each day an adventure in alaska: hoonah...

the ferry stopover in hoonah was just an hour. i did snap quite a few pictures. would be fun to spend more time in these places. we booked it to the end of the main road and back. somewhere in there we lost val. you gotta keep an eye on that girl. you turn around and she's gone. i was a bit worried, i booked it back to the boat only to discover she was already there. thankfully. did stop long enough to purchase one mug. looked for bumper stickers of the various places on this trip but was mostly unsuccessful. dang.

this is back on the ferry after our stop in hoonah. the guy had just cleaned the bell...looks all pretty.

hoonah is on the same island as point adolphus. could pretty easily have paddled the other direction and gotten dropped at hoonah i suppose. the island is called chichagof island. alex and erica called it chicago-f and we all adopted that it seemed. hoonah boasts a population close to 1000. we only saw a small blip of hoonah.

hoonah made news sadly last august when a member of thier community, who many thought was unstable emotionally, shot and killed 2 of the four police that serve hoonah. family members of both officers witnessed the shooting. the loss of any police officer is always horribly sad. in a small community like this it's devastating. many communities across alaska have nothing but safety officers if that and unarmed. if something horrible happens they are on thier own until help can be flown in, weather permitting. my heart goes out to the community and the families of these officers who lost thier lives. that was the mug i purchased in town. the proceeds go to the hoonah police dept.

as we left hoonah we spied a humpback whale. as the ferry headed to gustavus we could see point adolphus in the distance and we could see several blows from the whales in the area.

the dive...

i have officially eaten 3 hoho's today. have eaten crap today. did have a lovely spaghetti dinner with salad from the garden, which is always nice. my neighbor brought over some tomato's from his greenhouse. nummy. some of my lettuce is forming cute little heads. love when food you grow is actually edible.

this is a barge being offloaded it appears. barges are how things get transported in alaska and in many parts of the world i'm sure. i remember watching barge after barge pass through in front of my place in ketchikan. they are huge. you can see the large trucks stacked up on top of the containers. kinda gives you an idea of size. cars, trucks, boats would be sitting up top. these are hauled with a few tugs as support. occasionally, a container will simply fall off and be lost. it's not like there are a bunch of people out there watching the containers.

a gentlemen is using some of the lost containers and thier contents to study ocean currents. when we stayed out on kayak island we found many things from various containers that have dropped off over the years. one was filled ith small plastic tub toys, another wtih sporting equipment. we found 7 plastic toys. this is what this professor type started to study in relation to currents and such. i dropped him a note to let him know how many of the toys we'd found.

fishing and canning are huge in hoonah. people have lived here since before history records were kept. ask for wild caught salmon when you go out to eat. apparently, a school did some sort of genetics study and found that many restaraunts claim to use pacific wild caught salmon when actuality they were atlantic farmed salmon. rip off.

liked the black and whites of the boats and such. you always want to return to old places with all your current camera gear.

these kayakers had been on our ferry from juneau. they are probably headed for point adolphus. though in truth that seemed awful quick for them to have packed those boats up, could be a day paddle. we called them kashi kayakers. when we ran into them in the cafe on board the big ferry they were eating granola type stuff while we were eating bacon and eggs. we were thus all referred to as the bacon kayakers for the rest of the trip. they tried to make me a kashi type kayaker out there, but i just can't get too excited about all that bland food.

we obviously missed another fourth of july parade. we missed three that day.

appears to be 2 churches in town. one was definitely russian, this one has the regular cross on top.

liked the totem in center town.

loved the dog and the poppies. i'm easy to please. tourists always seem to like to take pictures of my dogs when i'm out with them so here i was a tourist taking a picture of a dog. rio and blossom were photograhed at least a few times today. did a quick loop of the bog. overslept and was a bit lazy so i didn't get all the way to seward and i had debated. instead i just went to byron glacier trail. seems to bring in quite a few tourists. kept the dogs on leash til we got to the snow below the glacier. can't believe how far back that thing has receeded. used to just go right up to it after the walk, now it's hanging pretty high up.

more of hte poppies.

rio is snoring. think i wore her out. gotta wake early tomorrow so i can do a short walk with both dogs. tanya and i are going to do a bit of a willawa lakes trek. always a pretty hike. too long for rio though so she'll stay home.

just sights of hoonah

okay, it's a tourist shot. what can i say.

we ran into the little store and then were directed to the ace hardware for possible souveniers. didn't find anything there i just had to have. pretty much anything else you may need was there though.

sandra and val get jiggy in front of ace hardware. hehe.

looking back at our little ferry...

this native art was on the little store there.

this is a shot by val morris. she told me i could post a few of her pictures in my blog. she is leaving tomorrow for katmai to camp with the bears out there. i think thier tents are in an area protected by electric fences. i camped out at mcneil river for a week with bears and we didn't have an electric fence. hopefully, they all have a great trip and come away with loads of photo's. liked this picture of me out at mendenhall glacier.

local decor

i'm all happy with the recycling attempt here.

hopefully, i don't have doubles in here, though this one looks familiar.

several big cranes out there. always seems so odd in such a small community. lots of work to do though.

this is the other church that i saw. it has the russian orthodox cross on it.

fisherman above get thier nets ready for the next run. below is the wharf with the ace hardware store. thought it was a good use of space.

always love the crab/shrimp pots laying about.

makes for some cool shots

this apparatus is used to lift those big containers.

always seeking out new and different wildflowers.

greeted by this old boat.

also by loads of tourists. there was a big cruise ship in town. the passengers were shuttled back and forth. was surprised that these big boats land in a small community like hoonah. not sure what all they do to entertain them. they do have one of the longest zip lines out there. it's over 1 mile long. not for me. way too fast and high off the ground.

something we have discussed at work from time to time showed up in the paper the other day. some of these young kids are morbidly obese. i think you can't say that anymore, can't keep track of all the politically correct statements i'm supposed to be aware of. some parents enable these kids to become so huge, some may encourage it, some just have no idea how to reverse/prevent obesity as they themselves are obese. should these parents lose custody. is continuing to feed an obese kid the equal to not giving them their insulin? examples cited in the article were a 3 year old was 90#, years later at age 12 she was over 400 pounds. she had diabletes, cholesteral issues, blood pressure issues. another 14 year old weighed 550 pounds.

horrible sad. all these kids can't go into foster. seems that for kids like this some sort of family counseling should be insisted upon. i'm thinking this goes under more of an ignorance than actual abuse. we already don't have enough safe homes for the kids that really should be fostered. no way our system can handle kids of just generally ignorant parents. far too many of those out there...or just strange. many kids just have crap lives, many more have worse than just crap lives and go undetected.

my mom handled my added adolescent weight poorly. she had some weight issues herself after she had 7 kids in 10 years. she had no idea how to teach me to eat properly, she worked so hard to try and manage how much activity my life had. i think she was just so worried i'd be obese. that is how i look at the things my mom did to try and "help" me lose weight. she did it out of love, but was totally clueless. self esteems at that age are so easily damaged.

this looks to be one of the local cannaries. made have been made into more of a tourist attraction. we didn't head this way. probably would have had better gift shop.

more barge shots

the little boat with the orange roof is being used to ferry tourists from the big cruise ship. if i did that cruise again i'd take one of those smaller cruise ships. just a few hundred on board. they are usually the ones who come to these smaller communities. like i said, i was surprise to see the larger boat docked out in the bay.