195 Haines, Alaska

Tuesday 2nd July 2013
miles Today 153 Total 11908

The camp site was awful and as usual, I became the buffet for the bugs.  This has been the worst part of this journey for me.
Onwards and southwards though....
Again, beautiful scenery and another couple of bears in Canada, we have yet to see one in Alaska.

We are on route to Haines and are having a day off tomorrow to do some local exploring, awaiting the ferry for Prince Rupert on Thursday morning.
Haines is a strange place, to get to it (by road) you need to go back into Alaska. This means we had to cross the boarder back from Canada into Alaska/America.  We were greeted by "Miss Frostie knickers" herself, who asked the usual questions about, weapons and alcohol and money, but relaxed a bit on finding out we were retired police officers.

Check out this beauty eating a dandelion.

Karen says I take her to all the best places.

Haines has the reputation of being the Bald Eagle capital of the world. Each November around 3,500 turn up just behind the village to feast on the last of the salmon to fatten up for the harsh winters.
We saw several today.

A long shot of the Eagles looking for salmon.

It is also one of the places that species of "Dolly Varden" and "Sockeye" salmon come to spawn in early July, bringing the bears down to Chilkot lake for a feed, so we are going there tomorrow in the hope of some good views.

Below is a 'Salmon Wheel'. Only the native Indians can use them. It is a large 3 net fish scoop. Only one net is currently out of the water. The wheel rotates by the water flow and as the salsom swim up
stream they swim into the net, are scooped up, fall onto the chute and then slide into the buckets either side. All that needs to be done is to collect the fish.

A Salmon wheel

We are booked into a little motel, called the "Eagles Rest", it looked a bit tired outside, but the rooms and the family that run it are lovely.  They have made us feel quite at home.
After checking in and sorting ourselves out, we decided to go out for something to eat and have an early night, but the best laid plans....
We bumped into Vern and Mike, (from our meeting in Destruction City), they had split from Dia and Spencer for this part of the journey, and so we had dinner together and went into the equivalent of the British Legion, Vern got us in as his guests, and after a couple of beers and putting the world to right, and reconfirming our invitation to Seattle, we were kicked out at 10pm, by the barman, we finally made it back to our room.  Another fabulous evening with new friends and brilliant hosts.