| Submitted by: Mark R. Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 14 February 2005 |
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Perhaps this is not an uncommon form of boot fastening, but this is the first I have seen it. We are called with four other passengers and we led out to the airfield.
We are standing there for a while then we see a fleet of helicopters coming in. I tell Evelyn 'I love the smell of napalm in the morning'
The steering mechanism for the copters is on the right, like with a car in Britain. We climb in. There is a headset so we can hear the pilot. It has a mike, but that apparently does not work. Pity, I would have a lot of questions to ask.
On one of the other helicopters a woman who decided she does not want to go. I sure do. They see the umbrellas in our pockets and say we cannot carry anything so loose. They check them for us. Well we don't have rain anyway. Take-off feels like being picked up on a bungee line. No particular acceleration, Just suddenly we are in the air. We lift higher and soon we are high over Juneau International Airport. Higher we go and we get a bird's eye view of the area. What looked like two mountains to our right has a glacier pouring down between them. This is a tidewater glacier and at its base it feeds into a lake. There are holes at the front where melt-water flowed through the glacier. Looking at the glacier from above there are horizontal and vertical cracks, though more are horizontal. The texture on the surface looks almost like elephant skin.
This is a receding glacier. One does not think of ice as a fluid, but it really moves down the valley from the mountain. Very slowly. About two feet a day. But ice is falling off the end faster than the ice can be delivered. So a piece of ice is moving down the valley, the location of the bottom edge is moving up the valley. The force of the ice pushed by gravity causes the horizontal cracks. Some of these go 150 feet deep.
Pushing the ice down a valley that is lower at the center than the edges causes the vertical cracking. The glacier just pours down between the mountains looking like a white frozen river.
The copter is so noisy I can't tell when I have taken picture. We pull to the side of the main flow onto an ice tributary. This glacier gal1200 and it reached its peak about the mid-1700s. Since then most of the glaciers have been in decline. Obviously we started to over-industrialize the world about the time of the American Revolution. Those big Man o' Wars of the Napoleanic War really screwed up the climate. 60% of the glaciers are retreating, and have been for about 250 years. There was 400 foot thick ice where we were standing. It was part of the 1500 square mile Juneau ice flow. Some don't distinguish between an ice field and a glacier. An ice field is the source area, a glacier is the actual flow. At places the glacier is 4000 feet thick. One of the features of a glacier surface is deep holes. The glacier picks up stones, temporarily proving itself the victor. But the sun heats up the stone and heat is a glacier's Achilles Heel. The stone bores a hole into he glacier making it sorry it picked up the stone. You bet. This is called cold comfort or cryocentric heating. There is a further effect of water falling down the hole spinning around due to coriolis effects and drilling the hole even bigger. These holes can go down 100 feet without blinking an eye.
We walked around the glacier for about 30 minutes then the helicopters returned with a bunch of glacier freshmen. With our experience of half an hour on the ice we could feel superior.
We file into our copter and again the elastic tug and we are up. Flying back we see a different view including large lakes. Our pilot was heavy into finance, particularly banking. Well we got back to the airport, got our shoes back, got our umbrellas back, had a hot cider. On the way back we asked how often do they have sunny days like today. About 24 a year. Well back we went to the ship.
For lunch we went to La Scala pizzeria, an almost free restaurant. I say almost because you do tip the waiter, if you happen to have money on you. Though few people do since everything else on the ship is cashless and handled through your cruise card.
(Evelyn wants it fully understood that the following paragraph does not represent her viewpoint.)
I have a number of books on cheeses and one makes a rather interesting comment on cream cheese. The author said that by objective standards cream cheese is a very high quality cheese. It is only the facts that good cream cheeses are inexpensive and readily available that keeps it from being respected. I feel that way about both cream cheese and pizza (but not together). I have had cuisines from all around the world, but there are darn few dishes that can stand up to a well-made hot-from-the-oven slice of pepperoni pizza.
Anyway it was pleasant to eat pizza and listen to classical music from the deck below. It was good pizza, but it could have more tomato flavor.
From there we headed out on our walking tour of Juneau. The first stop was the historic Red Dog, trying desperately to hang on to the feel it had during the glory days of the Gold Rush. It is a little hard to do when your clientele is modern tourists and not old-time hardened prospectors. The only thing in common is the level of swearing. The Saloon is not even in the same place. They moved the saloon to a more profitable place. But it has sawdust on the floor, the moose head over the bar, computerized register, he bear skins. You know the real frontier feel. Oh, and there are photographers everywhere. It looks like they make good French Fries, but we don't stop to try them.
Out front they have Old Number One, the engine from the narrow gauge railroad of 1893. The thing looks a little small to be a real operating railroad but in Wales we road the a narrow-gauge railroad and it also had an almost toy-like look.
We continued on to the Alaska State Museum. The layout of this museum is the lower floor is split between temporary exhibits and exhibits of native American peoples. Those are the Athabaskan, the Tlingit, the Eskimo, the Yupiaq, and the Aleut. The upper floor is more devoted to Europeans, the Russian early ownership, the purchase, the gold rush and mining, and Alaskan Art. Connecting the two floors is a spiral walkway surrounding a Eagle Nesting Tree.
As we entered they had an exhibit of photography by Brad Washburn. He was one of many Alaskan artists who specialized in showing the desolate and lonely look of the snow-capped mountains. I am not sure if I would have seen a difference of style from one such photographer to another. As we were looking at the exhibit they announced that a tour of the museum was in the offing. Evelyn and I decided that we were tourists so took the tour. The woman who led the tour told us that Alaska had only one person per square mile. That is not quite true, there are a few more people than that, but it is not a whole lot more than that. That makes for a pretty much unoccupied land. Alaska is big. If it did not have a government saying it would all be in one time zone it would naturally cross five different time zones. Of course that is somewhat helped by the fact that it is so far north. A postage stamp centered over the North Pole would be in 24 different time zones. Three quarters of the state is situated on permafrost. One of the exhibits shows spirit masks. These were all made for Walt Disney's cameramen shooting a documentary. When they were done the locals went to burn the masks and the Disney people asked if they could have them. They ended up in this museum. Each has some animal and some human aspect. We saw a local Eskimo home. Alaskan Eskimos do not build igloos though there are Canadian ones who do. This house was of wood and had frog totems. There were exhibits of Eskimo boats and Eskimos hunting with atl-atls. I did not know any modern people used atl-atls. This is really an arm extender to get more power in throwing spears. There was a female boat covered in female walrus hide. It was considered a female boat because it was the females that rowed it.
We then went to the Eagle Nesting tree and discussed eagles and local arts. Then the upper floor got only a very cursory treatment. There was a little about Russian America , and its furs-based economy, but with the otter population dying out the Russians were willing to sell it. We saw most of the upper floor on our own.
After that were walked around the town looking at the Governor's Mansion among other things. It looks like it could have come from Massachusetts except for the totem pole in front. Following that we walked around shopping a bit. Evelyn found a store in which a local artist made pins. We got our chachka, an Ulu knife. I left Evelyn shopping while I returned to the ship and worked on my log. Dinner was fish lightly fried and desert was Bananas Flambe.
After dinner we heard on the ships TV a description of what was to be seen in Skagway.
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07/30/97 The City Tour and the Horse Trail
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Well today we hit Skagway. A little history:
There are a sort of long fin of mountains that one has to pass on the way to the Yukon where gold was discovered. You go to the left and you have the Chilkoot Pass but first you go through the town of Dyea. The Chilkoot pass was high and deadly. If you choose to go to the right around the mountains you are choosing the White Pass, lower but longer, and the jumping off town is Skagway. Each of the 40,000 stampede prospectors had to choose one or the other. It was not so much a choice as a dilemma. Which ever one you picked you'd be sure you picked wrong. In the cold winter that started 1897 a good 3000 horses and other pack animals died trying to make it over White Pass. But before prospectors got to the pass, they had a bad hazard to pass in Skagway. That was Soapy Smith.
Perhaps the most celebrated person in the history of Skagway is Jefferson Randolph Smith, better known as Soapy Smith-I will get to why he had that nickname. And perhaps 'celebrated' is not quite the right word. The fact that a Soapy Smith could virtually run Skagway even for the nine months that he did strongly implies that the Alaska Gold Rush did not attract people of the highest mental caliber.
Soapy was born in Georgia in 1860. Life was tough for him during and after the Civil War. As early as he could he ran off to Texas to punch cows. It was a tough life, but it gave him a chance to meet gunfighters and gamblers and to get a feel for the land. His real education began when he lost six months pay to a sharp in San Antonio in the shell game. Smith knew he had been cheated, but he decided to use it as an education. He started hanging around the Three-card Monte and shell game dealers, learning their techniques. When he thought he could do it he started dealing the same games and started making his fortune.
Very soon Smith opened an incredibly crooked gambling hall in Denver. No game could be played in the hall unless there was some way for Smith to rig it. Eventually he moved to Creede, Colorado for silver strike. There was money to be made fleecing the credulous miners. Smith gained the nickname 'Soapy' for his 'soap scam.' He would stand on a soapbox hawking soap and claiming that random bars had $10 and $20 bills inside the wrapper. A lucky passerby would buy one and find money inside. Other people would buy soap inspired by the passerby's apparent success. The passerby was a shill working for Soapy of course. Soapy's competition in town was one Bob Ford. Ford was already famous. He was referred to in the song line 'that dirty rotten coward, who shot Mr. Howard, has laid poor Jesse in his grave.' Ford had shot Jesse James in the back as Jesse adjusted a picture on the wall. Hired killers killed Ford and it is generally assumed that Soapy paid them off. |
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