Africa

It's been about two and a half years since I've set foot in Africa. I think about it every month. Some months I think about it every week. And some weeks I think about it every day. There is no place I've been in the last four plus years I've been writing this blog that calls to me the way Africa does. Heck, there's really no place I've traveled ever that makes me long to go back the way I need to go back to Africa. Every time I get an email from South African Airways or see a post on Twitter about the Dark Continent, I want to be there.

Now, I'm not talking about the whole continent here. I'm talking about sub-Saharan Africa. I'm talking about the bush, the savanna, the rivers and the open sky. I'm talking about wide open spaces with no sign of anything man-made and pitch black nights where you can hear otherworldly noises and see the Southern Cross in the sky. I'm talking about places where there are fewer men than animals by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And I don't mean squirrels or chipmunks or tiny animals. I mean massive mammals that are free and wild and dangerous and a little scary sometimes or maybe all of the time. I miss all of that.

I miss watching elephants eat and interact like families. I miss searching for crocodiles on the banks of rivers. I want to finish watching lions hunt their prey. I miss hippos. I don't necessarily want to be on a river with a pod of hippos in a small boat but I do miss hippos. I want to see more than I've seen. I want rhinos and zebras and wildebeest by the tens of thousands and cheetahs and ostriches and flamingos as far as the eye can see and to lay eyes on an elusive leopard. This is what I have wanted for the last 30 months. The pull is absolutely irresistible. It sounds melodramatic but it's true and it's difficult to actually convey what that place did to me without seeming dramatic.

In August of 2015, we took a trip to southern Africa: a six night, four country journey to Victoria Falls and a bit west where Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana and Namibia come together at a point. We didn't know what to expect. We expected to see huge open grasslands and watering holes with acacia trees silhouetted against the horizon every so often like you see in The Lion King and nature shows. We expected to be soaked by the Smoke That Thunders in Victoria Falls National Park in Zimbabwe. We hoped to see a few animals and when we did we assumed they would be just all sort of hanging around looking at each other waiting for some kind of predator/prey circle of life action. We didn't get any of that exactly and we got so much more.

Next month, we are heading back. Not quite to the area around Victoria Falls this time. A little further north and east. To Kenya and Tanzania. If there's a stereotypical African safari environment, this is it. Kilimanjaro. Masai Mara. Lake Nakuru. Amboseli. Lake Manyara. Serengeti. Nogorongoro. Six days wasn't enough last time. I'm hoping 13 days will be enough this time. No pre-trip blog posts about wanting to be a zookeeper. I never want to set foot in a zoo again really. Not after last time. Africa is where I want to be. I'll have more stories to tell soon. I hope this keeps me going for another few years.

The Motor City

If you had told me three decades ago that there would come a day when I'd voluntarily make my way into Detroit, Michigan and want to go back there when I got home, I'd have said you were crazy. That's not (by the way) the first time I've written something like that in this blog in the last four plus years. For Detroit, that day came earlier this month. It still seems a little crazy.

In 1988, I was a sophomore at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, just about 45 minutes west of Detroit. And that city at that time was the last place on Earth that I ever thought I would want to go. I mean Detroit was legitimately scary back then. Murder capital of the USA. Just about all business having fled the city. Abandoned and ruined city blocks deep in the grip of a crack cocaine epidemic.  And if that wasn't enough to keep me away, I'd have to read in the newspaper each Halloween about Devil's Night, a Detroit tradition of setting abandoned houses on fire to see if the fire department could keep up. What kind of hell was this?

Now, I admit in the late 1980s that part of my perception of Michigan's largest city was due to my own bias as a teenager from suburban Connecticut. Heck, I was scared of going to New York back then. In the last 30 years, I've grown up a lot. So, as it turns out, has Detroit. Sure there has been a bankruptcy (Detroit's, not mine) and a 28 year jail term for a mayor that the citizens of Detroit elected and the tax base has a long way to go to allow the city to recover more, but it's no longer the scariest place in the United States, if it ever was outside my own head. I thought it might be time to go back.

Since I left Michigan in 1990, I've accumulated a pretty long list of sights I want to see in and around Detroit. This trip wasn't going to get at all that given the couple of days I was in town, so I focused on a part of Detroit's history that had its population in 1950 at more than 1.8 million people (it's less than 750,000 today): the automobile industry, the thing that made Detroit the Motor City. 


1949 Ford Coupe on display at the Ford Rouge Factory Tour.

Before we start jumping to conclusions about cars and Detroit, the automobile was not invented in the United States. Far from it. There were folks in Europe experimenting with steam powered vehicles to drive on roads as early as the eighteen-teens. When mankind started experimenting with gasoline fueled internal combustion engines as a practical solution to personal transportation, Europe continued to be in the lead. You might recognize some of the names like Diesel, Benz, Maybach, Renault and Daimler who were tinkering with the first wave of cars over in Germany and France.

When Americans starting building and selling cars towards the end of the nineteenth century, the first success was not in Michigan but in Springfield, Massachusetts. Charles and Frank Duryea built and road-tested the first automobile built in the United States in that city in 1893. But when we talk about the launch of the production automobile that would make the first cars available to a significant number of Americans, we have to look to Detroit.

How much car making was there going on in and around Detroit in the early days of the automobile industry? There were an estimated just shy of 100 automakers in Michigan in the year 1907. 100!!! Granted some were small shops that might have produced a single car and most of the names of these folks have disappeared into history but there were for sure some heavy hitters in Michigan in those early days who are recognizable today. Maybe some name-dropping is in order?

Some good stuff beyond these doors...

Ransom Olds made his first car in Lansing, Michigan in 1897. He moved his plant to Detroit in 1899 where the company cranked out hundreds of Oldsmobile Curved Dash cars. Two years after Olds built his first car, David Buick made his own in Detroit; six years later they would turn out 750, an impressive number for the time. About a decade later, Buick was out of the game but cars were still being produced by the company bearing his name but then owned by William Durant. In 1908, Durant founded General Motors with Buick as the flagship brand.

And then of course there was Henry Ford. Ford founded the Detroit Automobile Company the same year Olds arrived in Detroit. Two years later he moved on and formed the Henry Ford Company. A year later, he'd left that behind to his partners the Dodge Brothers who renamed the company the Cadillac Automobile Company. Ford reappeared with the Ford Motor Company which survives to this day. Enough familiar names in there for you? Good!

Assembling a list of automobile-related sites to visit in and around Detroit requires a lot of editing. There are that many to see if you really wanted to. We narrowed our list down to four: The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn; the giant Uniroyal Tire in Allen Park; the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant at the corner of Piquette and Beaubien in Detroit; and the Diego Rivera Detroit Industry Frescoes at the Detroit Institute of the Arts downtown. We thought this list would form a good overview and for sure all four are easily visited in a single day. The jewel of this bunch by far is the Piquette Avenue Plant. I really want to focus on that site and ignore most of the rest.

The first cars built by Henry Ford as the Ford Motor Company, including the Model A, were assembled in a rented property in Detroit. When Ford finally had enough money to buy his own factory, he built the Piquette Avenue Plant, a brick warehouse with wooden interior columns, floors and roof. It became the first serious manufacturing plant for Ford and also saw him create some of his most notable early cars, including the famous Model T.

What's so famous (or great) about the Model T? Well, it was only the car that changed everything about the car industry. It was a 22 horsepower, four cylinder, 40 mile-an-hour-maximum wonder that was the first affordable car that was bought by pretty much everyone. And I do mean pretty much everyone. It was so popular that in 1918 half of all the cars on the roads in the United States were Model Ts. There were over 15 million of these things built and sold for customers all over the country. It was the best selling car of all time almost as soon as it started selling and it didn't give up that title until 1972, when it was passed by the Volkswagen Beetle.

Ford's company operated out of the Piquette Avenue Plant from 1904 until 1910. He produced a total of eight different models (the "alphabet" Models B, C, F, K, N, R, S and T) in the factory with a total of 40,000 units made. When Ford moved out of the building in 1910, Studebaker moved in until 1933 to use it to continue to crank out automobiles, followed by 3M who used it for something else. The current owner, a private non-profit who runs the museum in the space, purchased the building in 2000 and has been fixing it up ever since. And yes, they are still in process. While the building's watertight now so the cars inside aren't at risk from water damage, most of the spaces are still unheated. That means on a winter's day in Detroit, it might be a tad chilly inside. I could feel my toes getting cold halfway through the 90 minute tour and our guide, Tom, kept his gloves on for the entire duration. Tom knows better than me.

Model T. Model T. Model T. Well...you get the point.

The tour of the Piquette Avenue Plant begins on the second floor and ends on the third (and top) floor. You don't have to take a tour; you can just walk around on your own if you want. But for the full history lesson, especially if you are a casual admirer of vintage cars like me and not a full blown Ford enthusiast, I'd highly recommend tagging along with a guide. The tour begins and ends, appropriately enough, with the Model T. After checking out the restored office of Henry Ford himself and the across the way office of Edward "Spider" Huff, the talk for tourists begins gathered around a fully intact and gorgeously original red Model T.  As a quick aside, Huff was sort of Ford's chief innovation officer; he's credited with inventing, among other things, the hand crank you see on all sorts of old cars in movies that allowed Ford's cars to start without a battery if necessary, provided you could crank the wheel at the front of the engine hard enough.

If you make it through the whole place, you'll end up at the north end of the factory on the top floor outside a recreated workshop where the Model T was developed. You remember I mentioned earlier that there were a good number of startup car companies in the first decades of the 20th century around Detroit? Well, things were so competitive that defection to other companies (and theft of trade secrets along with them) was so frequent that Ford decided he'd develop the Model T in secret, allowing just seven employees to know what he was up to on the third floor of the building.

In between the first car and the secret workshop, you'll see plenty of Model Ts. There are 17 of them in the last two third floor rooms of the museum alone and those are not the only ones in the place. There are plenty more on the second floor, including one you can touch (don't you always want to touch stuff in museums?) and climb into. And the more you see, the more you will learn, especially if you get a guide as enthusiastic and knowledgeable as Tom.

And let me say here also the Model T you can climb into was not meant to be climbed into by 200 (OK...maybe 210) pound men; the whole car dipped noticeably when I stepped onto the runner at the side of the car.

Model T? Or snowmobile?

Since I wrote down some of what I learned, let me share a bit.

The first Model T had a retail price of $800 (that's about $24,000 today) but that didn't include the roof, windshield, headlights or a speedometer; all those things were extras. Sound crazy? It wasn't so much, necessarily. Most people buying these things back then had no desire to take them out in the rain or at night, so things like roofs and headlights (which had to be manually lit with a match!!) weren't necessarily essential. And speedometers? Well, from the video that we watched at the beginning of the tour (and available on Youtube), it didn't seem to me that most roads were in good enough shape in 1908 to go very fast at all. Who needs a speedometer when you are traveling everywhere in six inches of mud?

If you are still hung up on buying a car without a roof, windshield, headlights and speedometer, consider this: you could actually get the Model T with less than that and add your own accessories, wheels or entire body. The museum has a few of these, including a Model T re-cast as a delivery van and one retrofitted to be one of the world's snowmobiles. Ford realized there was a demand for the Model T chassis without the body which was effectively just a horse drawn carriage on a motor so he branched out and let people buy just the stuff that made the car go and left it up to them to top it off with what they wanted.

We often think of early cars as being black in color and indeed there's a quote something to the effect of "you can get the Model T in whatever color you want as long as it's black" that's attributed to Henry Ford. I'm paraphrasing not because I'm too lazy to look it up on the internet but because nobody knows if Ford actually uttered those words. But the first Model Ts were not black. They were only produced mostly in black once the assembly line was adopted by Ford in his later Highland Park plant, the one after the Piquette Avenue Plant. At Piquette, the first 6,000 were produced in red, just like the first one you gather around in the museum. After that, he made 6,000 in green. And the early ones came with white tires, because carbon (which adds durability to rubber and makes it black) hadn't been added to that product yet.

The Model B at the Piquette Avenue Plant. Not too many of these around.

Now, if you went to the Piquette Avenue Plant in November of last year, you'd see most of the Model Ts in the place today as well as some other Ford cars and some by Studebaker and some other manufacturers you've likely never heard of. But go today, and you'll see every model of Ford produced in the Plant and there are pristine examples of each model to see and examine.

The reason why there is more to see now than a couple of months ago? Larry Porter.

Larry Porter was a Ford dealer who in his spare time collected early Fords. He was so committed to that task that he made it his mission to buy one of each of model of Ford car, up to a certain point. I'm not sure when he stopped but it's a pretty good bet he doesn't have every model of Escort ever produced. He at least got beyond 1910 when Ford moved out of the Piquette Avenue building which is sort of the point here.

Upon his death, a trust was formed which included Porter's car collection. With the Piquette Avenue Plant building finally fixed up to the point that the trust would allow his early model cars to be displayed in the building, some of them are now on view for the world to see in the museum. There are cars of varying levels of condition in the building. Porter's are all absolutely gorgeous. They are a real treat to see. I also think there's something beautiful about the symbolism of machines being returned to their place of manufacture over 100 years after they were created.

How special is this collection? There are some really rare vehicles in it. Porter owned one of 40 Model F cars and one of just 28 known Model K cars still around. 68 total known remaining of these two models and this guy had one of each. The Model K is especially interesting because that car was built as a super high end luxury vehicle based on the demands of Ford's stockholders. No crappy $800 Model Ts for those folks. They wanted to spend some real cash on their cars so Ford cranked out the six cylinder, 60 mph maximum K, which retailed for $2,500; that's $75,000 in today's dollars!! Check out the trim and the horns and lights on the K; they are all works of art on what is in total a work of art.

The Model K at the Piquette Avenue Plant. Not too many of these around either.

Detail view of the Model K. The horn is literally a miniature brass instrument.

One of 40 or 28 not special enough for you? Porter also owned a Model B. There are just six of these known in existence today and this is the only place on Earth accessible to the public to see one. The Porter collection instantly elevated this museum from a really cool place for Ford nuts to a world class museum. The museum had planned to announce the acquisition in April but word obviously leaked out because one of the guys on our tour came specifically to see them. Now the dozen or so people reading this blog know too. I am in no way a cars guy (I think I mentioned that before on this blog) but I appreciated the quality of these cars as works of art. They are nothing short of spectacular and the details are certainly worth spending some time poring over. Just dress warmly in winter, please. And keep in mind the commitment here is (right now) just for five years.

Eventually Ford's operation got too big for Piquette Avenue. He needed a new factory that would allow him to copy Ransom Olds' idea of making vehicles on an assembly line. So he moved his Model T manufacturing business out to Highland Park three miles or so north (Highland Park is a city entirely within the footprint of Detroit) and left behind the history that he'd created in that location. Now, you can do what I did and go back there and see (thanks to Larry Porter) the entire legacy that he and his third car company created from 1904 to 1910. Those were some pretty cool years.

The assembly line thing really worked by the way. Once he got that cranked up, his workers (who were paid an astronomical $5 per day) could put together a Model T from start to finish in 93 minutes.

The Model T. With steering wheel on the left.

A couple of final notes. Check out the pictures above of the Models B and K. Each one has the steering wheel on the right side of the car. It was located there because the biggest danger a car faced on most roads back in the first decade of the 20th century was running into a ditch at the side of the road. So they put the driver on that side to make sure you stood the best chance of staying out of the ditch. The Model T's steering wheel is on the left, which of course is where our steering wheel is today. Ford wasn't the first one to do this but the Model T was the first car where the wheel on the left stuck. So we owe which side of the car we drive on today to the Model T whether we know it or not.

Finally, I mentioned our Motor City itinerary included four stops. You can add many many more sites to your own list. Indeed there's a list of about 20 or so nearby car-related locations on a list inside the Piquette Plant. For my part, I'd skip the Henry Ford Museum and the associated Rouge Factory Tour and just spend as much time as possible at the Piquette Avenue Plant. We got way more out of this place than we could have possibly hoped. Spend a lot of time checking out the details on these cars and take lots of pictures.

I do also think it's worth stopping by the Detroit Institute of the Arts to check out the Rivera Court, which holds a series of murals painted by Mexican artist Diego Rivera right in the space between 1932 and 1933. The murals are about industry in general in Michigan but the main images that take up most of the space are specifically about Henry Ford's operations. It's interesting to see what a social commentary these works of art are after spending a few hours ogling some old Fords. The top photograph in this post shows part of the assembly of a Ford V-8 model car and is just a sample of what you can see. Go find the rest for yourself. But don't skip the Piquette Avenue Plant to do so.

There's still a ton I want to do and see in Detroit. Gotta go back here sometime soon. And it doesn't sound that crazy anymore.

Cold As Ice

Towards the end of each trip I take, there comes an inevitable "taking stock" moment, an in-process assessment of how great the current trip has been and how I might best remember my experiences. Usually that moment includes a decision about how many blog posts each vacation is worth and a mental sequencing of those blog posts. After the last landing on our Alaska cruise, and knowing that I'd be for sure writing a post about my pending visit to Denali National Park, I decided Alaska would get three blog posts and that would be it. Not very many for a trip of over a week in length but it would be what it was. 

The very next day, we sailed (using that term loosely) past the Hubbard Glacier. Now there's a fourth (and last) Alaska post.

It feels weird to be writing what I'm about to write but in a way, I was sort of no stranger to glaciers by the time I reached Hubbard. In December of 2013, I spent the better part of an Icelandic winter day walking on one. Then the day before I laid eyes on Hubbard, I'd spent all too short a time gazing at the Mendenhall Glacier just north of Alaska's capital of Juneau. But what I saw from the boat on that Thursday early morning blew Iceland and Mendenhall away. By a lot.

I remember two things pretty vividly from my 2013 glacier walk. First, our guide describing the glaciers as entities in motion and not just solid blocks of ice sitting in one location. Second, the incredibly beautiful and otherworldly blue color of the ice. If you are a Game of Thrones fan, think the color of blue on the white walkers. It's a perfect match to the hues in a glacier. Visiting Hubbard reinforced what I remember from December 2013 so clearly.

Small icebergs dotting the sea on the approach to the Hubbard Glacier.

I awoke on Thursday morning, August 17 in my cruise ship bed with great anticipation. Finally there was something to see from the boat itself. If my first ocean cruise experience taught me anything, it was that your vacation sort of gets put on hold once you get back on the ship. That day of sailing was about to be different, at least for a few hours. There's no way I could have had the same experience on land that I was about to see from the sea.

Stepping out onto the balcony of our room that morning was cold but not overly so. Not like I needed a heavy jacket or anything. But scattered about the sea were a few icebergs. Yes, icebergs! The water was so cold that chunks of ice were not melting in the water. I'm not talking Titanic sinkers or anything here but looking down at that milky green salt water I could imagine it was close to freezing. As we headed further and further north, we picked up more and more icebergs around us.

Perhaps a little background about glaciers is in order? These things are essentially giant slow-moving freshwater frozen rivers that flow downhill based on their own weight. Along the way they erode the surface of the land by picking up chunks of rocks and flowing those down to wherever the glacier happens to end. I could tell some of the icebergs around our boat had broken off from Hubbard because I could see pretty good sized chunks of rock embedded in some of them. Yep, I was on a boat watching rocks on top of ice floating by. Pretty wild!

The Hubbard Glacier is approximately 76 miles long from beginning to end. If that seems like a long way, it is but not so much really by glacier standards. Glaciers cover approximately 10% of the Earth's land and the world's largest glacier, Lambert Glacier in Antarctica, is 60 miles wide and 270 miles long. Having just poo-pooed the size of Hubbard, it still takes the ice in the glacier approximately 400 years to travel the full 76 miles. That meant that the ice we saw at the edge of the glacier had been added to the flow in the second decade of the 1600s.

Close up look at the face of Hubbard Glacier.

While I'm speculating about just how gorgeous the entire 76 miles of the Hubbard Glacier might be, the face of the glacier where the ice met the sea was spectacularly beautiful. Glaciers are blue for two reasons: (1) they lack air bubbles which generally causes ice to look white and (2) water molecules absorb colors of the spectrum other than blue much more efficiently that they absorb blue. This is the same reason why large bodies of water often appear to be a bluish color.

The variations of blue in the face of Hubbard are amazing and you can see the layers of ice that have formed on top of one another and the debris the glacier has carried with it throughout the four centuries it has flowed to the ocean. Look at the pure white snow on the mountains in the distance to understand just how blue the palest of pale blues are. It also has these incredible vertical cracks splitting the horizontal layers. The amount of pressure the ice must have been under to make those kinds of cracks must be immense.

When we finally got as close as we could get, we were staring at a wall of ice probably (and I'm guessing here because there was nothing really to give it any sort of scale) about 50 feet high. In some spots it was barely clinging on to itself where the horizontal strata clearly showed some signs that it looked to be collapsing into the ocean.

A portion of the glacier collapsing into the sea.

And indeed sitting and watching that's exactly what happened. In the hour or so we sat on the boat close to the glacier, piece after piece fell into the ocean to be reclaimed by the sea and let more of the ice behind get ready to do the same. If you had asked me what I expected the face of a glacier to look like, I would have thought it tapered into the land or sea at its end. The view of pieces breaking off a sheer wall was unexpected but likely way more impressive than an edge tapering to nothing and slowly drip-melting into the sea.

This sounds stupid but standing and watching, it was obvious the glacier was moving. Not so much by the fact that some of it was actually collapsing into the water but by the sounds you could hear. Glacier watching is very much an aural experience as well as a visual one. The sounds we were hearing were described as "white thunder": creaking, squeaking sounds caused by the ice compressing itself and moving and cracking under its own weight before releasing the pressure and moving again. Between these creaking sounds, every so often there were sounds that I imagine are just what an avalanche sounds like: slowly building rushing sounds like a lot of fine powder is descending from a great height.

Admittedly, watching a glacier is not too exciting and staying out on our balcony and later on deck for a time that lasted maybe two and a half hours total I didn't see a whole lot happen. But it's not like I will ever see this much again in the future. I don't have too many cold weather destinations on my list and I certainly don't have a lot of boat rides planned in those places that get that cold. Spending a small portion of one morning in my life watching this was worth it. And a total unexpected surprise for a time when I expected my vacation to go back on hold. Watching this wall of blue ice and hearing it move and tear and splinter against the backdrop of Alaska's mountains was a good morning.

The Hubbard Glacier from afar with the cold cold sea in front and the massive mountains behind.

Totem Poles

A long time ago, Raven and his two slaves built a camp at the mouth of a river. Towards the end of the year, they went out fishing to stock up for the winter but could catch nothing to keep them fed through the cold months. One day a woman appeared to them out of the fog that had set in that day. Neither raven nor his slaves saw her approach. She knew they were hungry so she asked raven for his hat, which she then turned upside down and out of the fog in the hat drew some salmon. These were the first salmon ever created.

Raven took the woman back to his camp and married her and she produced salmon for him and his slaves every day. Eventually raven started to take his wife for granted and became critical of her. In a moment of anger one day, he argued with her and hit her and she fled from him. He followed and tried to grab her but each time he closed his arms they went right through her, like she was made of fog. She ran until she reached the water and then kept going into the sea where she disappeared and took the salmon with her.

There are variations of the story of fog woman up and down the coast of the Pacific Ocean in Canada and Alaska. In some versions, fog woman is a chief's daughter who grants raven the right to marry. The story explains the origin of the salmon that are a critical part of the diet for peoples who have lived in that area of the world. Every spring when the fog returns to the land from the ocean, it is fog woman returning along with the salmon who start making their way upstream to their traditional spawning grounds.

Fog woman with salmon. Raven sits above her; the two slaves are below. Totem Bight State Park, Ketchikan.

When I was a kid growing up in England, I played with toy cowboys and toy indians. I'm not placing any value judgment on that activity; I'm just stating it as a fact. Back in the 1970s in England, I was fascinated by America and that for sure included the old west. I loved watching western themed shows and movies on the limited television we could get back then. At some point I'm sure I couldn't get enough of cowboys and indians.

Among the sheriffs and braves and outlaws and chiefs in my toy collection, there was a totem pole, something I probably at that time assumed was placed in the middle of every native American camp back in the 1800s or whenever I imagined the battles between these two sides were happening. I am fairly positive that the toys I owned as a kid were intended to depict the native Americans that lived on the plains of the central United States, nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples who lived in tepees. I believe this because I know I owned a toy tepee for my toy indians (I promise that will be the last time I use that term) to stand outside and fight off the cowboys.

Sometimes it takes a while for you to erase the beliefs you held as a child. Over the past almost four decades I've lived in this country I've been to a number of former or current native American communities, mostly the pueblo cultures in the American southwest. Not once did I ever see a totem pole in any of the places I visited. I wasn't particularly looking for them but they for sure weren't there. They never existed. Not in that part of the country. My toys were wrong.

In the last 40 years, I didn't question the toys I played with as a child because I probably just wasn't thinking about whether totem poles were carved by the Sioux or the Zuni or the Iroquois or whomever else I supposed I was playing with back then. Now I have. It took a trip to Vancouver and Alaska to make me think of this again. The reason my toys were wrong is simple: the native Americans who carved totem poles weren't on the great plains or the deserts of the southwest or the forests of New England. They were in the Pacific northwest. And that's the only place you can find true totem poles in their original locations today or at any other time.

Salish Grandparents and Grandchildren Gateway, Stanley Park, Vancouver.

Among the First Nations peoples, the carving of totem poles was a practice limited to six native American groups: the Chinook, Coast Salish, Bella Coola, Haida, Tsimshian and Tlingit. The range covered by these peoples stretched from present day southern Oregon or maybe northern California in the south all the way north to just above the top of the Alaska panhandle. I've listed the tribes in order from south to north in this paragraph. 

These people didn't live in tepees like the toys I owned in England; they lived in long wooden communal houses called plank houses which held about 40-50 people or so, usually associated with a single clan. In the center of these houses was typically a fire pit around which the family would gather on cold nights. A village would be comprised of a number of these plank houses. Their lifestyles and living habits were shaped by the geography and climate where they lived. It was cold in winter which required sturdy dwellings that could be heated in winter. And cedar, a most durable wood building material, was plentiful for building these houses. 

In front of their plank houses, you would frequently find a totem pole. In some cases the house itself might have a totem pole integrated into the construction and maybe used to hold the roof of the house aloft or denote the entrance to the dwelling. Or sometimes the poles would be shared in between houses or erected in a village for a festival. 

I admit I am fascinated by totem poles, so a trip up the Canadian and Alaskan coast had to include a visit or two or three to see different types of poles in the area of the world that they were first invented. Before I set off for the beginning of our trip in Vancouver, Canada, I admired these things as works of art. On a basic level these poles are composed of graphically striking and brightly colored animal and human figures stacked on top of one another (not really stacked, but carved out of a single tree to resemble that). On a deeper level they must have some sort of symbology to them. I was determined to find out more by the time I disembarked from our boat at the end of our journey.

Seven totem poles at Brockton Point. Stanley Park, Vancouver.

Our totem pole journey started in Stanley Park, a large green space just to the northwest of downtown Vancouver. Towards the eastern tip of the park, known as Brockton Point, there is a collection of a dozen or so totem poles and gateways of various origins, or more accurately, carved in a few different styles. Totem poles don't last forever, so the poles in Stanley Park are not works from a hundred or more years ago but are instead either copies of earlier poles or original works in the style of a particular tribe. If you are staying in downtown Vancouver, Brockton point is a good 45 to 60 minute walk depending on where you are staying, but it's an easy flat stroll and totally worth the effort.

Most of the poles in this location have a plaque explaining its origin or style, what exactly is carved and the meaning of each different symbol or animal or figure. In reading each plaque and studying each totem pole, we started to notice similar images on more than one pole: ravens, eagles, thunderbirds, halibut, killer whales (or orca), bears, wolves, beavers and frogs. In addition to the birds, fish and mammals that are indigenous to the area, there are human figures: tribal chiefs; or symbols of men or women or children; or figures from mythology of the region like fog woman.

Each pole generally tells a story, whether it's of a particular tale with a plot like the story of raven and fog woman or the history of the family or individual who commissioned the pole or in whose honor it was carved and erected. Families were usually associated with particular animals and in some cases the members of the family believed they were descended from the wolf or the bear or the raven or some other creature. It would all be laid out in the totem pole.

Three totem poles at the Alaska Rainforest Sanctuary, Ketchikan. Spot the octopus, beaver and snow crab.

Stanley Park is a great place to start a journey to learn about all these symbols because there are a significant number of poles of different origins and functions together in one spot. There are modern and ancient poles. There are poles that were self supporting and those which held up part of a plank house. There are also special purpose poles, like a mortuary pole which held the remains of a great chief. You can appreciate the breadth of meaning of both the poles and the individual characters on each pole.

From Vancouver, you might want to head north to Ketchikan, Alaska (we did!) which is located on Revillagigedo Island several hundred miles to the north of Vancouver. A drive will take you about 25 hours or so. The best way to get there may be by boat or plane. When you arrive you will find an area which boasts more totem poles than any other spot in the world. 

Totem poles are seemingly everywhere around Ketchikan. Take your pick of wandering around downtown and looking at the few located in that area (including the totem pole from the page numbered 25 in the U.S. passport) or spending time at the Totem Heritage Center about a half a mile northeast of town or one of the couple of parks located on the Island dedicated to totem poles. There are buses running through Ketchikan and to the north and south so all these spots are accessible via public transportation for free (in the downtown area) or a couple of bucks each way (if you are headed further afield).

We opted to head north on the Silver Line bus for 40 minutes or so to Totem Bight State Park, a spot on the west coast of the Island with a walking trail and 14 poles of Haida or Tlingit origin or tradition as well as a replica of a Tlingit clan house or plank house, which gave us an opportunity to understand the places where the carvers and their families traditionally lived.

Tlingit clan house with a totem pole serving as the front entrance. The pole in the foreground shows a halibut and otter.

As a second major stop on a totem pole pilgrimage, Totem Bight was fantastic. The couple of days separation from Vancouver along with maybe a little reading on the subject picked up at the Legends of the Moon gift store in Stanley Park gave us a little time to process what we had learned from our first stop. We were able to spot eagles and orca and beavers pretty easily in the poles. We were even able to pick out fog woman in one of the poles, identifiable by the salmon she held in each hand.

So what do these things all mean? Well as you might expect, the different animals typically have multiple meanings. The eagle is a symbol of peace or friendship. The raven is a trickster capable of help or harm but is also a symbol of the creator. The orca or blackfish is a symbol of the sea and strength. The appearance of these creatures in totem poles either tells parts of a story or symbolize characteristics or origin stories of the families who commissioned them.

The walking loop at Totem Bight is a leisurely maybe hour long stroll, leaving enough time to study the poles, check out the clan house (entered through a hole in the front totem) and look out over the water and shoreline for maybe some bear or orca (we didn't see any). There are different types of imagery at Totem Bight from that we found at Stanley Park in Vancouver. We saw the devil fish (or octopus) in one of the poles and in another found a man wearing a brimmed hat, which was traditionally worn at occasions where stories were told. The more you see of these things, the more you can appreciate the depth of meaning and connections to the past.

One thing we didn't expect to see on our trip to Ketchikan was the actual carving of a totem pole, but here we were wrong. 

The first thing we did when we got to Ketchikan was head south to the Alaska Rainforest Sanctuary where we planned on spending a couple of hours trying to spot black bears and bald eagles fishing for salmon in the stream running through the property. In addition to getting some amazing looks at these animals and a family of river otters, we found the workshop of Wayne Hewson, a Tsimshian who has been carving totem poles for almost 20 years.

Admittedly, not a whole lot got done in the 15 minutes or so we watched Wayne work but you could get a sense of how much work goes into these things and just how big the single cedar trees they are working with are. There were clearly some non-traditional images in the pole he was working on the day we were there, including some very large mosquitoes which we had heard before we set foot in the state referred to tongue-in-cheek as the state bird of Alaska, which caused a good deal of concern to us about the size of these insects (we saw pretty much zero mosquitoes in our almost week in state).

If I was fascinated and curious about totem poles before I went on this trip, I remain more so now that I've scratched the surface just a little bit on what these carved poles mean and have meant to the people who carved them. What before to me were pretty striking works of art now have a depth of meaning that I didn't understand before setting foot in Stanley Park earlier last month.

I have been buying knick-knacks or tchotchkes or whatever you want to call them wherever I've been in this going on five year journey. Right behind three small alien figures (from Roswell, NM) and a model of Hohensalzburg Fortress (from, you guessed it, Salzburg, Austria) sits a very small totem pole with a raven figure sitting atop a beaver (the protector, by the way). Like all the other items on my desk that I've accumulated over the last 50 or so months, my tiny totem pole is a reminder of where I've been, specifically my time in Vancouver and Alaska. It is also a symbol of how travel has enriched my knowledge of our planet's history. 

Ketchikan was one of the two best days we spent on this trip (along with our full day in Denali National Park) and one of the big reasons for the fond memories of that day is our stops at the Alaska Rainforest Sanctuary and Totem Bight State Park learning about and deciphering totem poles. I can't imagine I'm setting foot in Alaska any time soon again. Don't get me wrong, it's on the list somewhere but there's a ton of stuff ahead of it including like three California trips. If I do ever get back there, Saxman Totem Village and the Totem Heritage Center in Ketchikan are way high up on my list.

Thunderbird, Stanley Park, Vancouver.

Alaskan Wildlife

If visiting Denali National Park was the primary objective of our Alaska trip (and it was!) then getting a quality look at a ton of wildlife both at Denali and elsewhere in the state was one of our primary secondary goals. Alaska has a collection of wild animals that is probably unrivalled by any other state in the union and we were determined to see as much as we could see in our time both on land and on the water while there.

To that end, we made two decisions prior to embarking on this trip. First, we made sure our focus at every stop we made on our trip up the coast from Vancouver, British Columbia to Seward, Alaska was to make animals the number one priority. So before we made landfall at Ketchikan, Icy Strait Point, Juneau and Skagway (in that order), we made sure we had some kind of wildlife viewing excursion planned and booked.

The second decision we made wasn't related to the destination, but how we might get better looks at, and photographs of, the animals we hoped we'd see. Quite simply here, we bought a new camera.

Two harbor seals along the Lynn Canal near Skagway, including one doing his best rock impression.

Since I started this blog in 2013, I've been photographing pretty much everything everywhere I've gone with an iTouch, iPad, iPhone or the old Blackberry Torch that I clung to for far too long like some really weird security blanket (it's still to this day my alarm clock at home). In other words, I've been working for the last four plus years with some pretty low horsepower cameras. For most posts I've written on this blog, this hasn't mattered. These portable devices are good enough in most circumstances for me to get by.

But I really felt the deficiency in the camera department when we visited Africa in August of 2015. The kinds of details I wanted to get in photographing the gorgeous wild animals we saw on that trip just wasn't possible with the hardware I brought along. We also saw briefly the power of using a real camera to get closeup views at animals a long way away when a family we were on safari with us showed us just how good their camera's zoom was. They got some incredible shots of a lion yawning that we could barely see with our naked eyes.

So with a second safari trip on the horizon (so excited!!!) and our Alaska trip immediately in front of us where we hoped to get great views of bear, moose, wolves, whales and all sorts of other stuff, we decided to spend a little money on a new camera. What we ended up with was the Nikon COOLPIX P900. I don't usually promote products through this blog but we think the results are pretty incredible. It made our experience in Alaska so much better by allowing us to see and photograph details of animals at a distance that we couldn't possibly make out without the camera. To that end, all the shots on this post were taken with our new camera. Enough about that for now.

The best look we got at a coastal brown bear in the Spasski Valley. Thanks to our driver, Buddy, for the spot.

If you thought you could see all the wildlife in Alaska in Denali National Park, you'd be wrong. In fact, we didn't see any significant wildlife (magpies don't count) outside of Denali that we saw inside Denali except for a single moose by the side of the road. And that was on the drive south from the Park to the Anchorage airport. There are two main reasons for this: (1) there's no ocean near Denali and there are some creatures that just can't live away from the sea and (2) Denali has no salmon, and there are some animals that rely on those fish returning to their spawning ground to survive.

If there was a quality wildlife sighting we got in profusion all the way up the Alaskan coast, it was the bald eagle. There are an estimated 70,000 of these birds in all of North America with 30,000 of them being in Alaska. Consider that these birds need to be near places well stocked with fish like the sea, rivers or lakes, and it's no surprise there are a ton of them along the Alaska coast. We saw so many, in fact, that by the time we got to our last port of Skagway we were almost ready to ignore them, move on and see something else. Spoiled, I know.

If there's one thing we were taught early and often about bald eagles on this trip by our wildlife guides, it was how to spot them. The universal instruction at each stop was look for "golf balls" in the trees. Remarkably, this worked. Find a small white speck in the tree that makes up the Alaskan rainforests and nine out of ten times it will be a bald eagle. Do the zoom thing on the camera on a white spot and it usually ended up being one of these birds.

Bald eagle in the Alaskan Rainforest Sanctuary in Ketchikan.

Bald eagles are territorial, meaning you will only see a pair in about every mile or so of coast, although based on what we saw a bit inland, territories either overlap or are just plain ignored when it comes to scavenging for salmon heading upstream somewhere. Eagle pairs mate for life and keep returning to the same nest year after year. They also manage to supplement the materials used to build those nests every time they come back. We were told by our guide that picked us up in Icy Strait Point that after a while these homes can get to weigh a lot, like over 1,500 pounds, and can even collapse from their own weight. We saw a few pretty large ones on our way up the coast and I'd believe they can get to be pretty heavy.

In addition to bald eagles all along the length of the coast, our two best wildlife spotting days were on a whale watching trip just outside of Juneau and a stroll in the Tongass National Forest just south of Ketchikan, although we did manage to see one coastal brown bear very quickly in the Spasski Valley and got a great look at a number of harbor seals in the Lynn Canal (which is not a canal at all; it's a fjord) near Skagway.

Our trip to watch whales near Juneau was not my first whale watching trip. I've done that as recently as last year in Hawaii and before that off the coasts of Iceland, California, Seattle and Boston. Whale watching is above all an exercise in patience. Be prepared most trips to see very little and wait a long time between sightings that can ultimately be disappointing. Every once in a while you may get lucky and see some splashing or a full body breach or a feeding frenzy (which quite honestly is awesome!) but if you are humpback watching, you will likely have to settle for some back arching and then some flukes every once in a while before a deep dive. If you are unlucky (like we were in Iceland), your whale watch will ultimately end up just being a ride on a boat.

Two whales coming up for air near Juneau.

We were not unlucky in our whale watching off of Juneau. In fact, we saw a ton of humpback whales in the couple of hours we were at sea. The humpbacks come to Alaskan waters in the summer to feed on the enormous schools of krill and herring that populate the ocean just off the coast during the summer months. They arrive from, of all places, Hawaii, having spent the winter months mating, giving birth and beginning to nurse their young calves.

The problem with Hawaii? There's absolutely nothing for these whales to eat. So they just can't stay down there for very long. As soon as their newborn kids are ready to make the 3,000 mile journey to the feeding grounds they set out for the long trip north. And yes, they do it without any food. Well, not the newborns; they suckle on their mother's milk during the trip. But the adults go without and simply live off their fat reserves that are built up during the prior summer's feeding off Alaska. Must be awful and nice at the same time. As much as I love food, I'd love to be able to live off my personal fat reserves some days instead of bothering to eat. And rest assured, I have fat reserves.

Most of the whale sightings we got in our couple of hours at sea were fairly typical humpback sightings. That is keeping an eye out for spray emanating from the water then watching around that spot for some more spray and maybe the tiny dorsal fins that the humpbacks sport (see the photograph above for the typical look). There were clearly a lot of whales in the waters along with our boat which was exciting. We got some great looks at some flukes when they decided to dive, like the picture below and saw groups of up to three whales together, which was pretty cool. Although as usual, you don't get to see much of the whale at all.

Humpbacks can get up to 50 feet in length, which on a cold rainy day at a good distance is difficult to perceive. Whales are the largest mammals (or animals for that matter) on the planet. See one of these creatures up close and you really get a sense for how huge these things really are. At the distance we were at that day, we didn't get a chance to appreciate that.

A great look at the top side of a humpback whale's fluke. These are the signature looks on most whale watches.

Most whale watching trips usually get you a look at some other species of marine fish or mammal and our excursion that day was no exception. When we were heading back to port we got an awesome look at some Steller sea lions lounging on a buoy. These sea lions are the largest variety in the world (apparently walrus do not qualify as sea lions) and got their name (which is not misspelled) from, Georg Wilhelm Steller, who was the first (white man) to describe them in 1741.

I'm guessing the seven animals crowed onto the buoy below are likely younger males who are not full sized. Either that or they are further away than I realized or on a much larger buoy than I perceived because they don't look larger than some of the sea lions I've seen in other parts of the world. Sea lions are a great bonus animal on a whale watching trip. I've seen other species on other trips but never the Stellers, which are apparently in near threatened status, which is troubling but probably not alarming since sea lions all look similar but also appear to be all over the place.

Steller sea lions crowded onto a buoy in the waters off Juneau.

As exciting as our looks at whales, coastal brown bears and eagles (I think the picture of the eagle along the Lynn Canal near Skagway at the top of this post is my favorite; I love the eye) were in our last three stops in Alaska, I think our favorite day was the few hours we spent at the Alaska Rainforest Sanctuary just south of Ketchikan on our first day ashore. The rainforest's signature residents are their black bears, which would be the only black bears we would see on this trip. We got some fantastic looks at these creatures on that day, along with some other mammals and birds (and of course more bald eagles).

The Sanctuary is privately owned and just 10 acres in size but running through their property is a river which is a salmon spawning run. That means the land attracts both bears and birds looking for some food during the time of the year that the salmon are heading upstream to their birthplaces. The property had an existing sawmill which is still in place (although no longer used for that purpose) and the folks that bought the property have installed some elevated wooden walkways to allow humans to wander (with an escort) around the place while keeping them separated from the bears, which is good. As cuddly as black bears look, I'm in no hurry to surprise one of them in the woods. 

Other than the couple of new walkways, the place has been left as to allow the wildlife to have freedom to roam wherever they please, including off property if they so desire. It's not a zoo and it is not fenced.

Black bear siting up after a feed on some fresh salmon. 

The Sanctuary offers two tours. We signed up for the Bear Country & Wildlife Expedition which totaled about a little more than two hours on site with about a 30 minute bus ride from downtown Ketchikan on each end. It was one of the best things we did on our Alaska vacation, including being in Denali National Park.

I think it's always good to keep your expectations low on wildlife viewing excursions, especially when dealing with solitary animals rather than herd animals. Bears are for sure solitary; you will not find a pack of bears roaming around the woods together unless it's a mother and a couple of cubs and even then three probably doesn't constitute a pack. It's difficult to say whether we got lucky on this tour or whether the kind of sightings we got occur every day but the bear viewing was fantastic. As soon as we showed up we caught a glimpse of a female bear catching a fish before retreating purposefully but quickly out of sight. Without a chance for even a quick picture.

Turns out there would be plenty more opportunities that morning. This bear was obviously hungry, because we watched her come back for two more salmon later in the day. The last of the three provided us probably the greatest pictures. Not only did she walk right below the edge of the elevated walkway (you can see the claws in pretty good detail in the photograph below), we also got to watch her pick up a salmon and take it into the woods and eat it about ten feet from us. That feast didn't yield a great picture because the trees were in the way, but it was an opportunity to watch a bear feeding in a way that you don't encounter every day. At least I don't.

Close up look at the first bear we saw at the Alaskan Rainforest Sanctuary...

and walking with a salmon in her mouth. Yes, the salmon is huge!

That bear was the first of two we would see in our time at the Sanctuary. The other was a little larger and spent her time walking along the side and middle of an inland forest stream before retreating into the woods with a fish she just caught. We did get some pictures of that bear also but the best bear pictures we got were clearly of the first bear so I have not posted any here. 

As excited as we were about the bears, we were equally thrilled to see three or four bald eagles and a family of river otters. It was our first look at bald eagles on our vacation and we probably got some of our signature looks at these birds at this location, including the one below of one of these birds standing on a rock in the rain.

The great thing about the bald eagles we saw at the Sanctuary was that they were doing something fundamentally different than we observed at other locations. Instead of nesting, sitting in trees and flying over the open water, the eagles near Ketchikan were scavenging in relative comfort, meaning they felt at ease on the ground feeding on half eaten salmon, some of which were possible bear kills. It was the only time we ever saw them on the ground so we got to see how they moved on their feet rather than by using their wings.

Bald eagle in the rain. I love how the rain is captured on camera.

So about that camera again...

Our visit to the Alaska Rainforest Sanctuary and all the other stops all the way up the coast were just amazing opportunities to spot wildlife up close or from afar but I wouldn't have the memories I have now without our new camera. I've decided to show the best few on this post but we for sure have tons more of eagles, bears, whale tails and the same river otter family in addition to the animals and birds we saw in Denali later on in the week.

Just a couple of more plugs for this camera before closing. Obviously we are thrilled with the performance. It was cold and rainy some days we were out looking for wildlife and it stood up to these conditions well. It is also super light and super easy to use after a bit of practice. This for sure is going to serve us well on our early 2018 safari in East Africa.

But sometimes it's the small things that put you over the top in situations like this and one of the best features of the camera is that it has its own wifi, meaning we can (and did) download pictures from the camera to our phones and iPads on the fly, allowing us in the case of the iPad downloads to check out how good the pictures we were taking turned out in an instant. I'm definitely looking forward to getting a lot more use out of this thing in the future. It's going to make blogging a whole lot more fun too knowing I can get some really great images to go along with my writing. I'll stop endorsing now. I hope you like these pictures as much as we do. Many more to come.

River otters. Check another species off my "never seen" list.