Bear hunting AND boating??

On the morning of Saturday, April 28, we drug out of bed at the same early time that we get up Monday through Friday.  I really did not want to but we were going to drive down the parks highway to Cantwell then turn east and head across the Denali highway looking for bear.

We ate breakfast and headed out.  We arrived near Denali park about 5:45 and John was kind enough to stop long enough for me to find the Bruin Breath geocache so I could deposit Bernibar so he could continue his journey.  The river was still quite frozen - although there was evidence of breakup in the ice moving downstream.

We walked out on the pedestrian bridge and then turned around to get back to where the compass was pointing to the geocache.  As I got closer to the cash, I could see a pile of something.  Since I knew I was in bear country, I was a little nervous so waited for John to catch up with me.

I was very relieved to see that it was only mule poop.  We easily found the cache, dropped Bernibar and got back in the truck to head further south.

Lots of ice under the bridge.

The snow covered peaks rose above the highway as we twisted and turnd the next 30 miles or so to Cantwell and the turnoff.

Several times during those 30 miles, we had to slow for caribou that were crossing the road.  However none of them would stop long enough to pose for a picture.

We turned onto the Denali highway and drove for a while to watch for tracks.  John had a map marked with several spots where there were known bear dens.  We stopped to check these tracks out - it would be cool to see a bear but I wasn't sure I wanted to see one who had just emerged from the den.  Fortunately for me, these tracks were made by a moose.

John stopped several times to glass the hillsides.  While he did that, I walked a ways down the road but didn't get too far away from the truck.  There were a lot of other hunters out and who knows when you are going to run into some wild animal.

Road clearing equipment had been busy at work.  The snow was piled high on the sides of the road.  This is a road they do not keep open in the winter.  There is a lot of activity in the area but it is all done via sleds (iron sleds, snow machines or snow mobiles - depends where you are from).

We saw a large number of trees that had been stripped of the bark.  Lots of busy porcupines around.  I thought this one was particularly interesting since the curly branch in the center about a third from the bottom has been totally cleaned without breaking.  "How'd they do that?"

We drove about 70 miles east on the road before we came to a sign that said road closed.  The highway crew hadn't made it all the way through to Paxson so we had to turn around and go back the way we came.  We were prepared to camp out for the night (well, I use the word prepared lightly because I wasn't sure I was actually ready to spend the night in a tent sleeping on the snow at 25 degrees - I mean really how do you prepare for that).  Since we couldn't get all the way through, there was no reason to camp out so we decided to go ahead and drive all the way home.

On the way back, we stopped on the Susitna River bridge (Susitna is a Tanana Indian name meaning sandy river).  It was cool to look down in the water and see how thick the ice was.

I walked across the bridge while John drove the truck - I was so tired of just sitting.

As I stopped to take this picture,  I thought how fun it would be to come back when the river is running and put the boat in at one of the many launching spots.

We'll save that for another day though as on this Saturday, we were just ready to head on home and get out of the snow for a while.

Sunday morning, April 29, I slept in a bit then put away the stuff I had packed on Friday night for our 2 day bear hunting trip.  I had made a big pot of chile con carne (pork and beef - no beans) and several dozen tortillas so I knew I wouldn't have to cook for a couple of days.  I worked on the computer for a while and scanned another pile of papers.  I am trying to clean out my file cabinet by turning all these papers I've been moving from place to place into digital copies.

About 10, John came in the house and asked if I wanted to take the boat and go on a picnic.  Sure - why not, the Chena was flowing cleanly.  The ice had flushed out and there wasn't a lot of debris in the water.  It took us until 11:30 to get everything together and get the boat over to the boat ramp off of Chena Ridge.

Another 15 minutes or so to get the boat in the water and for me to park the truck and trailer out of the way and we were off.  Well kind of anyway.  For Christmas, I had bought John a marine gps for the boat and neither one of knew how to work it.  So I read through the manual while he proceeded up river.  I finally got it tracking our route.

We headed up the Chena which meant we were going through town from one end to the other.

I missed most of downtown on the way up river because I was still trying to figure out the new GPS.  Twice I goofed and reset the mileage so I had no idea how far we had gone. We went under the Steese Road bridge and headed out of town.

The river was clear of debris and ice but there were a lot of big chunks of ice piled on the sides of the river.

The river was fairly still.  Birch trees are just barely starting to bud out since we haven't had very warm temperatures.

We thought the river was clear but all of a sudden we came to these chunks of ice in the water.  Fortunately, John realized that he had taken a wrong turn and we were in a side channel instead of in the river.  So he turned around and headed back to the river.

We stopped for a bit to walk around on a sand bar.  Our "picnic" lunch had long since been eaten cause neither of us was willing to wait until 2:00 or so to eat.  John discovered that the fuel gauge in the boat was not working.  We weren't sure how far we had gone but knew for that we had enough fuel to go at least 107 miles.

We headed back downstream and I figured out how to make the GPS track our route - it said that we were 56 miles from our starting place.  Hmmm - not good since 56 x 2 = 112 which is more than 107.  Would we have enough gas to get back?  Since we weren't planning to go too far, we hadn't taken any spare gas.

This chunk of ice was approximately 12' x 12'.

Hey - why don't we just move the shed.  No sense cleaning it out first, we'll just move everything at once.  Notice the fire ring made of old wheels.  One thing we've noticed is that the "genuine" Alaskan seems to think they have to hang onto everything they get their hands on.

More chunks of ice.  We wonder if the dirt on the top of these blocks is actually from the bottom of the river and if when they broke up, they took the dirt with them.  We'll have to check that out with someone who has been here longer than us.

Back closer to town, we saw that old cars were being used to help reinforce the bank and keep it from washing away - not sure how long the cars had been there and if they were added before or after the buildings were built.

The Discovery Riverboats are tied up waiting the first tour of the season.  Discovery 2 is on the left and Discovery 3 is on the right.  They have metal hulls so they are left in the river year around.  Discovery 1 is behind them - since it has a wooden hull, it is pulled up out of the water every fall.

On the way up river, I had told John that on the way back, I wanted to go to where the Chena dumps into the Tanana to see the difference in the water.  Since we were low on fuel, I decided that probably wasn't possible.  Of course, as we made this turn off the Chena, we remembered that we had actually put in on the Tanana River but I had been too busy working on the GPS to realize where we had started.

With all of the run off, both rivers were too dirty to actually see the clearer water from the Chena blending into the silt-laden water of the Tanana so guess we'll have to look at that another day - later in the summer when the Chena is running a little clearer.

We made it back to the boat ramp and were able to get on home.  We haven't refilled the tank so we have no idea how much gas we had at the end of the run.  John will fix the fuel gauge and the next time we go out, we will fill the extra 50 gallon tank so we have plenty of fuel to go an extra 150 miles or more on the waters of the interior.

By the way, just to show how crooked the Chena River is, if we had driven to where we turned around, it would probably be 20 miles not the 56 miles we went.  Another beautiful weekend in the interior - or calendar is filling up quickly with adventures so not sure how many more times we'll get out on the water in 2012 but we'll enjoy the time while we have it.