Travel Blog

Ok, I think just about everyone knows about salmon spawning, and how they swim upstream, yadda, yadda, yadda. What I, as a land-locked Easterner, was never told was that they don't get out of the ordeal alive. In fact, their journey takes them so far from salt water into fresh that they start to rot on the way upstream. And let me tell ya, by the time they make it to Skagway, they're not looking real good. But it's really interesting to watch them swimming upstream, especially since said stream runs right through this little town. What I heard is not so nice is the smell of rotting fish that we can expect soon.


When they get in the shallows you can see them poking out of the water:


With the fish run come the bears. There's a little place called Dyea about 7 miles from Skagway where you'll almost guaranteed to see bears daily right now. Phil and I couldn't sleep one morning, so we drove out before work. We scoped the place out for awhile, not seeing anything, but enjoying the quiet anyway. We were about to give up and get back to town when, driving around a corner, something on my left moved. We startled a mommy bear and her two cubs, so much so that the mom reared up on her hind legs to get a better look at us, and then she got her babies out of there. And quickly. It all happened too fast for me to get a picture. We're going to go back some evening when they're actually fishing. A co-worker said the mom is teaching her cubs how to fish, and it's really a sight to behold. But we did get up close and personal with an eagle on our drive back to town.


"He's looking right at me Ray":


But you don't have to go 7 miles for the bear. Since the fish are swimming right through town, the bears are here too. Phil and I got this picture walking to work one morning:

Not much else to report. The season is winding down, and the sales are starting in earnest. I like it here, but I'm glad it's almost time to go. But we decided we'll be back for another season in 2008, so that says a lot about how cool it is in Skagway.
I'll leave you with this pic taken at dawn the morning we couldn't sleep. We were up before the cruise ships we in, and I like how ghostly the scene was.