Day 25: Christmas?

AKA Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Okay, so...I don't know what happened with this. I typed this all up on my phone five nights ago. It feels like forever ago, and it felt like it took forever to type up. Then the stupid email wouldn't send. Not enough service somehow for the app, even though it DID send--BLANK--from my email account online. Whatever. What follows is what I wrote two nights ago. 

I must start here, hiding in my tent from mosquitoes the size of Texas, by saying that these mosquitoes FLOCK to smoke and fire. NOT a Christmas-while-on-vacation-in-Alaska present AT ALL.

Secondly, I must tell you about last night. We stayed in a hotel last night. We have stayed in several hotels on this trip, mostly to help our bodies forgive ourselves from forcing them to sleep in our van. They've been all sorts of hotels--from nice ones who have breakfast ready to ones you can make coffee in your room to the ones with noisy air conditioners to ones where there are people screaming murder in the parking lot. As different as they all have been, they all have, at the very least, made some stab at getting the room dark in this land of the midnight sun.

Not so with The Golden Nugget Hotel. Not even close.

Everything else was great: two beds, running water, cable that showed NCIS and DC fireworks, fast internet. I mean, they'd really thought of everything...except that one whole side of rooms faced directly WEST. Where is the sun at 10 and 11 pm, 12, 1, and maybe 2 am in Fairbanks, AK? Setting in the WEST with all the glories of a 6 pm, rush-hour sunset. In other words, blinding.

Didn't the room have shades or curtains? you ask. Why yes, yes they did. I believe they were a pale yellow. Fail.

But do we, the Boggess family of smart people, just lie there and do nothing? No! We use our brains instead of letting them get fried by the light. We have these aluminum emergency blankets we got in Wyoming to survive the winter that was Yellowstone, and we put them over the drapes. We had to use some ingenuity to keep them up and from floating out from the window because then the daylight flooded back in. This was a problem because we had to use a box fan because it was too warm in the room and there was no air conditioning and we couldn't open the windows because the screens were too holey. (Yes, I had to catch my breath after that sentence too.)

So we used some of this little rope we use to keep the tarp over our tent us and tight and what not. Then we clip it to the drapes with one of the...like...rope-synching things. I don't know what they're called. I'm a bad camper. We didn't have enough free clippy thingies, so Mom tied a stake to the end of the last rope and just let it hang. It was a ridiculous scene. It was a hilarious scene. Yes, I have pictures.

I did work, mostly. While you'd think these blankets were totally solid, capable of totally blocking all light from passing through them when looking at them under normal circumstances, when hung up on drapes with Arctic "sunset" light streaming in, they are neither of these things. Alright, fine. True, they are solid in their physicality (vs. being liquid or gas or plasma). But they did not completely reflect all light that hit them. I could still make out the pattern of the drapes through them. And while I've been imagining myself to be sleeping on top of thin tin foil every time we have camped since getting them--it crinkles and folds weird, okay?--this has clearly not been the case. Nevertheless, it did make things much more gloomy but not dark by the stretch of anyone's imagination. And after watching "A Capitol Fourth" on PBS and seeing that it does get DARK in other places, and it doesn't take all night to get that way...well...let's just say there are things to be thankful for about home that I didn't even know I needed to be thankful for.

I'm pretty sure I've just taken a bunch of naps this entire trip. It's tiring to say the least. But all of that last night. And despite this crazy attempt at "dark" and a dreadful longing for true dark, we did sleep, and it became today, and overall, it's been a relatively good day. There have been worse, and it started off sunny: Alaska, Day 25, Christmas-on-vaca present #1.

We got up, packed everything up--including our handy-dandy aluminum blankets--took a picture of the bottle-opener screwed into the wall and so labeled, and went to find us some musk ox.

Now, I've gotta admit. I hadn't seen any flattering pictures of these creatures. With a name like "musk ox", how cute can they really be? But Ashley has been all hyper about them, wanting to see puffins and musk ox to fulfill her Alaskan vacation dream. Puffins I understood; not so much understanding with the musk ox. Until we got to the "Large Animal Research Station" of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

*Voice two octaves higher* Oh my goodness! Look at them! They're so CUTE. And the BABIES, just LOOK at them. *ahem*

Needless to say, I was won over. The males are aggressive with very small brains to allow for a very, very solid skull, aka a helmet, because they try to bash each others' brains even smaller about every 5 minutes. We had a very nice tour guide named Emma who showed us around the station some and told us many great things about the musk ox and caribou they have at the station. The first thing Emma pointed out was the fact that there were 3 fences between us and the male musk ox. There was a cable fence on the very inside. Then there was a diamond-shaped mesh fence--a normal fence basically. Then there was a flimsy little rope fence we all stayed on the right side of. This was for our best interest, Emma politely told us, because the ox were known to charge, and when they charged the fence, they could bend the cable and push so far through to bow out the mesh normal fence. We stayed on the right side of the rope fence.

There was Bob, the dominant male. Then there were a few others. Then, at the bottom of the totem pole, was Clyde. Clyde was at the bottom because part of one of his horns was broken. They never grow back. Sad for Clyde.

Then we went and saw the female musk ox and the babies! They were so, so, so cute! We learned that most of the babies were name after fruit. Oh, and my favorite part, Emma said that we may wonder why there are no other large animals there besides the musk ox and caribou and reindeer (which were in the back of the land, so we never saw them). Like bears or moose or wolves. Well, they had moose once, but--even with fences doubled in height (we later guessed about 15 or 16 feet tall)00the moose would jump and some student worker would have to track it down. What? A moose--you know, this HUGE, gangly, awkward-looking things--the ones with big antlers during the summer--moose can jump over 16 feet high? Nope, apparently not because they don't have moose any more. And, as for the bears and other things that eat things like musk ox and caribou, Emma said, with them being predators of musk ox and all, well...that "just wouldn't be polite".

We learned a bunch of other stuff about musk ox and caribou. Musk ox had gone completely extinct in Alaska, sometime in the early 1800s. To re-establish a population, 34 baby musk ox were shipped all the way to Fairbanks from Greenland. They all made it to Fairbanks. Unfortunately, 2 got eaten by a black bear shortly after their arrival...oops. But, on the bright side, Alaska's entire musk ox population came into being from only those 32 babies. Their numbers are up over 100,000 today.

Like I said, there were caribou at the station too. One was a calf, called Rosie, whose mommy was called Hermione. Rosie was about 5 1/2 weeks old (the musk ox babies were about 6 1/2 weeks). Now, I'm still kind of confused about the whole reindeer vs. caribou thing. If I correctly understood what Emma said this morning, then caribou are the North American species, and reindeer are the European species. There are both caribou and reindeer in Alaska (so it's not confusing at all). In Europe, there are some compltely wild reindeer, but they are very few. Most are domesticated. All reindeer in Alaska are domesticated. Reindeer are shorter, fatter, and have more elaborate antlers than caribou. 

There was a bunch more we learned, but my thumbs are getting tired (I'm on my phone tonight), and this was only the morning. The station was definitely present #2, way better and way less touristy than the riverboat thing we did yesterday.

We drove down to Denali National Park. We sorted our our bus tour for tomorrow and our camping arrangements. Neither turned out remarkably. Our first campsite would have required us to offload everything from our van, walk our stuff to the site, park our van somewhere else, and take a shuttle or walk back to the site. We tried for something else much more simple, especially since the bear box on our site was almost full and we couldn't leave any food in the car...even though...where is our food right now, at this drive-up site? In our car...whatever. The change of campsite, and full refund for the first one, was Christmas present #3.

As for the bus, we thought we wanted to take it all the way to the end of the road. The lady "helping" us didn't think we wanted to go there. It's "only" a place to drop off backpacks. Yeah well...actually...it is a) the end of the road (and you can't drive past mile 13 or 14 with your own car) and b) there is a stamp at the end of the road. 

I don't think I've mentioned anything about stamps...well maybe I did back at Yellowstone because there were eleventy billion of them. Anyways, brief version, the National Parks Service has these "passports" which you get "cancelled" with stamps at every park or forest or monument or landmark within their system that you stop at. It can get a little obsessive. We will probably all wish we coulda gotten that stamp at the end of the road, but...to balance everything, on Thursday we're gonna go over 100 miles out of our "way" to get another Denali-related stamp. Tho, 100 miles, in the grand scheme of things, is not an issue. And we get to go wherever we feel like it.

We got set for tomorrow. We finally at lunch, supper, something. We ate. We tried to get a couple of the stamps that are at the various centers around here (there are four, I think, and one to get along the way tomorrow). Then we drove out as far as we could legally drive on the Park's one road.

Along the way, we stopped at a pull out because we could actually see Denali. We saw it, first day in. It is the tallest peak in North America. Only 30% of people who come to see this mountain actually do. So I've heard anyways...you never can be too sure about those statistics you hear. It isn't all that surprising if it is true though. The weather can be rotten, even in the summer. Then there's winter itself to deal with...and even if it's one of those perfect sunny days, like today, low 70s and cute puffy white clouds, those cute clouds aren't so cute anymore when their puff is obscuring the view. They were trying to be obstructionists today, but Denali managed to tower over them for us. It is still snow-covered. I think it stays like that. This does not help anyone see it because then the mountain is white, there are white clouds puffing around, and the sky is shading from blue to very, very, very light blue (aka white), and with the shadows dancing everywhere...well...you kind of have to play that trick with your eyes when you're trying to find those 3D images inside those weird pictures. Kinda go cross-eyed. but we saw it. From far away, and we are really hoping to see it up close and personal in all its awesomeness tomorrow, but... Christmas present #4: we saw Denali. (We will not be attempting to climb it tomorrow or any other day.)

That was pretty much our day. We came back to camp to build a fire, roast marshmellows, and pop popcorn. we discovered that mosquitoes are attracted to smoke, or they have evolved and now know that fire=blood. There will be no fire tomorrow.

Mom and Dad saw a mommy moose and a baby moose trying to cross the street on their walk. Then they saw a mommy moose and a baby moose laying down. Brave and stupid souls that they are walked right by them, well under the 75-foot recommended steer-clear distance. Christmas present #5. 

And now I'm going to be done because my battery is dying and my hand is falling asleep.

Oh, oh, oh! I forgot! We will call this Christmas present #6. Casey Anthony's trial came to a close today which means we might actually get real news on TV now, and Orlando can maybe recover from what has been a 3-year-long circus. I'm not interested in a debate of the verdict, just for the record. I know nothing really about the case or the evidence. I am merely glad that, from now on, whenever I go into a restaurant or a hotel breakfast room playing CNN on the TV, I won't have to hear an hour-long recap of the day's trial events or how there are "lucky" people being allowed into the courtroom to gawk at Ms. Anthony as her verdict is handed down.

Adios y buenos noches.