Alaska: Haines, the penultimate Alaskan gasp.

Not a bad view to wake up to.

Dave Pahl is a gentleman who decided that the world needed a hammer museum and that it would be best placed in Haines, Alaska. He's a bit slack jawed and it's because of all of this that I'm caught underestimating him. In asking where I'm from, I offered up Broome instead of Perth, hoping its relative obscurity may excuse me from too much conversation. Instead, it turns out he has an encyclopedic knowledge of Australia, owing to his recent driving around it. He was particularly charmed by the Kimberley and Pilbara regions and as a result of this I go nowhere fast. The museum houses some five thousand hammers from all over the world and they fill a multitude of purposes, it's an impressive dedication of time and effort to a tool I'd only given a scarce amount of thought to (even considering it is reasonably iconic in my field). This wasn't exactly my reason for being there, but for a town with a main street a quarter-mile long, attractions weren't going to be hard to check off over the course of a few days.

Haines only really slipped onto my radar as an Alaskan place to visit by virtue of the listserve, an email lottery that I won in the weeks leading up to departing Australia. As a footnote to my tale I appealed to Alaskans to tell me where to go and show me a good time. Emily - an intern at the museum - responded with some assistance and was also pretty good drinking company over the course of two nights in town.

Part of her recommendations were to go out to Chilkoot Lake, a short drive beyond where Greta and I were camping. The lake is a flurry of activity; there is an abundance of anglers on the lake and in the stream at the bottom of it. The reason is clear; there are dozens of salmon jumping and showboating around, an endearing thought for any fisherman, no doubt. Hilariously, over the course of the few hours we spent there, not a single salmon was landed, surely a cruel twist of the knife given they were launching themselves out of the water a rate of much greater than a few times a minute.

That's not to say that there was no successful fishing going on though, there were a pair of bald eagles at work in the area too... and quite a mess of one salmon left on the rocks for someone else to finish off.

"Be right back, I have a salmon's day to ruin!"

The whole area is a bit of a bald eagle paradise. The drive into Haines is many-fold exciting. Miles out of town the valley rapidly descends and narrows, leaving you firmly with impassable mountainside on your left and fast flowing river on your right as you approach sea level. It's impressive scenery. Furthermore, this area is world class for watching bald eagles take care of business when the salmon are running, something that had both Greta and I rubbernecking on occasion. Compounding all of this is a windy road with a great surface, good visibility and a car with all wheel drive.

Throw in a casual bit of hiking at Battery Point (another of Emily's suggestions) and without trying too hard, a few days had passed with little effort at filling in our days or worry that we were doing the wrong thing.

Haines... Haines quite unexpectedly had a little bit of everything for me.