The highlight of the Alaska work was not the work :) I think the last post summed up the drive there (near Mt Denali aka McKinley) and a couple small weekend roadtrips and such. And the last week of work I worked with Paul, an electrician who I did utility locates with (me on a GPS unit, him with essentially a fancy inductive metal detector). And it turns out Paul has a log cabin in the middle of nowhere, but this nowhere is exactly half way between Fairbanks and Anchorage via the southern route (via Delta Junction, nearly into the Yukon and Whitehorse), which is exactly the route I was planning.
Turns out Paul's cabin is a very nice 2000 sq. ft. log cabin above the tree line on Summit Lake. And most importantly, it has nice wood burning stoves and a solar system to make life easy.
When I first arrived, it was a dark, foggy, gloomy almost surreal afternoon / evening. The place was totally deserted with not a car or person to be seen anywhere. And because above the treeline, you could see everywhere (no such thing as privacy here)...
The next morning, everything had come to life! I don't know if you can tell just how scattered the cabins are on this treeless plateau. There's a little townish type clustering of houses around the lake (though definitely no shops and no people whatsoever when I was there) and then a scattering of cabins on the upper ridge. Just felt very strange with no trees...
After leaving the cabin, I took about a hundred photos, all on the card I lost. So here's what stuff looked like... (note, use your imagination).
Here's a couple river scenery photos for Carole (the 2nd being a river that starts at the distant glacier - the glacier used to be at the highway)...
And some random pipeline photos, since I was along two major pipelines at various times - I think both started at Prudhoe Bay (aka the North Slope) and one went into Canada (Alcan)and eventually Fort St. John and the other (Alyeska) to the port at Valdez (the infamous namesake of the Exxon Valdez).
The road trip took a rather random detour to Valdez just because (and where the fish are big, almost as big as in Kenora!)...
The road to Valdez was very impressive with glaciers and waterfalls around every corner in the road. Of course, most of these photos are goners, but here's a few...
And I was lucky, because they had just had torrential down pores the previous day and the road was nearly flooded out in a few places (it look more impressive in a few other places where the backhoes were doing there job, but I was trying not to get killed stopping in random places on the highway - this little stream going through the culverts is the runoff from the glacier I had just hiked up to in the previous photos). Apparently this happens every year and people just accept being stranded for a few days now and again. If I had been there a few weeks later you can take a ferry to Anchorage, which would have been sweet!
And lastly, just some more miscellaneous photos...
Since Alaska, I've been to Seattle for a couple days to visit Justin, then to Montreal for a week with Mel, then to Calgary for a day, Edmonton for a week of work, Winnipeg for a weekend wedding, back to Edmonton for a couple weeks, then a Jasper roadtrip with Carole, back to Edmonton for a couple more weeks of work, then to Calgary for a day and now I'm in Montreal for 3 days (in a cafe right now) and heading to North Carolina tomorrow for a month or so? Working 10 days on, 4 off and not sure how many shifts, so everything is very week to week shall we say. Anyway, with one paragraph I've covered the last month or two and now I'm up to date - sorry, don't feel like being wordy anymore :)
