Hi Everybody, 5 September 2005 It's been almost 7 weeks since my last email, but it feels like a lifetime. I've been having a great time coming back up through BC, and then the Yukon and Alaska. At one point I drove sloppily through a steep ditch and let one rear wheel slip sideways into a little creek; when I hooked up my hydraulic winch to pull myself through, it quit working almost immediately. Fortunately I was able to get some 'bridge boards' under the wheel and reverse out I've been carrying those two 3x12x48 inch laminated plywood boards for four years without ever using them, and getting them out requires unloading the entire back seat area, but in this case they were just what was needed. When I return to Colorado next month I'll replace the hydraulic winch with an electric, what I should have chosen in the first place. My second time through Banff and Jasper Parks was like the first superb mountain views, but no desire to linger or to take 'postcard photos'. I spent a great couple of days with Alyse and Luke Kwantes, friends I made last year in Smithers BC, and they had an interesting 'coffee table picture book' which their son had given them he's a professional forrester. The book has hundreds of aerial photos showing the forest recovery from earlier logging operations, and even though the earlier practices were more destructive than modern ones, it's surprising how quickly the ugly scenes disappear. Of course it's not the same as old-growth forest, but people do want wood and paper and are pretty wasteful with it. Just north of Smithers there is a waterfall where Canadian First Nation people ('Native American' in the US) have the right to net salmon, and with the long lens I was able to zoom right in on the scene. If I had any one ambition for this trip, it was to photograph a loon, and I found one cooperative enough to manage a photo that's adequate although I couldn't get close enough for a really great one. At the same place a little sandpiper and a gull were even more cooperative. At one lunch stop there were dozens of skittish small yellow butterflies, which I was able to shoot nicely from 10 feet with the long lens. In Dawson, I rendezvoused with Ed Arnold, my sailing friend from England, Norway, and Spitsbergen, also on a summer trip to Alaska from Colorado, and he showed me the 'graveyard' for a half-dozen large wooden sternwheel steamships which once plied the Yukon River, and then a bit of the stupendous mess which the Klondike gold rush made of Bonanza Creek: an area perhaps a mile wide and 60 miles long which is nothing but torn up hills and gullies of sterile gravel and rocky rubble from the hydraulic mining which stripped off the overburden to get at the gold near bedrock. At Dawson I first picked up wildfire smoke, which stayed fairly heavy for the next week until I was a couple of hundred miles north of Fairbanks. Fortunately, the weather and wind shifted, and after that it nearly disappeared. This year I think the Alaskan fires total around 100,000 acres, nothing like the 2004 total of around 7 million acres. In Tok, the entry town in Alaska, I discovered my water pump had a leaking seal which could quickly become disabling, and I was lucky enough to get it fixed in one day and in the process made a new friend. Bill Kaltenekker owns and runs the big RV repair shop in Tok, and was extremely helpful managed to get a new pump from Fairbanks almost immediately, and worked until 8 PM to get it installed. We were both happy to discover that we were each physicists (or ex-physicists, at least), and I was interested to hear about his experiences working on a ice-island 50 miles from the North Pole and could tell him a bit about Spitsbergen. His son, who works with him, couldn't resist some comments when he saw us both peering under the hood, and I've put them on the picture caption. My daughter Amy flew into Fairbanks from Boston and we spent 10 days up and back on the Dalton Highway, historically called 'The Haul Road'. It was built in 5 months back around 1975 to enable construction of the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline north from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay, on the Beaufort Sea of the Arctic Ocean. Before that there were no roads more than a few miles north of Fairbanks. In 1986 the road was opened to the public, and there are a few tourists like me, and also fishermen and bow hunters looking for caribou, who make the 1000 mile round-trip every year. As well as many huge trucks hauling stuff for the oilfield at Prudhoe Bay. The Dalton more- or-less runs from central Alaska to the north coast, and it's the only road outside the SouthEast quarter of Alaska. Seventy percent of the road is gravel, sometimes rough enough so you had better slow to 20 mph or less, and stones thrown up by the trucks often star or break windshields and headlights. Calcium chloride is mixed into the gravel to make it consolidate better, and with any moisture the back of your truck looks like it's been spray-painted white. Fuel and water are available halfway up and at the end, and there are 3 or 4 little trading posts with gifts and a grille and rudimentary cabins, but no groceries are available. There's the one village of Wiseman (pop 50) dating from around 1880; before the Dalton was built, you reached Wiseman either by river in the summer or dogsled in the winter. There's a fancy and very fine new Arctic Interagency Visitor Center at Coldfoot, once a mining center, and except for 6 pipeline pumping stations and a few highway maintenance stations, that's it. Nothing else for 500 miles. Prudhoe Bay oilfield has around 4,000 people working there, and the minuscule 'civilian' village of Deadhorse which is mixed in with the huge industrial stuff sort of disappears in the confusion. Last year I went about halfway to Deadhorse, to Atigun Pass where the Dalton crosses the Brooks Range, a huge mountain range which runs East-West and divides off the northern quarter of Alaska into the 'North Slope'. Last year I turned back at Atigun Pass in a foggy snowstorm, not minding too much because I thought the rest of the way to Deadhorse, on the North Slope, would be pretty dull. WRONG! Amy and I found this the best part of the trip. Real Arctic scenery, quite spectacular, and much more wildlife than farther south. A mile south of Deadhorse we were thrilled to see a young grizzly bear strolling across the tundra toward our truck, perhaps 75 yards away, and as it crossed the road near the truck we were able to get lots of pictures. I've put a few of the best photos in the main slideshow, and more in a separate slideshow for those who might wish to see more. People in Deadhorse said the bear had been wandering through the village for several days, munching on a caribou carcase nearby. I found that with the image stabilizer I can just barely handhold the 500mm Canon lens, but it does not seem to get as sharp pictures as with the tripod I need to do more experimenting with this. I surprised myself by getting some handheld shots of owls in flight, but they are pretty poor compared to what I think they would have been with the tripod. I put these in another separate slideshow for 'birders'. When Amy and I returned to Fairbanks it was super clear, and from up on a little rise at the University of Alaska, the snowy Alaska Range 100 miles south looked 'right there'. While I was shooting it with the long lens Amy spotted a string of migrating Sandhill Cranes flying across the scene, and without even realizing it I caught a really great picture. From the same place Denali is sometimes visible, 170 miles distant, but we couldn't seem to spot it. Amy flew out of Fairbanks on 29 August at 0025 and my brother Lee arrived from Grand Junction at 0051, and I had another week on the Dalton with him, up as far as Atigun Pass and back. They were snowplowing on the pass as we went over, and there was new snow on the hills and mountains for a hundred miles south, very beautiful. With both Amy and Lee, the red and gold autumn colors (in August!) were really gorgeous that, and no bugs, makes autumn a great time to be here. Amy had just gotten her first digital camera, so we had a perfect opportunity to learn how to use it, and even more, how to use PhotoShop and the Canon ZoomBrowser. Fortunately she got a Canon camera so the controls and 'programing mentality' was very familiar to me from my own two Canon cameras. By using a small special rechargeable battery rather than 4xAA, and not pivoting the LCD screen as mine does, her camera has essentially identical function and specifications as mine in 40% of the size, very impressive. And Lee brought his digital camera also, so for the past two weeks this has been 'Photoshop City'. I'll be back in Tok tomorrow and hope I can upload the slideshows and send this email, then planning next to go up the Dempster Highway which is the Yukon/NorthwestTerritory analog to the Dalton, the same length and over similar terrain and isolation. I'm hoping for more wildlife photo opportunities there. After that I hope to be able to take the ferry from Prince Rupert out to Queen Charlotte Island off the BC coast, and perhaps the ferry from Prince Rupert to Vancouver Island (it's $370 with my truck, but that's what it would cost to drive the long way around). Here are the same old instructions for the slideshows: http://www.firestardesign.com/johna. (Note that this is still 'johna' in spite of my email address change to be just 'john') These are the slideshows: 05BC2.exe British Columbia 05DALTON.exe Alaskan Dalton Highway 05GRIZZLY1.exe Grizzly extra photos 05OWLS.exe Owls in flight (poor) If you are using Internet Explorer you can either choose OPEN to view the show once, or choose SAVE TO DISK if you want to have it your hard disk for future re-viewing. I have used my updated PC-cillin to be sure the .exe file is virus free. Right-Click or Right-Arrow will advance to the next picture Left-Click or Left-Arrow will return to the previous picture Esc will end the show at any time; use Esc if the show seems stuck If you don't have a broadband Internet connection it's not realistic to download these large files please let me know, as it is very easy for me to send them to you on a CD. And if you would like any of the individual images, just let me know. I have only limited space on firestardesign.com, so must remove older slideshows to put up a new one; let me know if you want me to send you a CD of any of the 'back issues', or all of them along with their accompanying emails on one CD. Regards, John Armitage