Even More Ice Carvings…

Although it’s now June 1st, I thought I’d put up a few more pictures of the Ice Carving event from March. Then follow that with a few pics from downtown Fairbanks during the sled dog races in mid-April.

Happy B'day Alaska

One of the kid slides...

The log cabin slide. Very popular with the kids.

Entrance to The Maze...

Snow covered sculpture. We had a lot of snow last winter so this kept happening. We have the equipment to blow them off, just have to find the volunteer that wants to stick with it for the whole season...

Another Maze sculpture.

Waiting...

Wow!

Mirror image.

Musk Oxen.

Huh?

Dinosaur Attack!

I still have lots more and I’ll put them up later. These are just teasers.

After the ice carving show, I wandered downtown in early April and hung around while a dog sled race got started. The route began and ended in downtown Fairbanks and was a 20 mile long loop around the city. I didn’t see many of the teams as I got there late and left early. But I did notice one thing that was really strange…a fur auction. Here they had all these dead animal furs hanging on racks or stacked in piles. They’d hold one up and people would bid on them. In some cases, hundreds of dollars.

On the way to downtown, I stopped and took a picture of the Chena river looking West.

The main street all set up for the dog sled race.

More of main street, showing the 'start - finish' line.

This is how they haul the dog teams around up here.

Soapy Smith was a famous trouble maker. Place is just named after him. Yawn.

Fans wandering up and down the street.

Can you believe it? A fur auction in 2009.

Here's a guy with a full wolf head hat. Whew, really? Yes, really. That's his forehead peeking out from under the wolf's fangs. Strange when you first see him face on.

This skin went for a couple hundred but I've forgotten what animal it's off of. Red fox?

That’s the last of the pics for today. I have more of the ice carvings to put up. I’ll try to get them up soon.

Meanwhile, I was able to move back to the campground in my RV the first weekend of May. Since then I’ve been volunteering as a camp host here. We had a nice warm week in mid-April so I was able to shovel off the top of my RV. Then it got warm, up into the high 40’s F and that melted much snow. But I was stuck at the cabin with a 3 foot deep pile of snow all around the RV. Took many days of warm weather to even be able to think about driving it out.

The last few days of April and first few days of May it got really warm and the melt sped up. I did dig a little of the snow from around the RV but mostly just let it melt. Then on the 2nd of May, with the snow from in front of the RV mostly gone, I turned the start key, with my fingers crossed, and she roared to life. Very little white smoke, purred like a kitten and not sounding at all like a rig that had spend seven months in a deep, deep freeze. I had to drive over a little snow berm of 8-9″ but it wasn’t a problem. Then I parked in my front yard where I could load the rig easier and spent the next 3 days getting all my stuff out of the cabin and back into the RV. On the forth day, I drove it over to the tire center and had them put the tire I took off last spring back on. What had happened was it was soooo cold the winter of ’07-08 the bead on the tire broke and it lost air. I had a friend help me put the spare on and I was now removing that spare and putting the tire that belonged there back on.  Now with all the tires the same size, topped off with air, and plenty of fuel, I called Stacy and invited her to join me for a shake down trip. I hadn’t been more then 22 miles since July of ’07. She was all for it and suggested we head down to Delta Junction where she had worked the summer before. Then we invited Dorthy so soon the three of us were heading south on the Alcan highway. Past North Pole (a small town south of here) and into the wilderness. It was about Eielson AFB where we all realized we’d forgotten our cameras! An hour and a half later we stopped for ice cream at Delta Junction and some shopping at a thrift store. Stacy showed us where she use to hang out and drive her Jeep in the river bed for fun. The trip was nice and it firmed up my feeling that I really wanted to get back on the road. So I decided that, yes, I’d be leaving Fairbanks for points south in August. The rig ran fine, brakes felt good, made a couple funny noises at times but nothing that seemed too bad.

We’ve had some pretty nice weather for many days since then (it’s now June 1st) and some light rain and cloudy, cool days. Spotty weather I’d say. Very light RV traffic into the park and we’re seeing the 30-40% drop in RV traffic that was predicted. Since we expected it, and now we’re seeing it, we’re going to open more rentable rooms in the building. Just to see if that works. Need to make money somehow.

Well, that’s all for today, I’m going to ride the bike down to Pioneer Park and hang out for a while. Maybe take some pictures. Talk to you later.