Again, haven't been here in a while. But some people don't have facebook yet, and actually, xanga.com is a pretty good way to let everyone know what is going on. I just gotta keep it in mind. Been staying on facebook, but not on xanga for some reason. hmmm... don't know why I just rambled like that either. Kinda just is that mid afternoon slump. Got stuff to do, and no real desire to do it right now. That's the problem when it is slow, stuff to do, because the busy season is coming. but you gotta get worked into it.

Yeah, I said "gotta" twice in that last paragraph. I can use it. when I feel like it. That's what texting has done for me. Gotta use that shorthand occasionally. But I still can't get in the LOLs. Those are one of things that bug me in my writing. Even on a text.

So going fishing tomorrow. Taking a personal day since the council is sending me to Nashville via a 1:00 am departure from Juneau International Airport. Oh, and that's right, I will be in Nashville, so any of you Tennesseans, come hang out, I'll buy you lunch!!

Going Sockeye Salmon Fishing tomorrow. Sockeye is Red Salmon, the best eating salmon, and the one with the most Omega 3 fatty acids, according to the big informational sign on the hatchery wall across from my office. You can see it on Google Earth. They have the address wrong, but my office is the three story glass and concrete building with Juneau Empire and native american totemic figures on the sides. Kinda a cool place to work.

I am actually posting because of a specific request from Beth Cox... She wants to see photos of me, and since she doesn't have Facebook, she can't without logging onto Myklin's account, or some strangeness like that.

No worries, I'll post more, and more photos too.

Me and her... meaning Kjerstin, the new element in my life... So Xanga world, meet Kjerstin!!

I really like the hair getting into her eyes in this one... I stole it from her facebook page.

And the Alaskan Sunsets are amazing. This one is actually Nathan Caldwell's... Stole it too, I have some, but I liked the mountians and trees better for the poster I was puting together. Sorry Nathan.

 So...

haven't been here in a while.

oops.

Thought I would just check in.

I thought about writing.

But I'm not up to it.

Mostly written out.

Don't want to put a lot of effort in tonight.

But, good news!!

I'm at Philmont again!!

on the wrong side of the road...

...in class too.

Summer Camp Management school.

BIGGER BUT!!

I HAVE MY NEW CAMERA!!

This is my favorite so far!!

So here I am, in Alaska. I did make it, even though my xanga page has been silent. Sometimes, like now it is hard to keep with all of the internet commitments I have. Both of them. Facebook is demanding. And I only have so much time to write.

I am currently sitting at my computer eating trail food left over from Philmont... yes, I know that was a month ago... but the point is that the trail food is all extremely packaged stuff and I could probably eat it in a century and still get some nutritional value from it, without too many hazardous side effects. I am sitting in front of the computer to itemize my expenses from the 3,200 mile trip I took to get here to Alaska. That trip was incredible. I will get my photos up and running here before long, I took as many as I really wanted to, and I got some panoramas that I want to try on here, to attempt to give a better picture of what the Alaska highway is all about.

The highway is all paved. Some people will tell you differently, but I am here to tell you that I drove 3200 miles on a road that was pavement. If they want to tell you that it is still gravel, tell them they took a wrong turn back in Alberta somewhere. I even drove a longer, more scenic route, to see the undelievable Canadian Rockies, and while the frost heaving was a little worse at 9,000 feet, it was still beautiful road. By the way, a new addition to my list of must-dos-before-you-die is to drive through the Candadian rockies from Banff to Jasper. As I got into the mountians, I had this weird feeling that something was wrong, I was having a hard time breathing and all that ill-health stuff. Then I realized, that wait, I am in the biggest and most the most beautiful mountians that I have ever seen, so I am not having a geart attack, I am just hurting from all of the beauty I can see. God is so amazing, his creation is beyond words.

The Canadian muskeg outisde of Banff and Jasper national parks is serious oil country. if you drive through in a station wagon, like I did, you will feel out of place. The only saving grace is that I had a Subaru, which was the most numerous car on the road besides the ubiqious mud-covered 3/4 ton trucks and semi-trucks. Some of the semi-tractors moved such heavy loads that in front they had tandem steering tires ( read that as four tires that move when the steering wheel is turned, instead of two. Go see a giant concrete pumping truck as an example). But more impressive than that were the REALLY big rigs. Their trailers had eight or ten tires on the back axles, and the four steering tires. American big rigs will have dualy wheels on both ends of the axle. These trailers had the dualy rigs on the ends, then came the springs and suspension, and two more sets of dualy wheels in the center of the trailer...

There are wild bison up there too. You don't see a fence for several hundred miles, and out in the middle of all this country are small herds of bison, napping in the middle of the highway. I saw deer galore, I hit one in Montana... Caribou, Elk, Moose, Bison and Dall sheep, all close to or on the road... there's no place on earth like British Columbia.

My favorite stop on the trip was a lodge I wanted to stay at, but got too tired to drive the remaining two hours. Toad River Lodge is just outside of Ft. Nelson, BC. And by just outside, I mean about three hours and almost two hundred miles. I think there are maybe three outposts of human civilization between Ft. Nelson and Toad River. The rest is just miles of trees and mountinous piles of rock, the most beautiful country ever. I am going back one day. Toad River is the most amazing combination of home-grown lodge, gas station, cafe and airstrip with a house or two scattered around. They are open year round, I think, which is an accomplishment that far north. The place just had that strange, quirky, but nice, atmosphere that I revel in.

I listened to all of Focus on the Family's Narnia series, and the Les Miserables and a Sherlock Holmes novel produced by another company on the way up. That was what I did between the quiet stints through the mountains, and a few musical hours. So if you come, bring forty or fifty hours of new audio books to listen to, it really shortens the trip, I think that I would have been a miserable wreck for sixty hours in the car without those audio-books.

The ferry into Juneau was a longish, uneventful ride. I took the ferry out of Skagway, because while Haines Alaska is closer by water, Skagway is 300 or 400 miles closer to Kansas by highway. There are some really steep mountains between Skagway and Haines.

Juneau is right on an inland waterway, Gastineau Channel, and is constantly 78 degrees and sunny, as the joke goes... as long as you are in the tanning bed at the local salon... But before I was in town 24 hours, I dined on the best in northern homecaught and homecooked wild halibut and storebought scallops, I someone try to fix me up on a date with a lawyer, went seal hunting, found out that while I don't have a company car, I do have a company boat, and chased a blakc bear through a neighborhood... I slept REALLY deeply Sunday night.

So, this update is on Wednesday, rather than Monday, as I originally promised. I am so sorry. But the last two days have been busy. We finally received the paper that has been en route since the beginning of JUNE, and so, I have printed several thousand prints in the last couple days. Even on a machine as cool as the one we have, that takes a while. The prints come out about twenty-a-minute, so a thousand prints takes a significant about of time. The way I figure it, it takes about three hours to prints and package all the photos from a morning's worth of photography in base camp. I have yet to run any prints of special assignments.

I also have new boots. I took a day off, went to Taos, and purchased a pair of Vasque hikers. It's not exactly the order of events I had in mind. I would still be hiking in my Asolos from October if I could... But... They hurt...

I tried for ten minutes to get this picture, and it still doesn't include everything I wanted. The Touch-me-Not summit cairn is chopped off before the middle, were there was a stick, held upright by the pile of rock marking the 12,050 ft. summit of that peak. I wanted to have my face and the 12,441 ft. summit of Baldy, which are in the photo, with the important elements of the Touch-me-Not summit cairn... but alas, that was not to happen.

I wanted to place my face, even if it was not entirely represented, only mostly represented, in the left of this frame. This would have preserved for all of posterity the acheivements of that day. I would have recorded the two peaks and my face...

This is just a cool shot I got of a camper climbing the wall at the Dean Cow rock climbing camp... thought you might enjoy seeing that one.