Blackhawk Park COE

My disabled son Justin is home full-time until the end of August, so travel opportunities are limited this month.  After Whitewater Lake, however, my daughter Allie offered to assume care-giving responsibilities for a few days to give me one more trip to test out the Brew Hut’s systems before my planned journey out west in September. Allie and Justin both wanted Elvis the dog to stay at home, so this would be a solo trip for me.

At Whitewater Lake, I tested out the off-grid systems.  For this trip, I wanted to make sure that the on-grid electrical systems were all still working properly.  Temps were expected to be in the upper 80’s and low 90’s, so I wanted the option to use the air conditioning and perhaps some television at night.

Blackhawk Park is an Army Corps of Engineers’ property on the main branch of the Mississippi River about 30 minutes south of La Crosse, Wisconsin. The campground is heavily utilized on the weekends, so reservations are recommended if electrical hookups are desired.  However, I was arriving mid-week so I took a chance, showed up without a reservation, and still found one of the few remaining sites with electricity ($24).  There were lots of remaining  camping sites without hookups available for $18, and some of those were really pretty and right on the river, although a little muddy. Here’s one of those sites:

Another nice feature of this campground is a three-mile loop that can be walked from the campground and next to the river before circling back through some backwaters to the starting place.  This gravel path can also be biked.  I walked the loop in the morning and at night.  Wildlife is mostly birds and jumping fish.  I saw bald eagles each day that I was there.

I was also interested in this area for historical reasons.  When I was a boy, I read a book about Chief Blackhawk, perhaps the most famous Indian chief from the American Midwest. He was a member of the Sioux tribe.  He fought for the British against the Americans in the War of 1812, hoping to get rid of American settlers pushing into Sioux lands.  That didn’t work for him.  Blackhawk continued to be pushed from Illinois, Iowa and then Wisconsin during the Blackhawk War of 1832.

I never knew the specific details of Blackhawk’s final loss on the  banks of the Mississippi River, close to where I was camped.  War is always messy, and this one did not end well for the Sioux or honorably for the Americans.

I knew that we drove Blackhawk’s people into the river, where they drowned and were shot. The part about Blackhawk trying to surrender to the steamboat captain and getting fired upon was new to me.

“I loved my towns, my cornfields, and the home of my people. I fought for it.”  (Chief Blackhawk)

The trip was a success.  The air conditioner worked great in the late afternoons for bringing the temps down to where I could open up the windows and sleep comfortably at night.  I watched a little free tv, which was nice for catching the late light news before bed.

During the next couple of weeks, I will be preparing the Brew Hut for its first long trip.  The plan is to be on the road in three weeks, heading generally for South Dakota and then points west.  Stay tuned.

Back to Wisconsin: Whitewater Lake Campground

My Scamp trailer has not received much use this year.  That needed to change.  After returning home from Alaska, I had a few days before it was time to pick up my son Justin from his summer education program at UW-Whitewater.   My first thought was to head north to a new state park or county park for a couple of days of camping, but then I realized that I could use the Scamp to camp and move my son’s belongings and medical equipment home.

Kettle Moraine State Forest has two units:  north and south.  The south unit has several campgrounds, and one of those campgrounds, Whitewater Lake,  is only about fifteen minutes from my son’s college.  Whitewater Lake is lightly used, especially during the middle of the week.  There are no hookups or showers.  There are water spigots and pit toilets.  Most of the sites are heavily wooded, especially the west loop.  I stayed in the east loop to take advantage of partial sun so that I could use my Renogy solar suitcase to keep my new Renogy pure gel battery fully charged.

The Scamp uses 12 volt power for lights, water pump, portable fan, and to recharge electronic devices. My site had full sun in the mornings, and I was able to fully top off my battery each day with the solar panel.

This was not a hiking trip, although I found it easy to hike 5-7 miles each day by walking Elvis the service dog through the campground loops and the lightly traveled road out to Rice Lake.

Whitewater Lake itself isn’t all that close to the Whitewater campground.

About a five-minute drive away without good walking access, it features a beach and a boat landing. I was able to pull in two bars of LTE for T-mobile at the boat landing, where I downloaded my daily newspaper.

I tried to hike the segment of the Ice Age Trail that passes close to the campground, but the mosquitoes and biting flies cut those attempts short.
How did I spend my time at Whitewater Lake?  Mostly, I read.  I started and completed “The Fallen” by David Baldacci.  I read some “Game of Thrones”, which is my go-to book when I’m between books.  And I read the Milwaukee daily newspaper from beginning to end.  Sadly, that doesn’t take as long as it did at one time.  At night, Elvis and I sat by the campfire and listened to the owls and coyotes.

This was very relaxing trip.  After the constant action of Alaska, I needed some quiet and downtime.  Elvis had no objections.

On my last night, I drove in to Whitewater and took Justin out for sushi (his request).  I am a big sushi fan, but Whitewater, Wisconsin is a long ways from any ocean.  We each had five different kinds of raw fish, well-presented, and four tasted quite fresh.

On the next morning, I hitched up the Scamp and drove over to Justin’s dorm.  His primary caregiver had everything cleaned up and packed into plastic totes.  I loaded all the totes into the Scamp, put the Hoyer lift and shower chair into the pickup bed and headed home.  An hour later, Julia picked up Justin and his few remaining things in the wheelchair van.

With regard to Justin’ first month at college, his caregivers did an outstanding job.  Every semester will be a bit of a battle to line up reliable caregivers, so we were grateful that the summer session went well.  I think that Justin liked the freedom of college life.  As with most young adults, there is a learning curve to balance freedom and responsibility.  I think he learned some things about himself and his potential.  Time will tell.

I had one learning curve of my own during the camping trip.  Fortunately, this episode does not include pictures.  I have not previously used the gas water heater on the Scamp, and I wanted to take a shower before going out to dinner with Justin.  Following the manual, I set the temperature in the middle.  The water heater kicked on right away, and it heated up to the set temperature and then shut off just like it was supposed to.  I disrobed, entered the tiny bathroom and decided that the best way to shower was to sit down on the toilet (this is a wet bath).

I didn’t want to waste any water, so I turned on the shower briefly to get myself wet all over, and then soaped up with the water off.  The water was a little cold, but I thought that maybe the hot water hadn’t made it from the water heater to the shower. When I turned on the shower again, using only the hot water knob, the water was not at all warm. 

As I was screwing around with the shower head and knob to get things warmer, the shower head fell apart on me with cold water randomly spraying at me, and little bits and pieces of the shower head falling into the water below.  Eventually, I found all of the bits, got them together again, and got the shower running only to realize that the manual instructions were horribly wrong as to where the setting needed to be to get warm water.  I finished up my cold shower, dried off, and got dressed.

I turned the thermostat to 3/4 of the way to hot, and the water heater dutifully created hot water.  Next time, I’ll have a hot shower. Learning curves.

Seward, Alaska: Boat Trip

On our last day in Seward and the day before we flew home, there was one more item on Julia’s “to-do” list that needed checking off.  Before we left Alaska, it was important to go out on a boat and see the glaciers and sea life.

Now, while Julia grew up in a fishing family and around boats, I barely know how to swim and have already been seasick several times when out on the Pacific or Gulf Coast.  I am not a boat/water person. Then there was the matter of cost.  An all-day ride was over $200/person.  Marriage is about compromise, however, and we were on our 30th anniversary celebration trip, so we were going on a boat ride.

Partly because of low expectations, I was pleasantly surprised by our boat experience.  We left on a gray, drizzly morning.  Staff warned us to take medication if we were at all susceptible to seasickness, because seven-foot waves were expected in the Gulf of Alaska, which we would be crossing.  The boat seemed big enough that I wasn’t too worried.  During previous bouts of being seasick, I was either on a smaller boat and/or had possibly too much fun on the night before going out to sea.

There were a handful of people on our boat who were unpleasantly surprised.  I would guess about a half-dozen passengers spent most of the trip hanging over the back railing and filling up paper bags, as the boat rolled up and down through the waves. One elderly woman spent the entire trip throwing up or laying down in a dead-like position. She paid big bucks to be absolutely miserable for six hours.

We started the trip sitting at the rear of the boat, but as people succumbed to the rolling motion, we quickly moved to either the top or front deck, depending on the best vantage points.  We had assigned seating inside the cabin, and we spent some time talking with  our table-mates.  It was harder to see inside though, and the fresh outside air helped me from joining the sick folks on the back railing, so we spent most of the trip outside.

Within the first hour, we saw a pod of killer whales (orcas).

We drifted with the pod for about 30 minutes and watched these magnificent creatures surfacing  and blowing.  It was an unexpected sighting, staff told us, because these killer whales were passing through on a late migration.  While this wildlife sighting was our most memorable, we also saw sea lions, seals, dolphins, rare birds and mountain goats.  Due to the limitations of my phone camera, I cannot share most of these sightings with you, but I have a small sample.  If you click and enlarge, you can see the sea lions in the lower portion of first photo and mountain goats at the top of the second photo.

If someone asked me what my favorite part of Alaska was, it would be the glaciers.  The views from the boat were amazing, and we spent about an hour by the glacier.

As I watched the glacier calve (the breaking away of icebergs into the water), it occurred to me that future generations may not be able to see glaciers.  It’s natural for glaciers to retreat/melt in the summer and build back up in the winter. It’s natural for ice ages to come and go. However, the rapid retreat of glaciers today is not normal.  No matter what your politics, it would be a rare person to view a glacier, see photographic evidence of how fast they are disappearing, and not wonder what the world will be like for future generations.

I don’t have any answers.  Even if human beings are totally responsible for today’s climate changes, it seems unlikely to me there’s enough political will to have a snowball chances in hell to reverse those changes, even if we could.  One thing is for sure: nature is one powerful force to reckon with.

Kenai Fjords National Park

During our stay in Seward, Alaska, we drove one morning to the Kenai Fjords National Park to hike up to Exit Glacier.  The Visitors’ Center opens at 9 a.m., and the parking lot is often filled by late morning, so we were there at 9 sharp.

As we walked up to the building, someone shouted out to us that the 3 1/2 hour guided tour on the Harding Icefield Trail had just left and we could probably catch up if we hurried. Julia and I jogged quickly up the trail and asked permission to join the group, which consisted of the ranger and a father/son.  The ranger agreed and then talked for about five minutes about bear safety on the trail.

“I’m not trying to scare you, but this is bear country, and I want you to prepared,” he said, letting us know that he had bear spray, but we should holster up with our own if we had some (I did).  It turned out that this ranger usually did boat tours and that this was only his second hike of the season on this trail. We quickly started our ascent through heavy forest and brush.  “There are bears all around us,” he said, “but they generally keep away from people.”

We learned that he was not going to take us on the entire trail, but was only going to go far enough that we would be able to get a good view of the glacier. On the way, he instructed us on all types of trees and plants, including several very toxic ones.  It was very informative, and we were glad for the guided hike, even though the group went slower than our usual pace.

At first glance, the glacier looks like a long, steep saucer or sled hill.  But upon further review, it contains crevasses that would easily swallow a person or even a house.

At the meadow overlooking the glacier, we parted ways with our ranger and continued up the Harding Icefield trail on our own.  The trail climbed more steeply above the top of the glacier so that we could see the beginning of the Ice Field from the High Cliffs segment of the trail. In the photo below, you can see a mountain rising up in the distance within the icefield.  That mountain was only briefly visible before fast-moving clouds buried it in the mist. The ice field extends back 3 miles from the top of the glacier.

Just after the above photo was taken for us, another couple shouted out to us in excitement and pointed to a patch of alpine cover next to the ice.  It was too far away to show up in our photo, but this was our first and only black bear sighting in Alaska.  I thought the bear was pretty far away, but the local woman taking the photo told us that the bear was actually pretty close as far as sightings go.  “They are all around us in the park,” she said, “but you don’t usually see them until you get above treeline and have this type of view.”

Within a minute the bear ran off in the opposite direction and dropped below our view entirely.

Fortunately, this was not our only wildlife sighting on this trail.  On the way back down, we encountered the wild and dangerous Alaskan marmot.

This guy was very ticked off that we wanted to pass him, and he basically refused to move until I was just a few feet away, and even then I had to cough to get him to move off of his perch.  I later learned upon doing some research that he was likely a lookout for a whole family of marmots. I’m glad our close encounter was with the marmot instead of the bear.

We thoroughly enjoyed this hike, which was about 7 miles including our side trails.  We did not walk to the end of the Ice Field Trail, after receiving a warning of a grizzly with two cubs on the trail above the cliffs’ overlook.  The entire trail is 8.2 miles.

Seward, Alaska

After a couple of rainy, misty, cool, cloudy days in Seward, we asked a coffee shop barista if this was typical Seward summer weather? “Yep,” he replied. “This is kinda Seward’s vibe.”

So we put on our fleece sweaters and rain gear to stay outside and deal with Seward’s vibe. With about 2300 residents, Seward is a small tourist town and expensive. Our room here was the most costly of our stay. While clean, our 8’x 10′ basement room with no closet and a tiny bathroom was not someplace we wanted to spend much time in.

As a result, we did a lot of walking in the rain along the shoreline, port and downtown. Seward is another Alaskan town with prominent murals. Since it marks the start of the Iditarod, much of the public art focuses upon that famous dog race.

In between the port and downtown, there is over a mile of municipal campground with just about every type of rv rig you can imagine from Casitas to expedition vehicles to huge motor homes. Fees ranged from $40 for hookups to $20 for dry camping to $10 for tenting.  There were about a dozen hardy tenters each day we walked by.

Seward had one brewpub: Seward Brewing. We visited a couple of times. The beer was good, especially the imperial stout, which they ran out of on our last night there. Also, there was some interesting metal art and a painted concrete bar.

That last photo wasn’t at the brewpub but I felt compelled to add it in.
We dined at two excellent restaurants: Chinooks and Ray’s, Both had great food, drinks and views.

Kachemak Bay State Park

After a couple of days of walking up and down Homer Spit’s shoreline, we were ready to do some hiking again. Our Homer hosts recommended visiting the state park across the bay. The only problem is that you can’t drive there; the only way to get there is by boat. So we took our first water taxi to Kachemak State Park.

Our “driver”/captain took us on a bumpy thirty minute ride across the bay.  Just before dropping us off on a gravel beach, sea otters were spotted.

We were scheduled to be picked up by a different water taxi five hours later.
Armed with our bear bells and my bear spray, we started off into the dense, wet forest. The Glacier Spit trail was actually very well-constructed , and for the first couple of miles, we followed a young couple who called out, “hey bear, yo bear,” every five seconds. Then we hiked a side trail to a hand tram that crossed a river gorge. This was my first experience with a hand tram, and I must say that Julia was very trusting.

I managed to get her back again, so we backtracked to the main trail and continued hiking. After another mile we saw several people standing close together off the trail in the brush and taking photos. As we approached, a young man told us that a black bear was ten feet off the trail just five seconds earlier. I looked to where he pointed, but the bear had clearly taken off and was no longer visible. Only slightly disappointed, we hiked on to our destination. Grewink Glacier Lake.

The lake and glacier were spectacular.

The photos don’t adequately capture the intense blue of the icebergs. I’ve never seen anything like it. Also, we experienced calving: when a big chunk breaks off an iceberg creating two icebergs. The sound when that happens is like an explosion and startling.

After spending over an hour at the lake, we hiked a couple more miles back to our pickup point at the Saddle Trailhead. We highly recommend hiking at this state park.