7/8/17 Here is the trouble of travel. One slowly becomes warped in time… I feel like apologizing as it seems such a luxury and it is…mostly not yet attained by my peers … when days are not named but destinations or tasks are. 

The cabin on the Homer plate was what it should be….a place to sit after what was needed to secure comfort … and relish in the view and surroundings. Moose and yearlings walk by. Mountains and glaciers sit there all day so when you look up they hit you with ….”I’ve been here forever”. Rattles the senses. After a couple days we pumped fresh spring water into our 20 gallon water tank and set sail for ‘north of Anchorage”… not that the city hadn’t  things to offer but it was not for us… getting through the rush hour traffic was a shock to our “delicate senses” … we are not that far from reality….the scary one that says …if what is …what we see… is here then it will be everywhere eventually. 

In my time on earth I have been lucky.  I feel to have traveled to places all over the earth before the ‘crunch’ … we are in that crunch now… Alaska’s ‘final frontier’ is exactly that and it is vanishing as I type. Anyone who impedes saving “Forever Wild” at this point is simply greedy. We need as a species to feel the wild…once gone we will evolve to something else. Before that last step we need to think…. but seeing human nature as it is… I have no real hope of the inevitable… We will be left alone. 

Sounds dismal but that is the truth of it. I am SO fortunate to be here and see what is left. 

We drove from our boondock camp site (big hint here… use google earth before the drive to see the old road… before the new one you are on. They have straightened it over time and left behind a number of curves still sort of paved that one can find that wiggle around the new… find them and drive off to a quiet pop up and free sleep as we did last night on or way from Palmer AK on the Glen highway. Free and easy. The Glen highway was insanely big and crazy drop offs to immense glaciers and mountain terrain. This morning we drove on to Valdez.

How can I keep typing about this … running out of superlatives…….. driving on a road that requires the driver to focus on the pavement…yahoo .... the 65 mph frost heaves… rivers and glaciers…mountains so big …fuh-get-about-it…. big.. yeah big….crazy big.

We came across the river gorges and such to Valdez… both natural and man made marvels … god’s engineering and man's…. to boggle the mind … I kept asking "how did they make this” on every turn of the road… then I look at what nature did and fuh-get-about-it…. too much. The pipe line ends here… google it and imagine yourself in a cloud of bugs welding that together?! I have no problem with what we build it is what is left behind after the money goes to the wealthy. Look into the copper mine of Kennicott. A marvel of man’s ingenuity … when the metal was gone …they walked away…leaving everything they made and destroyed… money made and exit. Seen this in many places … it is not ‘freedom of regulations’ it is rape. All this can be done …though with less profit… and still maintain the spirit of the land and people. 

Okay …it is not a diatribe … we sit in Valdez surrounded and overwhelmed by beauty.  

Tomorrow it rains big time and we will hunker down for the morning … then go back to the boondocks hunt for a place more quiet… thereafter to McCarthy on the Copper River … 50 miles of gravel road into Wrangle-St Elias National Park… incredible beauty. (The beauty saved by out forefathers …. we still need our present ones to do the same…not take it away).Photos soon...