Every weekend the question arises: What are we going to do? Scott and I take turns picking adventures, except when we both want the same adventure. It works out.
Up in Chatanika there is a very large, dinosaurlike gold dredge and Scott's been doing a drawing of it for some time. It takes a long time to draw this thing because it's so humongous. Not as large as the Queen Mary but much larger than a breadbox.
The dredge is responsible for creating acres and acres of rocks. It looks like a house boat floating in a narrow pond, with a brontosaurus head sticking out a hundred feet on one side and a boom with a track on it sticking about fifty feet out on the other side. The track had giant iron buckets on it all the way around. As the track pulled the line of buckets along, they would dig up giant chunks of earth and then dump them into the innards of the house part of the dredge. Inside, the soil was sorted and flushed and eventually all the gold-bearing sludge was gathered inside, while the rest, the rocks, was spit out the brontosaurus head.
The dredge was a gold mining factory, when you got right down to it. What was leftover was hills and hills of rocks. All kinds of rocks. Big rocks, little rocks, shiny rocks, black rocks, white rocks, stripey rocks, polka-dot rocks, fat rocks, skinny rocks. You name it, it’s there.
One of these days the government will discover the dredge area and create Lots o' Rocks National Park.
As it dug its way through the landscape the dredge created ponds, too. And they've filled in with ducks and beaver and fish and all the pond stuff that goes along with that. Reeds, water grass, ooky icky algae.
This week smoke has returned to the Fairbanks area. Unless the wind blows from the south, we are going to have smokey air. So far it isn't anywhere near as bad as it was two weeks ago, but it's not good, either.
Driving to Chatanika was kind of stupid, since we were driving toward the Boundary Fire and the smoke got thicker as we approached the Chatanika Lodge. Right away I knew I wasn't going to be hiking. A short walk to the dredge ponds was going to be it for asthmatic little ol’ me.
We ate cookies and ice cream at the lodge to fortify ourselves (no pie or desserts available, the surly waitress informed us, they've been too busy to make any, or so she said) and then walked across the road and up the rocky path to the dredge. The dredge hadn't burned, and we didn't see any blackened land around the lodge or the dredge. We were happy that it was still there.
Scott drew for a while, and I threw my fishing line into the pond just to exercise my right arm. If there were fish, they weren’t letting on. Or they were hiding from the huge noise of the helicopters periodically flying overhead to the helibase at the back of the dredge area. Trailing huge buckets behind them, these helicopters were scooping up water somewhere and dumping it on a nearby fire. Scott spent twenty minutes explaining the dredge operation to a firefighter who was on a break. This guy had come in from Idaho and told us that that helibase was shutting down tonight because the need wasn’t as great as it had been, and that they were flying back home tomorrow morning.
After a while the cookies wore off and we decided to go eat lunch. We trudged back to the lodge and dealt with the same surly waitress as before. She clearly didn’t want to be at work today. Luckily another waitress came on shift and relieved her (and us). The new waitress was one we’d had (and teased) before and we were “old friends.” I wouldn’t have dreamed of teasing the surly waitress, who knows what might have happened!
Fortified by sandwiches, we drove the truck to the back of the dredge area, right onto the helibase. Scott popped into his kayak and took off to paddle back toward the dredge and back, and I wandered around exercising my right arm again. Except that just when the exercising was best, one of the helicopters would arrive and I’d have to walk down the road a bit, just so as not to be accidentally squashed by the trailing bucket, should it drop by accident. Lest you think that I am a worry wart, this was a possibility put into words by the manager of the helibase. He was quite anxious about it. So when the helicopters came in for refueling, I’d move just to keep him happy.
Meanwhile I found the nicest little lagoon of all, and was just throwing my line in when I saw motion out on my right: four baby ducks checking me out. I continued to cast and the ducks paddled around by the shore, watching me. I stayed there for half an hour and the ducks never left, just kept coming close and then paddling back, poor motherless things! There is nothing, NOTHING cuter than baby ducks! And these were my own personal baby ducks. They weren’t afraid of me. I thought they’d paddle right around the corner and get away, but no, they decided to hang out with me and my arm exercises, aka fishing. A couple of times the line went pretty close to them due to a strong wind, but the little guys just flinched a little bit and stood their ground. Not only were they cute baby ducks, they were BRAVE baby ducks.
After a while Scott skimmed up and we watched a couple of helicopters land and take off. We were both disappointed when they didn’t scoop water out of the pond. Apparently they were just refueling.
After leaving Chatanika, we decided to go to the top of Pedro Dome and see what we could see. On the way there we saw fires burning on the hillsides (smoke, not flames) but it wasn’t until we reached the top that the Big Picture came into focus. No less than three hillsides on fire, but those fires were piddling compared to the two huge billowing (the size of cumulous clouds) fires just over the tops of the ridges of the hills toward Chatanika. Only the the direction of the wind was keeping us from being buried in smoke. It was frightful.
As I write this on Wednesday, it’s been blue and cloudy with only a touch of smoke in the Fairbanks area. Whenever the wind decides to change, that’s when it will get bad again. Let’s hope we get a nice south wind.
