Alaskan Vaca 2022 - Day 3, Part I, Boat Tour on the Chena River

July 14th - today we are scheduled to go on a river cruise down the Chena river and later have a bit of a train ride at a place outside of Fairbanks where there's an old Gold Dredge 8 gold mining operation. Sounds good to me!

I got up around 6:30 to pretty myself up and have a cup of coffee while I await the others to get to the same point as myself.

We needed to be to the boat joint by 8:15, or so the email said.  Truth be told, we could have arrived at 8:40 and would have been perfectly fine but the terrorists who own the place want EVERY.  SINGLE. PERSON. to spend as much as possible in their overpriced gift shop.  We did spend a lot of time in there as that was about the only thing to do!  Rob spotted a dude in an Iowa Hawkeye's coat but we didn't get to talk to him as we were never closer than about 6 people away.  Oh well...

Waiting to board the boat with the gift shop behind us.  I like how this picture gets a bit less blurry as your eyes move from left to right. lol

So they finally open the gates and we made our way onboard the vessel known as The Discovery III of Alaska.  We made our way to the third floor of a four level ship on the port side.  I had forgotten my fleece pullover at the house and it was 52 degrees with a slight breeze.  Had it not been so sunny and lovely out that morning, I probably would have bought a new sweatshirt at the store but I decided against it since I needed to be punished for my dalliance of the morning.  Glad I did!  The weather that day could not have been any more perfect!

We were on the Chena River from up by the Fairbanks Airport on Discovery Dr. down to the confluence of the The Chena and Tenana Rivers.  

Let's look at some pics and I'll pick up the story when it becomes relevant again. 
 

Some of the properties along the river were just beautiful!

So this was interesting...  before we got very far at all, the boat stops and they explain a little bit of life in and around Fairbanks.  They talked about how many pilots there are per capita in Alaska and how the small crafts are used as way of life.  Turns out the dude demonstrating the water take off today was our pilot Sam from the Arctic Circle tour on the previous day.

While these planes look ordinary "Buddy Holly's", they are not!  They are made of aluminum piping and canvas.  They need to be super light to take off in the short distances shown here and that's how some crazy ******** figured out how to do it!

I take pictures like this as it is fascinating to me as to how many square miles of Alaska are untouched!  I really wanted to move there but I think we should probably go back during the throes of winter to make the final decision...

These were cool too!  Plane docks instead of boat docks.

Caleb and I were out exploring our vessel when we saw this.  Dude was making his escape from the boat!  We didn't understand it at this point but I assumed that he figured into the story at a later point.

This is Trail Breaker Kennels.  This is currently owned by David Monson who was married to Susan Butcher, the famous lady from Cambridge Massachusetts.  Some of her stories with her lead dog, Granite, are legendary and you should seek them out to truly learn why dogs are better than cats... as if it weren't obvious.

Squint hard and you can see across the water that there are dogs pulling an ATV (that has no engine in it but still has the braking mechanisms) on the path around the pond.  The dogs in the foreground are all looking in that direction as they're disappointed that they were not selected for the run.

Here we are at the confluence of rivers.  The water do not mix well.

 

This, if I recall correctly is a Salmon trap.  The thing spins and is slanted one way to dump the trapped fish into a holding area.  This is the start of the little village that we visited but I'll be dipped if I can find it again on the fancy google maps...

We're docked and getting off of the boat at this point.

Reindeer.

This young lady gave us a tutorial on the stuff around us and acted as I would have when there was a spider on one one of the items she was teaching us about!  That is to say, freak out.

Another presentation if you can spot a lady up in the door of the raised cabin.  An interesting thing happened on the walk to this demonstration.  There was a dude with a Cyclones coat on.  As a family, we were talking about it when I noticed a lady walking parallel to us who had had a Hawkeyes visor on.  I pointed to her and said to the boys, "See, the rivalry lives everywhere!".  The lady smiled and asked if we were from Iowa.  "Yes, Pleasant Hill.".  She responded that she was from Reasnor, Iowa which is not very far East of us.  The dude in the Cyclone gear caught on to the conversation was from between Ames and Newton.  AND, another person who over heard the conversation walking near us was from the greater Des Moines area too!!!  Crazy! 

I took a picture of this as they grow local plants on tops of cabins as roofing as it rarely needs to be replaced.

Our ride.

The smoke house where they were smoking...  "things".  I didn't document what they were.

A bald eagle who came out to entertain us.

Once we got back on the boat, they started serving up these crackers with canned salmon and cream cheese on them.  It was FANTASTIC!!!  They also had free coffee and donuts earlier in the day.  By our final count, Caleb had two coffees, 5 donuts, and 21 salmon crackers!  He was trying to get back some of our ticket price...  or something.

  Me and the critters!  I believe Caleb has a mouthful of cracker and salmon dip!

That's the Pump House restaurant that will figure into the story a bit later.

And last, I only show this picture as the lighter colored stuff that you can see thru the breaks of wood on the dock are sections of the pipeline that they repurposed and can be inflated with air to raise the dock or deflated to submerse it.

After this, everyone but Caleb is a bit hungry so we hit up the Alaska Coffee Roasting Co. where Rob and I ordered some wood fired pizza's along with some coffee's and some yogurty/fruity nasty looking thing that mama chaos ordered.  I will admit, it looked nasty but tasted pretty good!

That's it for this section of today.  I'll try to be quicker with part two of today's adventures....