Monday, July 30, 2012

Don and Tina's Place

Don and Tina had a party for their Mica Guides staff yesterday, and here are a few pictures.

Don and Tina cleared the land and built this cabin with their own two hands:
Off the Grid, Of Course

In a beautiful setting:

Wood-Fired Hot Tub

And, he employs chics that like guns:

Mandy with 30-30

Meagan with 357 Magnum

Claire with Pistol

Claire, Joyful with Shotgun

Abra

Every year the staff party kicks off with some firearms training. Targets include stuffed animals, laptops, and full soda cans. This year I ordered some tannerite exploding targets which added a little more joy to the event (especially when placed inside a stuffed animal).




Sunday, July 29, 2012

Pinnacle RV Park


This is the Pinnacle RV park, where they also have laundry, a cafe, wifi, and showers. Showers cost $5, but cost is not why we don't take showers every day. For some reason, it's just no big deal out here. It's hard to explain why, other than it's just an honest outdoor culture, and outward appearances don't mean much here.

I'm at Pinnacle right now. Pinnacle is closer than Palmer, so sometimes I come here to get access to the internet and grab a meal. They have all kinds of animals running around--geese, llamas, dogs, and other cool birds I don't know the name of. They've also got old tractors, bicycles and other oddities lying around. It's an interesting place, run completely by an old man and his wife. I can't imagine how much work they have to do between caring for the animals and running the cafe and all the maintenance that must be required, but Alaskans work hard.

A couple of scenics from the ride from Palmer to Don's:



Saturday, July 28, 2012

My Outpost

This is my little outpost on my friends Don and Tina's land. A moose came by the other day--I stayed in the van.



Valdez to Whittier

People have been telling me I have to take the ferry from Valdez to Whittier. So I finally made the trip. Valdez was a 240 mile ride from Palmer and spectacular, as most of the rides in AK have been. I spent the night in Valdez and got up at 5:00 am so I could check the motorcycle in at 6:00 and the ferry sailed at 7:00. It started out really foggy but the sun came out later--the ferry trip was about 6 hours.

Palmer is C
Valdez is D
Whittier is B


View Larger Map

If you click on an image it will go full screen.
Leaving Valdez












Wednesday, July 25, 2012

All Good 2012

Last Tuesday I took a flight back down to the lower 48 to go to the All Good music festival in Ohio with my friend and old college roommate, Carlos. It was awesome; 4 days of camping and music. About 25,000 people. The Allman Brothers were sort of the headliner but there were a ton of great bands over the 4 days.
Spontaneous Hammock Village
Carlos with Didgeridoo-Mounted GoPro

Fire Dancer
Crowd on the Hill
New Motorcycle Tires
Before I left I got new tires for the motorcycle. I got about 10,000 miles out of the last set of Michelin Road Pilot 3s, which is really good for motorcycle tires. I'm a little worried about getting many miles out of this new set of Bridgestone Battlax S10s though. In any case, the motorcycle is back in action so the little red dot on my tracking map should start moving around again. While I'm waiting for the Sportsmobile to sell I'm going to take a couple of tours around the state.

I will say that after Alaska and the outdoor music festival, the "real world" of airports and taxis etc was quite jarring. It's good to be back in a nice laid back place with no traffic or neck ties.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Sure it's Edible!

So I'm hanging out at Don's place with Bill, Claire, and Meagan (MICA Guides), and we find this giant mushroom growing next to my van. Bill's eye's grow wide and he says excitedly, "This is an aphrodiclosophus genus mushroom and is delicious!" or something to that effect. Then Claire says, "Yes, since it's aprocodifolated instead of neocortexacerbated we can eat it!" or something like that. Mushroom freaks. Anyway, we picked that bad boy, sliced it up and ate it for dinner, and I'm still alive.




The mushroom mixed in with pasta, and other Alaskan edible greens called Chickweed.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Crickets

Nothing is happening quickly right now. I've got the van advertised on craigslist and ebay for $13,500 and not getting any action. Over the past couple of days I've continued cleaning it though and got it looking pretty good:
Look I made the bed!


I did have a little excitement on Friday when I got a call from Mark, a friend and accomplished photographer from DC. He was in the neighborhood to do a 200 mile bike ride from Glacier View to Valdez, so we met up and had lunch and explored in the Sporstmobile a little. I was going to meet him in Valdez and take the ferry to Whittier, but when I called for reservations there was no room for the motorcycle, so I didn't make the trip.
I feel kind of trapped in that I need to be near the computer and wifi in case I get hits on the van, but I'm not really trapped. I could go out and do a hike or something for a day and just log on to email at the end of the day. For some reason I'm not doing that. Well one reason I don't move around too much is that my van only gets 13 mpg, so to move it is about 30 cents a mile, and that adds up. Still, I'm going to try to be more active during the day.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Kinda Quiet Now

Man, after all the traveling, getting the van ready and waiting for it to sell is not very exciting. In fact it's close to driving me insane. I've got it posted on craigslist and ebay, and now I wait. No hits yet.

During the day I hang out in a coffeeshop in Palmer called Vagabond Blues. But I can only drink so much coffee and surf the internet for so long before I get antsy. At 13 mpg, the van is expensive to move around, so I don't really want to go exploring with it.

The motorcycle is in dire need of new tires, so this morning I go to start it to take it to the shop and the battery was dead. That damn battery. This time I'd left the GPS on the bike, turned off, but somehow over the course of a week it managed to drain a lot of the battery. I pulled the battery and drove to the motorcycle shop to get it tested and charged. While it charged I hung out at Vagabond Blues.

I've got the battery now and will try it out tomorrow. Since I'm living in the van, it doesn't really matter where I am, I can spend the night anywhere. Since Palmer has cell phone and internet (the whole town actually has wireless), I'm going to stay here tonight and wait for hits on the van.
Sportsmobile Getting Some TLC

Daily Scenery

Saturday, July 7, 2012

So Now What?

Sell the Sportsmobile, that's the next mission. Although not as exciting as the ride from Key West, it will likely be more difficult for me. There is a LOT of crap in there I've stockpiled over the years in preparation for the zombie apocalypse, and sorting out and making decisions about large amounts of my own stuff freaks me out and overwhelms me.

Amazingly though, after 2 years of storage and severe winters in Alaska, it started right up on the first try. It was stored on my friends Don and Tina's land:

Storage


Peacocking

Together Again


There's a lot of work ahead of me to get it in decent shape to sell it. Apparently I was in a hurry to leave AK in 2010 because here's the state I left it in:

Alright this blog isn't exactly linear--today and yesterday I worked on the van and got it looking a little better:
Still another couple of days of work; it's been to Burning Man 5 times so has a lot of playa dust built up.

Here's a short vid:



Thursday, July 5, 2012

Dalton Footage

Here's a 30 sec compilation of some of the conditions and scenery I ran across on the way to Prudhoe Bay on the Dalton (have I mentioned it's 414 miles, one way?): the Alaska pipeline is visible in the last bit.

Arctic Tour

So the morning of what became my treacherous trip back to Fairbanks was actually really cool. Deadhorse is not actually on the Arctic Ocean, but is as far north as you're allowed to go. So I paid $49 to take a shuttle to the Arctic Ocean, which also included a tour of the oil field operations, which was pretty fascinating. Apparently there's enough oil in this current oil field to keep producing for the next 50 years. I was relieved to hear that.
Oil Stuff

In the Arctic Ocean

Shuttle



Did I Say "Overblown"?

I take it back. The reports of how difficult the Haul Road (the Dalton) is are accurate--the ride back to Fairbanks from Deadhorse (Prudhoe Bay) beat me up pretty bad. It was tricky on the way up for sure, but nothing like the ride back.

The ride started out great, it was sunny, and I felt much more confident at first with my newly acquired riding skills gained on the way up. Then it started to rain. And then I hit some soft, rocky gravel and dumped the bike. It was humiliating to say the least, as this happened in front of a guy driving a road grader. But he was cool and helped me right my 700 lb motorcycle, which would be very difficult for me to do by myself, in spite of my legs, huge and powerful. I also held up a couple trucks getting all this sorted out. I had learned earlier that the truckers on the haul road hate motorcyclists already, so my awareness of this made holding them up all the more uncomfortable.

Being humbled, I rode much more slowly and deliberately in the rain through this hellish stretch of soft gravel mixed with large rocks, which lasted about 5 long miles.


It continued to rain and then I hit a really long stretch of hard packed dirt that was slippery as snot in the rain. The rain and mud caked in the radiator and the bike started overheating. I tried cleaning it off by scraping the wet mud with sticks but it didn't really work, so the only alternative was to ride until the bike got hot, then park and wait for it to cool off, which would take 5-10 minutes. I went through this cycle about 5 times before I finally found some water to wash it off more thoroughly. That did the trick and I made it back to Fairbanks after 400+ miles of this, but not until 2 am.


One cool part of the ride was that around midnight I got to see a near full moon rise in the funky Alaskan twilight. Of course I didn't take any pictures because I was cold, wet, hungry, afraid the bike would fall apart and I'd get eaten by bears, and pretty pissed off in general. In fact a bear did cross my path about 50 ft away. Wish I had a picture.


So today I finally got the FJR to a car wash bay and thoroughly cleaned the radiator and the rest of the bike. I also power washed my boots and legs to get the mud out. It made me feel funny, sensations I didn't understand.







And now, I' hanging at a Mc Donald's since they have wifi.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Deadhorse

I decided to stay in Deadhorse another night so I can go on the Arctic Ocean tour. It's the only way you can actually see the ocean because it's in a restricted area. They do a background check before you are allowed to go on the tour. So that happens a little later this morning; hoping to get some good pictures.

As a town, Deadhorse seems unique. It;s population is oil field workers, sprinkled in are some visitors and bikers. Lots of industria equipment and buildings designed to keep you warm when it's -50 degrees.









One interesting thing about being here is that when visitors arrive, they are often finishing a big trip, like I was, for which the end of the Dalton Highway is their goal. I met this couple who traveled from Argentina: