ever laid eyes upon.  And in the parking lot there was a food trailer serving very acceptable Mexican fare.

Strolling around Copper Center you see all sorts of enigmatic sights.

In Alaska it is very easy to become disoriented.  In mid summer you have pretty much 24 hours of sunlight.  This makes it possible to grow some really outrageous Giant Vegetables.  I am not sure what they have growing here, looks like perhaps cabbages approaching shoulder height.  The fencing features barbed wire.  They don't have to worry about deer so I assume this is moose deterrent.  Or maybe not.  I promise to address the matter of the Mordor Bunnies in due course.

In addition to the Garage there is also a sort of blacksmith/machine shop.  Out front I saw these:

I think the owner of the car has given up waiting for the work to get done.  The second image shows the remains, one assumes, of a bush pilot crash.  The log structure next to it could either be a traditional hunter's food cache or more likely a house for a really, really large dog.

The far end of Copper Center has an out of business "Cash Store", an art gallery and surprisingly large and active Post Office and City Hall buildings.

If you have ever wondered how to make a fence post in a place where rock and permafrost renders post hole digging impractical, here you go.  You're welcome.

As to the future of Copper Center, well, who knows.  The fishing outfitters and campgrounds seem to be doing well.  And there will always be a need for local services on some level.  It is good to see the Lodge being rebuilt and I have to say the little cafe did a fine job on the two breakfasts we had there. (They serve yak burgers at lunch but alas I did not avail myself of this rare opportunity).

What money there is in the area seems to be up the hill where the Princess Cruise line has a very fancy resort.  Some of our party went up there to enjoy the fabulous views and to try unsuccessfully to pass themselves off as idle rich folks.  But this is money that does not trickle down the hill to the old Gold Rush town.  The Idle Rich arrive on a motor coach and leave on one.  Other than some business to the fishing guides they might as well be on another planet.  So Copper Center sleepwalks on.  Perhaps on some level the spirit of the place is still awaiting that Big Strike, that Golden Opportunity that will bring another wave of enterprising entrepreneurs and fortune seekers.

The wait may be a long one.

Girdwood Alaska, Truth (?) in Advertising

Girdwood Alaska is an odd little place.  It has a whopping big ski resort and real estate values are sky high.  But it also has a sort of hippie tradition.  When my son and I were there about 6 years ago we were - speaking of sky high - surprised to notice people openly smoking marijuana in the streets as they walked their huge, wolf like dogs.

This time we just swung in for a stop.  There was a large outdoor chess set with a black painted traffic cone filling in for a rook. There was a place that had gone out of business called Goodie's Whole Food Coop.  There was another place called Driftsale that had all kinds of new age crystals and herbs and such for sale.  Across the street from that we saw this:

Well, a rather high powered claim, perhaps the availability of beer put them over the top.  I had to stick my head in and look.  Dissapointment.  There were a couple of scraggly haired young guys doing laundry.  The ceiling was painted with stars and planets.  There was an attached hair salon, not open.  The claim of food was borderline true, there was a food truck run by "Cheech and Nong" that advertised Thai food.  The special of the day was tamales.  Beer?  None in sight.

Here is another Girdwood business.

Full points for honesty.  But as Tourist Traps go this was not on the level say of Treasure City.  In fact the merch was artistic and witty.  My wife got my fisheries biologist son this for his upcoming birthday.

Storm Troopers riding salmon.  Cool.

Strolling to the Copper River

Fishing had been a bit slow so our host/guide suggested we try a spot down river a ways. Specifically where the Klutina and Copper rivers meet.  His directions were quite easy to follow.

Over the bridge.

Take the path to the left.  Ignore the no trespassing signs.  The land owner does not really care.  Oh, he is also the host of a reality show about guns.  To be fair if the second sign No Fires No Trash is meant to be taken seriously the more generic No Trespassing could be considered null and void.

Oh, and you had better bring bear spray.  This is a sort of veterinary grade tear gas.  It looks like a grenade but I am told that you point and spray.  Lobbing it at a grizzly might only momentarily confuse it.

It was a near perfect day.  Lovely scenery and fine company.

We saw a few other fishermen along the way, none of them seemed to be having much luck.  Salmon are slippery customers, when they are running strong you catch them.  When they are not, you are just flailing at empty river.

As we went through denser and denser woods things did start to feel a little creepy.  Nothing major, a peculiar sound here, a dead porcupine there.  Some sections of the woods

just seemed a little too quiet.  We saw piles of moose droppings twice.  But bears?  Nah, just a story to tell tourists from the  "Lower 48".

Fish Eyes

King Salmon do not in fact have anthopomorphic "Disney Eyes".

They are in fact rather "beady"

The one on the right, fish not human, weighed about 38 pounds