I drove through a forest fire and all I got were some lousy pictures of smoke
So I've spent the last week (approximately) housesitting for my mom in Alexander Creek. Due to being an idiot and forgetting to recharge my camera or offload my pictures following Layla and Jane's Excellent Adventure, I have nothing picture-wise to show for the experience. I do, however, have another dog. Dammit.
I discovered last Thursday that there was a forest fire at Nenana, 50 miles to the south -- not a particularly large fire, as these things go, but intermittently causing road closures due to dense smoke and, well, flames.
By Friday the road was open again and I talked to the News-Miner's head photographer, who'd been down there and told me it wasn't bad at all, and they had pilot cars guiding people through the smoke. So I took off on Friday afternoon.
It was in Nenana that I discovered my camera's condition. I'd been cheerfully snapping blurry pictures of smoke through my windshield and taking video of the (fairly interesting) pillar of smoke being put up by the fire, when I suddenly found that it wasn't taking pictures anymore, due to the memory stick being full. The next thing I found was that I didn't have enough battery life to actually delete pictures while still leaving myself enough battery to actually take MORE pictures.
My memory stick has two halves, which are selected by flipping a manual switch -- and I found that I'd stupidly filled up the second half on my trip to Kodiak and then forgotten to download the pictures.
Rats!
I felt guilty taking pictures of the fire when people were risking their lives trying to save their homes and other people's homes, anyway. It was just as well. And it wasn't as if there were trees torching off beside the road, anyway -- though you could see they *had* done that. There was just a lot of smolding and some patches of flames. The main body of the fire was off the road a couple of miles and hidden by trees.
At this point, too, it was a fairly small fire, as these things go -- I think about 10,000 acres or so. It looked like more because it was burning up the road corridor and not much to either side. When I drove back through it yesterday, I think it was up to about 60,000 acres or so.
See all the fun you missed, Jane?
Here's a rather confidence-uninspiring road sign before the camera crapped out:
Anyway, that was Nenana. The drive to Anchorage (or actually Wasilla, where I spent the night) took me about 7 hours due to big delays in the fire area and to various road construction along the way. The next morning I was up at 6 to drive on into Anchorage for the next leg of my journey: an 8:30 a.m. flight to Alexander Creek. By "flight" I mean I'd bought seat fare on the next chartered plane going out to that area. They let you do that. Either some group of fishermen had chartered a plane at 8:30 or they simply had enough seat fares going that way to make it worth sending a plane.
It was a De Haviland Beaver -- the workhorse of the Alaskan Bush. Beavers are old planes -- I noticed this one's license (visible in a little plastic caddy of various stuff above the passenger side door) said that it was chartered in 1953. The brand new GPS, with its graphical display of our location and airspeed (110 mph once we got going) looked very out of place on the WWII-era dashboard with its round metal gauges.
The flight to Alexander Creek takes about 20 minutes and it was rough as all hell. I guess they'd been having 40 mph winds, and it was spitting rain. But we crossed Cook Inlet and the Susitna River (west of Anchorage -- a high-resolution map should show them) and landed on the creek. (It was a float plane, of course. No airstrips out there. Well, technically there are some, but they're private.) My mom and stepdad Ivan met me and picked up via light motorboat and then 4-wheeler ATV for the 4-mile trip home.
We were all together for a day or so before they took off for their trip to the Lower 48 to visit with Ivan's daughters. It's kind of funny considering that I grew up out there, but I was actually a little nervous about being completely by myself for the first time in years. The neighbors are three miles away by trail -- cars are out of the question and the trail is so rough it takes nearly an hour by 4-wheeler to get there. They do have a phone, so it wouldn't be impossible to call for help if I needed to, but I think it was mostly the idea of the psychological isolation that got to me -- even though I'd watched the place by myself when I was a kid.
But it was just fine. I loved the serenity as much as I'd remembered. Well, it was total serenity right up until their dogs had a major dogfight and the deck ended up looking like a chicken had been slaughtered on it. Which is how I came into possession of the older, smaller, more damaged dog. He's a terrier mix, about 11 years old, and is getting too decrepit to live outside (as their dogs do) and hold his own against the much bigger and meaner Rottweiler that makes up the rest of the Chez Gardner dog complement. My mother had asked me a year or two ago if I'd consider taking him. Well, it looked as if the choice had just been taken out of my hands, because he was bleeding like the proverbial stuck pig -- I was actually half expecting him to die in the night, there was so much blood -- and I certainly couldn't leave him alone with Reggie (the Rottie) when I left, because the dogs would be alone for several more days. The general plan was to leave them lots of food and water, and then they'd be okay. It's been done to them before. But an injured dog, in woods crawling with bears, with a bigger dog keeping it away from the food, was a recipe for disaster.
So I brought him back and he's now, at least for the time being, living with us. After having the last 24 hours to adjust, the dogs are getting along remarkably well. I think it helps that the new dog Sparky is injured and highly insecure, so he can't slip into his usual habits of fighting with every male dog he meets. Also, Lucky is such a gigantic wuss that I don't think he'd actually reciprocate a fight. He would probably cry and flee -- which is his response when the neighbor's German shepherd tries to play with him. I'm actually surprised he's not more scared of the Sparklet than he is ... although Sparkus is about a quarter his size and keeps skulking around like he expects the other shoe to drop -- on his head.
Sparky, by the way, is Frisky's puppy -- those who've known me for at least a couple of years have probably heard of Frisky, my beloved childhood terrier. Sparkus is half Frisky and half dachsund, which resulted in a strange sort of trundling mop creature. Kind of like the dog in Howl's Moving Castle, if you've seen that movie.
The cat is dealing with the situation by avoiding it as much as possible. Luckily Sparkus is used to cats, and the cat is used to dogs ... inasmuch as a cat can get, anyhow.
Oh, one more thing ... driving back, the weather was gorgeous until I hit the pass, where it turned to pouring rain and smoke. But I had a lovely view of Denali, so since Jane didn't get a chance to see it when she was up here, I took a picture. I'll finish up this entry with Denali for Jane:
I discovered last Thursday that there was a forest fire at Nenana, 50 miles to the south -- not a particularly large fire, as these things go, but intermittently causing road closures due to dense smoke and, well, flames.
By Friday the road was open again and I talked to the News-Miner's head photographer, who'd been down there and told me it wasn't bad at all, and they had pilot cars guiding people through the smoke. So I took off on Friday afternoon.
It was in Nenana that I discovered my camera's condition. I'd been cheerfully snapping blurry pictures of smoke through my windshield and taking video of the (fairly interesting) pillar of smoke being put up by the fire, when I suddenly found that it wasn't taking pictures anymore, due to the memory stick being full. The next thing I found was that I didn't have enough battery life to actually delete pictures while still leaving myself enough battery to actually take MORE pictures.
My memory stick has two halves, which are selected by flipping a manual switch -- and I found that I'd stupidly filled up the second half on my trip to Kodiak and then forgotten to download the pictures.
Rats!
I felt guilty taking pictures of the fire when people were risking their lives trying to save their homes and other people's homes, anyway. It was just as well. And it wasn't as if there were trees torching off beside the road, anyway -- though you could see they *had* done that. There was just a lot of smolding and some patches of flames. The main body of the fire was off the road a couple of miles and hidden by trees.
At this point, too, it was a fairly small fire, as these things go -- I think about 10,000 acres or so. It looked like more because it was burning up the road corridor and not much to either side. When I drove back through it yesterday, I think it was up to about 60,000 acres or so.
See all the fun you missed, Jane?
Here's a rather confidence-uninspiring road sign before the camera crapped out:
Anyway, that was Nenana. The drive to Anchorage (or actually Wasilla, where I spent the night) took me about 7 hours due to big delays in the fire area and to various road construction along the way. The next morning I was up at 6 to drive on into Anchorage for the next leg of my journey: an 8:30 a.m. flight to Alexander Creek. By "flight" I mean I'd bought seat fare on the next chartered plane going out to that area. They let you do that. Either some group of fishermen had chartered a plane at 8:30 or they simply had enough seat fares going that way to make it worth sending a plane.
It was a De Haviland Beaver -- the workhorse of the Alaskan Bush. Beavers are old planes -- I noticed this one's license (visible in a little plastic caddy of various stuff above the passenger side door) said that it was chartered in 1953. The brand new GPS, with its graphical display of our location and airspeed (110 mph once we got going) looked very out of place on the WWII-era dashboard with its round metal gauges.
The flight to Alexander Creek takes about 20 minutes and it was rough as all hell. I guess they'd been having 40 mph winds, and it was spitting rain. But we crossed Cook Inlet and the Susitna River (west of Anchorage -- a high-resolution map should show them) and landed on the creek. (It was a float plane, of course. No airstrips out there. Well, technically there are some, but they're private.) My mom and stepdad Ivan met me and picked up via light motorboat and then 4-wheeler ATV for the 4-mile trip home.
We were all together for a day or so before they took off for their trip to the Lower 48 to visit with Ivan's daughters. It's kind of funny considering that I grew up out there, but I was actually a little nervous about being completely by myself for the first time in years. The neighbors are three miles away by trail -- cars are out of the question and the trail is so rough it takes nearly an hour by 4-wheeler to get there. They do have a phone, so it wouldn't be impossible to call for help if I needed to, but I think it was mostly the idea of the psychological isolation that got to me -- even though I'd watched the place by myself when I was a kid.
But it was just fine. I loved the serenity as much as I'd remembered. Well, it was total serenity right up until their dogs had a major dogfight and the deck ended up looking like a chicken had been slaughtered on it. Which is how I came into possession of the older, smaller, more damaged dog. He's a terrier mix, about 11 years old, and is getting too decrepit to live outside (as their dogs do) and hold his own against the much bigger and meaner Rottweiler that makes up the rest of the Chez Gardner dog complement. My mother had asked me a year or two ago if I'd consider taking him. Well, it looked as if the choice had just been taken out of my hands, because he was bleeding like the proverbial stuck pig -- I was actually half expecting him to die in the night, there was so much blood -- and I certainly couldn't leave him alone with Reggie (the Rottie) when I left, because the dogs would be alone for several more days. The general plan was to leave them lots of food and water, and then they'd be okay. It's been done to them before. But an injured dog, in woods crawling with bears, with a bigger dog keeping it away from the food, was a recipe for disaster.
So I brought him back and he's now, at least for the time being, living with us. After having the last 24 hours to adjust, the dogs are getting along remarkably well. I think it helps that the new dog Sparky is injured and highly insecure, so he can't slip into his usual habits of fighting with every male dog he meets. Also, Lucky is such a gigantic wuss that I don't think he'd actually reciprocate a fight. He would probably cry and flee -- which is his response when the neighbor's German shepherd tries to play with him. I'm actually surprised he's not more scared of the Sparklet than he is ... although Sparkus is about a quarter his size and keeps skulking around like he expects the other shoe to drop -- on his head.
Sparky, by the way, is Frisky's puppy -- those who've known me for at least a couple of years have probably heard of Frisky, my beloved childhood terrier. Sparkus is half Frisky and half dachsund, which resulted in a strange sort of trundling mop creature. Kind of like the dog in Howl's Moving Castle, if you've seen that movie.
The cat is dealing with the situation by avoiding it as much as possible. Luckily Sparkus is used to cats, and the cat is used to dogs ... inasmuch as a cat can get, anyhow.
Oh, one more thing ... driving back, the weather was gorgeous until I hit the pass, where it turned to pouring rain and smoke. But I had a lovely view of Denali, so since Jane didn't get a chance to see it when she was up here, I took a picture. I'll finish up this entry with Denali for Jane: