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.

Alaska: Chicken and the Top of the World Highway

Leaving Tok there are two ways to the Canadian border. One is to follow the Alcan - the most traveled route - while the other takes a turn to the north on the "Top of the World Highway". It's a gravel road that goes for eighty or so miles, most of them on the US side and broadly speaking, it is a lot like the pointy end of this video:

With Greta's attitude toward things being a mixture of "if I'm bad enough at it the first time, I won't be asked to do it twice" and "well, you didn't die, did you?" it was with some relief (and I won't lie, a great deal of excitement) that I was behind the wheel for the section of road that was most likely to be outrageous fun and/or kill both of us. The road traverses ridgelines and spurs to skirt around ravines of the sort of depth that you don't consider walking away from, should you wind up visiting one.

The last place of note on the American side of the border is a small gold mining town of 39 called Chicken. The site of a minor gold rush contemporary to the Klondike find at the turn of the nineteenth century, the town owes its name to the ptarmigan bird. The locals - at least initially - wanted to call the town Ptarmigan as the bird was plentiful in the region and reasonably delicious. However, the problem that prevented this was that no one could spell it, so instead they settled on Chicken, as it kind of tasted like that. It's clear to me that by extension none of these gents counted the pterodactyl among their favourite dinosaurs.

Upon leaving Chicken we were - stupidly - racing the clock. The border shut at 8pm and we were pushing our luck as far as making it was concerned. Making matters more interesting, the road got a little more hairy as hairpins and sheerer drops were introduced as we passed through 5000 feet above.

Arriving at the border with mere minutes to spare, the Canadian official takes umbridge to the fact that I do not have a work visa while Greta does. I misread this as mock offense but over the course of a few questions become quite aware of his sincere disappointment that I am - at present - not prepared to work in his otherwise fine nation. After a few more questions we have to surrender our BB gun as it exceeds the firepower for such weapons allowed in Canada without a license. I joke that he just wanted to play with it over the campfire that night with his mates after work.

The joke sinks. He hands me a certificate outlining the weapon that I've surrendered and we depart, bound for Dawson. Safe in the knowledge that not much will be coming the other way for the remaining distance - knowing that the border is now closed - I open up a little more on the road and am suitably disgusted and terrified when we meet an RV upon exit of a particularly enjoyable switchback. Fun truly scuppered, we eventually roll down the hill, cross the Yukon River on a ferry that struggles against the current and get into Dawson City; site of the Klondike Gold Rush. The Klondike find spawned possibly the largest gold rush in history and almost certainly the most ridiculous in terms of conditions and remote nature. At any rate, it's now a little after ten which is just in time for most of the town's kitchens to be shut...

Alaska: It's only $700

This isn't a phrase I'm comfortable uttering. In Homer, $700 gets you a flight across to Katmai National Park. You land on a beach in Hallo Bay and there are bears. The bears are not afraid of you. They're not really curious about you. In fact, they nothing you.

Back in Homer - before any of this happens - we get a lengthy briefing about how to behave. Most of it is reasonably straightforward and appears to be common sense to me. Then we get to, "if they come toward you, don't run away". This one seems a little counter-intuitive to begin with but then is explained away by saying that running away invites a chase instinct and that's how you die.

It seems fair enough.

We have a large group - it fills four planes - and our subgroup of six is a mum and daughter from the US, a couple from Israel, myself and our pilot, Martin. Martin is the older of the four pilots and a comes off as a little brisk and lonesome - especially compared to the two kids flying other groups - but he basically discards the flight plan and takes us out over a chain of island volcanoes.

Chalk that up as a win.

We land on the beach, pulling up with the sort of J-turn that I absolutely never did in Wembley Downs as a seventeen year old. It leaves me grinning, most others seem altogether a bit more concerned. We're in a bay full of bears that we'll be walking amongst and they're all of a sudden concerned about their mortality?

The first bear we see bisects our group and another. It is maybe forty metres from either. Ambles down from the dunes and wanders across the beach. Casts cursory glances at both groups and carries on. It gives precisely no fucks.

I don't care. You're not near the salmon.

The pattern would be repeated for four or so hours. One sow and her cub come to within twenty metres of us. They stare for a bit, catching the eye of people in the group. After the first encounter everyone seems a little more relaxed about the prospect of being torn limb from limb and eaten alive but that doesn't stop me from positioning myself with a person that I could outrun in two steps between myself and the bears.

No need for a long lens when the bears come to you!

Over the day we see a dozen or so bears in slightly different settings. Cubs play fighting. Grizzlies fishing. Sows taking strolls on the beach. A sow protecting its cub from potential attack from another bear. Bears just chilling. It's like some sort of beach side resort for bears. It's tempting to wax lyrical about this being all kinds of fantastic but I'm just going to defer to photos instead. There's more. Lots and lots more. Go to my flickr page for ten or so, facebook for thirty (just for George) or bail me up somewhere in the world and you can look at all five hundred. They're great.

Alaska: Homer and Wake In Fright

"Are you here? I'm the idiot in plaid rain boots in front."

I had my suspicions that was who Becca was- there were only two girls at the Homer Concert on the Lawn that seemed to fit her couchsurfing profile - but it was useful to get in text nonetheless. As my third host, Becca, didn't so much offer me a couch but a place to park my car (and sleep in) and seamless integration into her social life. In the days that follow, I'm John Grant's inverse. He finds himself held financially captive in Bundanyabba owing to 2up and falls in with drunks and yobbos in the ensuing days and weeks (Wake In Fright). His arrival at The Yabba is only for it to be a port to somewhere else. Likewise, Homer becomes my port of call on the way to Seward, its on-the-way nature owing only to the vagaries of couchsurfing hosts and their relative availability, not any sort of geographical convenience.

Our stories are of course divergent. Wake In Fright - even forty something years on - remains one of the best and most chilling representations of the Australian outback I've ever seen. It's confronting. The Yabba's inhabitants want to inhabit the screen as caricatures but for every moment that seems an Australian stereotype, somewhere or sometime, I've seen it in the Pilbara, Kimberley or Territory. Homer has these people too, but they inter no terror. Both places hold you captive but it doesn't take losing all my money and being in a perpetual state of inebriation (OK, the latter probably did happen) for me to find Homer as inescapable. After a day or two - firm friends already made - you welcome its embrace. Nothing is so much planned but characters drift into each other with a charming regularity as if it were scripted. Becca the seeming anchor to my days, Sarah's tales of tattoos, hunting and Wyoming, Joe's case for Superman to be taken more seriously as a hero over the course of two nights of heavy drinking, Kelsea with her easily won affection and a chorus of barflies who make cameo roles through the last gasp moments of evenings or carry the atmosphere of the world cup final, they become the fabric to my time in Homer.

I came for two days and stayed for five. Maybe it was Stockholm Syndrome.

Let's face it, Homer is not the most unappealing metaphorical jailor.

Alaska: Denali National Park

John talks the whole time. He's not obliged to. In fact, he sought the permission from the bus passengers to share some of his observations and thoughts on the park as he shuttles us through it to Wonder Lake. I have no idea of his out-of-summer professional proclivities. Perhaps he's semi-retired. Maybe he's a teacher. Right now though, he's a bus driver, although you wouldn't know it. Naturalist adequately covers what he's doing. He talks to the geology, ecology, biology, cultural history and mountain climbing throughout the park.

Naturalist is probably the only word that could adequately cover it. His range of narration covers a breadth of topics, most of them immediately fascinating to me. He begins with the geology of the park and talks in an informed and academically correct manner. This doesn't feel like he's reading idly from a prompter or recalling some notes... he's explaining, making observations and discussing science. I want to call him a geologist, even if he's more like an amateur one from the 1800's; the types who crawled the hills in the British Isles crudely coming up with a sedimentary structure to further aid them finding coal. The type who viewed it as the eminent weekend hobby... regardless, he speaks knowingly and lovingly of his plot of land and the processes involved with it. He's at least getting a "B" for the park's geology so he's probably already more accomplished in the field than I am.

Given my tertiary education doesn't cover a lot of what follows, I have to trust that he's correct about the topics that moves on to... but he talks with a confidence and assurance that belies his comfort with the knowledge and ideas he's sharing. Plus, the earlier "B" makes it easier to accept his remarks about the different park species, their migratory patterns, eating habits and so on. Likewise for the Athabascan inhabitants. Then the history of mountaineering and climbing Denali.

Denali has one road. It's about a hundred miles long, is mostly gravel and generally one lane wide. This is obviously problematic with traffic going in both directions... and downright diabolical on the mountain passes.  No guarding. No windrow. Just a sheer drop. A long time ago - as a motorcyclist with only a small self preservation streak - I used to imagine the gruesome and bloody ways that I may meet my end if I were to make a mistake mid-bend. It was enough to stop me from twisting the throttle a little further or going in a little harder. Here, I caught myself doing a similar thing. How many times would the bus tumble before coming to a rest some three hundred metres down? How many times would I feel it? Would anyone actually survive? Is there really a point to wearing this seat belt up here?

Apparently, expressing these thoughts to the person next to me is not the right thing to do.

Moments later, John piped up with a few comments of his own about the precarious nature of the pass we were on, "there are three ways y'all can deal with it. You can look out at the horizon in the distance, you don't notice the height so much then, or you can keep your eyes in the bus."

Someone tells him that's only two things. I wish it was me.

"Or, y'can do what I do..." Dutifully, they ask him what it is that he does, seemingly because he's best placed to dealing with these sorts of things.

"... and just shut your eyes."

That nervous laughter that I have come to love travels the length of the bus. I'm grinning like an idiot.

The three days I'm there I have three different drivers. They are all more than adequate narrators, each with their own interests. No bus ride is the same, save for the ground we cover. Not that that is necessarily bad. It's spectacular country. The object of the drives is typically to find wildlife which is cool - make no mistake - but asking to stop to admire a landscape, something I am more prone to do, wins you some pretty weird looks.

Apparently foxes are less frequently sighted, being a bit skittish by nature... this guy was pretty unfussed.

... and just generally pretty cool.

Luckily, the wildlife roam around and so over the three days we stopped in a variety of places that often quite accidentally have amazing backdrops.

No animals. Apparently that makes this less interesting.

I didn't accomplish as much hiking as I'd have liked. Still being unreasonably sick - I spent most of my time in Fairbanks lying on the couch wondering what I did to deserve it - I milled around at and around the rest stops without getting too far away. On the third day though I mustered the energy and resolve for a few miles of a valley, mostly to stalk some caribou I'd seen earlier in the day. Luckily, they were still there and were reasonably happy to put up with my company for a while before they made off in a direction I wasn't too interested in heading. I followed a river for a while to meet up with the road somewhere in the mid distance and hailed a shuttle returning to the campsites.

An obliging caribou.

Taking a seat on the bus, the passenger next to me asks how my walk was, how far I'd walked and from what direction. It seemed like a pretty pointed inquisition, but whatever, sometimes that's how people prefer to go about the business of conversation. Dutifully, I answer all questions.

"So how close did you get to the bear and her cubs back up the valley?"

... what fucking bear?

Why is Alaska So Beautiful? A scientific examination of angles, warm light and CMB.

If you're expecting a serious post, just close the window now and read something else.

Abstract: Alaska is beautiful because it is. It is mountains and rivers and lakes and snow and big mammals and alpine forest and glaciers and just... seemingly unspoiled.

Introduction: Alaska spends an awful lot of time in twilight. That part of the day where everything seems that much more pretty than it really is. By virtue of its latitude, the sun doesn't really get very high and when it is rising or setting, it travels very, very obliquely. You get a long twilight period... that soft, dappled, warm light that photographers love.

Hypothesis: Alaska is beautiful because of twilight.

Apparatus: Photos of Cameron Michael Browning, sourced from personal archives and/or facebook.

Discussion: Cam is an average looking person with the sort of personality that is its own contraceptive device. He is appropriate for testing this hypothesis because I haven't made fun of him for over a fortnight.

Figure 1 is a photo of Cam under flash photography. It's an appropriate substitute to midday sun as it mimics the harsh light of the sun high, somewhere in the middle of the day. It's especially useful because it's clear that his face is unprepared for this, it responds less well than the girl's next to him who has a bit of makeup on, obviously to counter looking like a washed up drug fiend.

Figure 1: I will present this without further comment.

Figure 2 highlights the importance of a soft and oblique light source. Taken at twilight, it's infinitely better than figure one... but perhaps that's only because he's looking the other direction.

Figure 2: Cam at twilight looking in the opposite direction. Already less repulsive.

In the interest of rigorously testing my hypothesis, let's also investigate a photo of Cam looking the otherway but under the midday sun, simply to see if it's twilight or his pose that makes Figure 2 subjectively more appealing. Figure 3 shows Cam at 2pm on a Saturday violently vomiting off the back of a boat in Longreach Bay. Ladies, form an orderly queue.

Figure 3: Hard to know what to make of this, except to laugh at him chumming the waters.

The obvious final test is Cam looking at the camera at twilight (Figure 4). Being a man of science though, I'm prepared to state that in my opinion the results of this particular photo are anomalous, should be discarded and not considered when forming any conclusions as to why Alaska is beautiful.

Figure 4: Cam looking at the camera, at twilight. This experiment shows results that are anomalous to a pre-determined conclusion and has been summarily discarded.

Conclusion: Hypothesis is void. Alaska is beautiful because Browning isn't in it.

Further reading: https://www.facebook.com/cam.browning

Alaska: Independence Day

One of my central motivations for driving past Denali National Park and over to Fairbanks was to spend Independence Day in a city, with people. Instead of a park, with bears, who probably don't care. I don't know what I was expecting. Gun toting, loud proclamations of a love for freedom and incessant calls of "'MURRRRRRRICAAAAAH!" certainly crossed my mind but was ruled out as unlikely; being in the company of some very left leaning and hippie couchsurfing hosts, I couldn't imagine that this was the company that they would be seeking out.

My assumptions were fair. In Ester, there is a parade and town fair for the fourth and that was to be our day's entertainment. It turns out that Cassie, Liz and Sarah - my hosts - seemed to know the whole town. The fair is also a giant picnic, there's a pig on a spit and just generally a stack of food on offer right around the grounds. I load up, like a student at a buffet. After the food is mostly gone the fair starts up proper with rounds of sack races, tug-o-war, egg & spoon races... and egg catching contests which is most definitely a spectator sport.

Photo finish unnecessary, the ginger wins it after the guy on the right crashes out spectacularly.

After some time just flinging a frisbee around (and one of the girls hitting a toddler in the face) we decamp to a pub for a few beers. Again, it feels like the girls know everyone here. Admittedly, there are a few familiar faces from the fair, but there are plenty of strangers too. Before too long what feels like most of the bar has traveled with us to a lake for paddling and frolicking. It's fucking cold but we're loaded up with beer and tequila coats, among all sorts of other things and it would be well past dark in a normal part of the world before we get back to our cabin in the woods.... for more drink and merriment, until everyone just sort of winds down. There was precious little nationalism on show. No xenophobia.

It was pretty great.

Alaska: Flightseeing - Oh Hi, Mt McKinley.

One of the major reasons people stop in Talkeetna - besides to sample the local brewery and reindeer - is because of its relative proximity to Denali. The airport is a myriad of flightseeing (a good, but not great pun) tour operators and for no apparent reason, I sign up to K2 Aviation's offering. As always, I'm winging it (also not a great pun).

Not totally trusting myself with an 8:30am departure, opting for the 10:30am flight exiting Talkeetna is a good move. The lady at the front desk informs me that some cloud earlier has cleared up and it is looking like one of the better days of the summer. The pilot - Patrick Carter (google him, his job and some of the projects he is working on are awesome) - is clearly impassioned by what he does and takes us through a safety briefing light heartedly, "if for some reason we need to land and I can't get to them, there is a tent and some food in the front, but don't worry, these guys in with the red planes around us will be out with the pizzas and beers pretty quickly."

Black humour remains the best kind.

Our route takes in a collection of glaciers, peaks, circumnavigates Denali and for the majority of the flight the weather is completely amenable to showing us a good time.

A cauldron of cloud!

Patrick is a pretty great narrator, he covers the natural history, ecology and cultural history of the area in between alerting us to various points of interest. This is all momentarily abandoned when he sees me playing with lego. He and I briefly bond over Junior and then a Snowtrooper. Somewhere in the flight he begins an observation with, "now I'm no geologist but..."

It's jarring to hear. It sounds a little like those clowns who preface racism with, "I'm not a racist but...". Patrick's observation of weathering patterns on the Alaska Range is reasonably sound. Perhaps he is a geologist in denial, much like those other guys with that different prefix.

Glacier carved valley with Denali in the background.

The flight itself is incredible. It seems every time out there has been one or two experiences that are very much, "do this and don't pay too much attention to the price" sort of activities. Shark diving. The Serengeti. Petra. Jiuzhaigao. Abu Simbel.

Flying over Denali National Park is it. Just do it.

Mt McKinley/Denali/The Great One. Whatever you call it, it's impressive.

Alaska: Talkeetna

Conveniently, pretty much every building in Talkeetna has a pub attached to it!

Talkeetna is a small town with one main road, conveniently called Main Street. It's mostly cafes and pubs for a few hundred metres. Interspersing the places I'm most interested in were gift shops and activity shops. Pedestrians rule Main Street, cars crawl behind unfussed walkers often many abreast.

I ditch the car and wander into the Roadhouse, an eatery of some reknown for its large delicious portions delivered at a low cost. Upon noticing reindeer chilli on the menu all decision making could be concluded for the foreseeable future; spicy rudolph is exactly what I want inside of me. Sitting outside I ate cute dead animal, made friends with local porter and just people watched for a while, losing track of time. This is an excellent way to settle into a small town and I fully recommend it. Talkeetna has a pretty great feel to it; a pedestrian paced lifestyle in a town of log cabins in the woods by a river, all not too far from one of North America's finest national parks.

Admittedly, were I to live here I'd probably think it was hick-ish and inbred, but whatever. One of the joys in being a passerby is just feeling and writing whatever the hell you want into the lives of the people and buildings around you. It's not such a bad space to be.