double-post

this is me, the queen of the world. have summited chilkoot pass. was standing on a camping platform in beautiful british columbia, canada.

(and was dry, warm, and cozy for the first time since i woke up that morning.)

check out our blog at our wedding website for more pics and a slightly different take on hiking the chilkoot.

gold! gold! gold!

the chilkoot trail was the most-traveled route into the yukon where gold was discovered at the end of the 19th century.

today, the chilkoot is "the longest museum in the world"--spanning 33 miles over the chilkoot pass at 4,000 feet.

greg & i just returned from hiking this great little trail. all along the way are old telegraph wires, old cable cars, rusted-out boat bodies, & cemeteries of opportunistic gold-hunters. the depression of the 1890s seems to have made enough people desperate enough that going to the yukon goldfields seemed like the best idea. whew.

the trail, as you can see from the map, crosses into british columbia--and the canadian mounties required that people carried, literally, a ton of supplies into canada. so sometimes people made up to 50 trips over the pass--which, by the way, was covered in snow last week. they were crazy.

so, now, the trees have finally recovered from being absolutely destroyed--the land was stripped so that the goldrushers (also called stampeders) could build boats and head down the headwaters of the yukon on the other side of the pass.

pictures greg took'll come later. we had a good time, even though we had to buddy up with 3 other people. and now we own a tent. funny.

4th of july in juneau (redux)

fireworks in juneau, from the stoop of our apartment!

4th of july in juneau

during the gold rush days, miners had 2 days off a year--Christmas & the 4th of July.

apparently, the legacy continues. 4th of july is supposed to be a big deal up here. big. my soon-to-be-boss tries to leave town.

a parade (with a now-famous "bong hits for jesus" banner flying, it is rumored), fireworks (even though it doesn't quite get dark yet...), and kids' games (this year they dug for chocolate pudding in cupcakes to learn about drilling for oil. gotta love natural resource extraction!).

should be a blast...i'll let you know how it goes!

false call

okay, so my reporter fiance got the facts wrong: in anchorage, smoking in bars ended the other night. here in juneau, we happy beer-drinkers will have to wait until jan. 1, 2008, to be pleasantly smoke-free.

in other news, ate a small peanut butter & banana picnic out on douglas island today. yummy & beautiful all in one! douglas, alaska, just across the bridge from juneau, used to be the biggest city in southeast. after the gold rush ended, it dropped in population & is just a little town on douglas island now. i think we'll move there soon.