I have been to Nowhere - and beyond!

Let's see here... the last post was on Sunday afternoon from the library in Cordova, too rainy to do anything so I sat in the library until they kicked me out of there, shooed to the streets like a stray dog. In the library, I met this guy my age named Steve. He is an interesting character. Got a job offer as a lab tech working "sporadic hours" and doing lots of "field work" for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G). So, like any adventurous young male looking for something cool to do for the summer, he moved up to Cordova and was excited to do some field work and check out the terrain around Cordova. Instead, he ended up with a job slicing the heads off of salmon, working ENTIRELY inside in a smelly cannery, and working huge shifts (for example, he had just worked 52 hours in the last 3 days). I chatted with Steve a bit before being kicked out of the library.

With nothing else to do, I returned to my tent at around 6 pm to wait out the rain until 7 am when I'd go and catch the ferry. But just as I was taking a nap in my tent, Steve pulls up in a "borrowed" ADF&G truck and asks me if I want to go eat dinner, he's grilling up a "rescued" pink salmon - rescued because in the cannery right now they are only processing chum salmon so any contaminating pink salmon they just send to the grinder to be liquified and sent back out to the ocean from whence they came. Anyway, he just couldn't see this pink salmon being ground up so he shoved it in his pocket and now we were going to eat it.

Fantastic! So, I had a great dinner with an interesting character. Then Steve came up with the great idea to "borrow" the ADF&G truck and go out the Copper Valley Highway - towards the Million Dollar Bridge (that they just put $3 million of repairs into, ironically) and the "Road to Nowhere". Apparently he had put in his two weeks with the work gig and was a little irate with his employers so why not "borrow" the truck?! I was ecstatic 'cause I wasn't able to make it out there but was dying to. So, we loaded up the ADF&G truck with gas ("borrowed" because his boss certainly wouldn't let him take the truck out to the bridge if he knew!) and we were on our way. The license plate read "Official Use Only" - we were officially using the truck, right? So shouldn't be any problems.

We drove out the road and it was one of the coolest thing I did while in Alaska. So remote and so wild. There is NOTHING out there for 47 miles until you get to the bridge. And the whole time I couldn't wait to cross the bridge... and see what Nowhere was all about! This is what was at Nowhere:

A huge glacier (the Child's glacier), probably a wall around 100 feet tall! Anyway, on the way back we saw a brown bear in the road that scampered off when he saw us and we ran across a huge pile of bear sh!t. Lots of water too. The road crosses this river delta (the Copper River) and the road just sort of hop-skotches across different chunks of land that are continually being eaten away and deposited by the river - roadwork always in progress. I could see very upclose the powerful forces that shape the river delta. Super cool indeed and for some reason I felt surprisingly vulnerable all the way out there in the middle of nowhere (but close to Nowhere), like if the car broke down or something we'd be stuffed.

River water everywhere on the Copper River delta area! Sort of a scary feeling.

Steve flingin' grizzly poop at the camera.

Well, I took the ferry to Whittier yesterday morning and rode my bike to Girdwood (note for Uncle Max: sounds like, but not to be confused with, "nerd wood").