Alaska '08 Day 41, Homer to Long Lake

Tue July 22, 2008

We headed out from Homer this morning, we want to make it to Long Lake on the Glenn Highway, maybe 40 miles beyond Anchorage towards GlennAllen. We need to make Glennallen/Copper Center to fish with a guide and some of my brothers co-workers on the 24th and 25th. From there we will head to Valdez for 3 days.

Jen wanted to stop at the "Town of Living Trees" chainsaw woodcarver in Soldotna. This guy had all sorts of carvings on the property. We took pictures of the kids with carved moose and bears, riding a giant king salmon and on a carved carousel. The carved salmon were really cool but a 2 foot one was about $100. The carved carousel was all Alaskan animals, caribou, moose, dall sheep, walrus.


The neighboring business was another carver that did carved log cabins. He carved bear heads onto the log ends and salmon onto the eves. His cabins are really amazing but I am sure it adds a lot to the price of a cabin for all the carving. A 10' row of running salmon was like $2000.


We stopped at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center at Girdwood on the way back to Anchorage. The center is an animal rehab and breeding center. They have some moose, black bear, brown bear, musk ox, caribou and elk. This is the closest we got to a brown bear or a moose, we walked right up to the moose.


Mike picked Long Lake as a place we could boondock on the way across the Glenn Highway to Glennallen. There is a lake right along the road with a pull off with an easy place to launch a canoe. We had a loon come in to our end of the lake at sundown and a kingfisher was grabbing small trout right in front of us. The lake was full of small trout and we tried casting for them from the canoe. Lots of small trout came up and took a look at the lure but we couldn't hook any.


312 miles today.

5769 miles so far.

- Jon