Abalone Cook-Off 2017

With memories of our 2008 Abalone Cook-Off, in June we bought tickets for the 2017 event (it sells out early), and four months later, October 5, we headed south.  Last time we drove the entire way in one day, down I-5 to Willits and across the coast range on an impossibly curvy road in the dark, in rain, arriving at our motel about 9 p.m., exhausted.  This time planning on two days, we cut off at Grants Pass to Crescent City and contined south on 101.  Near Orick, we found a few bull elk sparring just off the highway.

They didn't seem serious─they ignored us and the few others who stopped to rubber-neck; we managed to capture a few decent shots.  It was getting late and we had not made reservations, so we stopped at the only motel left in Orick, a community of about 350 spread along 101.

The Palm, right out of the 50s (and pretty much still there), according to their vintage sign, featured dial phones and color tv.  The people were friendly, the food good (the restaurant closed at 8).  The indoor pool was empty ("could not keep up with the leaks").  The tv received only a couple of channels.  The poster on the wall was right out of the 30s.  No palm trees.

The next morning we drove back to see what the elk were doing.  They had moved down the road a bit, seemed more subdued, but still ignored us.

We left 101 to drive the "Avenue of the Giants," 31 miles of narrow twisting road in the redwoods.  We were not in a hurry, we stopped to explore.

According to one reader board, early settlers called the burnt-out center of redwood trees "goose pens."

Most of the major stops we have visited before but they are still impressive and we stopped again.

We walked the Founders' Grove loop, a half-mile trail with the Founders' Tree at the near end and the fallen Dyerville Giant at the other.

This trip, for no particular reason, we paid attention to burls: their size and shapes were fascinating.

We drove into the Women's Clubs grove, where once we had driven with Mother on a track barely wide enough for the rented RV.  It seemed tight even for the Veloster.

Late fall and winter is the best time to visit the redwoods: traffic is light, visitors are unhurried, the trails are almost deserted.

South of the Redwoods, 12 miles north of Fort Bragg, we stumbled onto the Pacific Star winery, perched at the end of a promontory thrusting into the Pacific, waiting for the fault discovered in 2006 (named the Pacific Star fault) to drop it into the water below.  Tastings cost $5 for six sips, but the site was so spectacular that we had to try the wine.  The proprietors were entertaining, the wine good.  We bought a bottle to open on Deb's birthday.

Drove to Fort Bragg in time to have dinner at Silver's at the Wharf, recommended by the hostess at our B&B.  Nice harbor view, good food.

Next morning, the Cook-Off.  We arrived early, but not as early as many, drinking wine or beer, wandering the grounds.

Cooking teams were still pounding abalone, heating pots, decorating booths.

By noon, bands were playing, judges lined up to sample, we were tasting: abalone chowder, fritters, sushi, ceviche; fried, baked, seared.

I liked best a fried, panko-covered thin-sliced bite with a bit of shredded lettuce; Deb liked a thick-cut bite sushi style on a cracker.  It was all good.

The next morning, we discovered a raccoon had left muddy paw prints all over the car.  The photo here does not capture the extent of the evidence.  We cleaned the windshield so we could see out before I thought to snap a photo.

We headed north, back through the redwoods, and discovered, down a steep slope, a car that had run off the road years before, sustaining a bit more damage than the coon had inflicted.

We found more elk, two of them cooling off in a bay while others milled about someone's yard and driveway.

At the "Trees of Mystery" tourist stop, we visited "The End of the Trail," a museum of Native American artifacts assembled largely by Marylee Thompson, who opened it in 1968.  It is the best collection I have seen outside of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC., and free.  I was particularly taken by a ceremonial copper shield and a button blanket.

We had reservations for lodging and supper in Eureka at Carter House, an upscale inn where we had stayed in 2008; we stayed in the main hotel again but the photo I took was of the more interesting Victorian mansion across the street, part of the inn complex.

The next day, we stopped to view the memorial lighthouse in Trinidad (the original is on a point miles out of town).  According to its website, the memorial is starting to slide down the slope toward the bay.  The civic club launched a GoFundMe page to raise $100,000 to move the memorial, but less than a tenth of that amount has been pledged.

That evening, Deb found the lovely Lighthouse B&B in Bandon, not a lighthouse but across the estuary from the Coquille River Lighthouse.

The B&B was nice, the hostess delightful, the breakfast stunning.  Among her other talents, Shirley feeds two gulls, off-spring of crippled birds she had rescued.  They sit on the second-floor railing, watch her through the sliding glass doors until she steps through to feed them.

On the water in the morning fog, just inside the bar, fishermen waited while waves broke much higher than the little boats.

We finished our leisurely breakfast, headed north, stopped briefly at the Devil's Churn, and took the cutoff from Waldport to home.

 

Elk River Canoe Trip, 2017

All my life, I've been interested in animals, the outdoors, and the North.  As a boy, under the influence of writers such as Ernest Thompson Seton and Vilhjalmur Stefansson, I dreamed of moving to the Arctic.  When I was about 14, my father's cousin, a Scout Master in Nutley, New Jersey, and I canoed and camped in upstate New York and in the Boundary waters north of Minnesota.  Later, at the University of Iowa, I canoed white water rivers in Wisconsin with a friend.  We talked about taking a summer to canoe across Canada from the Rockies to Hudson Bay but life and better judgement got in the way.  Then last year, I discovered a small ad in the back of The New Yorker for Canoe Arctic—guided canoeing in the Canadian Barrens.  I corresponded with Alex Hall, the guide, and settled on a trip, August 5 to 16, on the Elk River, which he claimed was his favorite of the trips he ran.

 Getting there was not easy.  August 2, Deb and I flew Portland-Vancouver-Edmonton, laid over to the next day, then took a single engine plane 800 miles to Fort Smith, and the southern edge of the Northwest Territories, where we had arranged to stay at the Whooping Crane B&B for the two nights before the start of our canoe trip.

Near Ft. Smith, we toured the Salt Plains in Wood Buffalo National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

We found buffalo and grizzly tracks.

The air was hazy with smoke,

but some two hundred yards across the flats, sandhill cranes marched back and forth as they fed.

In Ft. Smith, we visited the Northern Life Museum, filled with artifacts from the region, and Canus, the rescued whooping crane largely responsible for the re-establishment of the species.

Deb hiked down to Slave River at the edge of town to see the White Pelicans that hang out at Rapids of the Drowned.  She took these photos.

In the morning, we drove to the airport and loaded up two floatplanes.

Alex was joined by his sons, Graham and Evan.

Eleven were on the trip, with five canoes, leaving little room inside the planes.

We flew about 250 miles from Ft. Smith to Damant Lake, the last big lake at the headwaters of the Elk River.  Our route, ten days on the river, is marked in red on the map.

The Barrens from the air: 220,000 square miles of tundra, swamp, lakes, and rivers stretching from Great Slave and Great Bear Lakes to Hudson Bay, north to the Arctic Ocean.

Elk River from the ground.

We unloaded the plane and set up camp for the night.  The next day we loaded the canoes and started paddling across the lake.

As we approached the far shore, someone spotted a Musk Ox on a hill, some 200 or 300 yards away.

As each canoe beached, the paddlers jumped out and tried to sneak up on him, some of them down on all fours, trying to hide behind scarce bushes, probably looking like wolves, the only animal a Musk Ox might fear.

I dug the Leica out of its dry sack and managed a couple of shots before the others chased him over the hill.

We paddled down river, running a few rapids, portaging any that looked difficult.

The portages (pronounced by the Canadians por-TAHGE) involved carrying packs, food boxes, and canoes

up to half a mile over rocks, bushes, sand, bogs, and genereally bad footing—there were no trails—several times each portage to move all the gear.  It was more than exhausting.

Each morning, we ate breakfast at 8—Alex's rule (he was quite punctual), either instant oatmeal or granola with powdered milk, then on the river about 9.  Lunch was canned fish or peanut butter and jam on hardtack—rye crackers.  We stopped about 4, set up camp, ate supper at 7 of freeze-dried soup and freeze-dried stew.

Deb and Tasha on the river.  Deb fished the river, hooked a nice one but it got away.  Here she's estimating how big it was.

Smoke obscured the sky every day but it made for interesting sunsets, which lingered late into the evening.

We hiked up to long ridges of sand and gravel—eskers—a distinctive feature of the Barrens.  Eskers are deposits from rivers that flowed under glaciers (up to two miles thick) that covered the land.  When the glaciers receded some 10,000 years ago, the deposits remained.

Deb fished a lake by one esker.

Land near eskers form a moonscape of sand and rock.

For centuries, herds of Barren Ground caribou migrated seasonally from the tundra to the taiga across this land.  In 2011, a survey estimated that the Beverly herd, which traveled where we canoed, numbered 124,000.  Today, only bones remain.  The other Barren Ground herds have decreased as well.

Relics from the people who followed the caribou remain, and when Alex finds any, he hides them to show his clients.

The land is still rich in plants, small animals, and birds.  Fireweed,

sand flower,

and mushroom.

Ptarmigan.

The ground squirrel was not shy at all.

After ten days on the river, the planes returned to take us back to Ft. Smith.

We were ready.