After Whitehorse, the roads turned really nice. Light traffic and most of the frost heaves I had to contend with in ’07 were fixed. The big construction project was almost done so it didn’t take anytime at all to get to Tok. In fact, I was there by 3:30pm the afternoon I’d left Whitehorse. I still had some travel left in me so I headed on to Fairbanks. About 5 miles out of Tok, I picked up a hitchhiker from the side of the road. He’d been working at a gold mine outside of Chicken, AK, had a fight with the owner and late the night before had just picked up what he could carry of his stuff and walked into Chicken. Found a floor to sleep on that night, and got a ride the next day into Tok. He was trying to walk to Fairbanks when I picked him up. Him waving that $5 bill helped me decide to stop for him. Tho I thought it was a $20. Anyway, I got into Fairbanks around 7:30pm and stopped at my favorite bar to say hi to everyone. Got to the Ice Park Campground around 10pm on May 21st.
After I arrived I was invited to be the camp host again so I settled in and took over that job. 2010 was a slow tourist time in Fairbanks for every business us included, so the work was light and I spent most of my time just hanging around the office and checking people in and out occasionally. Got my bike out and rode around town 3-4 times a week to keep fit. We had a beautiful and serene summer without overly hot days. Seldom got above 75°F.
A friend that I’d met here at Ice Park (Dorthy) was staying in one of the upstairs rooms and she had taken a couple shots of moose along the road up…something I’d failed to do this trip…so I got copies from her. Thought you might like to see them. They were taken around 50 miles outside of Tok along side the Richardson highway.
Moose! Come here little moosie!
Same moose, different angle.
A long lazy summer took all of my time. Saving money was a necessity this year since I’m getting low on funds but I’m now doing computer consulting so that is helping take the edge off. I’ve got 10.5 months to wait before I officially retire and my 401K kicks in so I’m looking forward to that. I’ve gotten my expenses down to around $600 per month and if I can keep that up for several more months, I’ll make it to retirement in good shape. Then it’ll be time to buy a newer RV and spend more time on the road touring the country. I’ve never been to much of the east coast except on quick day runs so I’d like to do that. I’d also like to find someone with a ocean cruiser and sign on as a deck hand for some ocean touring. Ya only get one trip through this life and I’d like to do as much as I can before the grim reaper appears at my door. After several uneventful months at the Ice Park, it finally got cold and snowed. I was out of my RV by this time living in one of the rooms in the parks main building. It’s small, but it’s free and the I get free food all the time. Many businesses around town are in the habit of donating food to us for the Ice Carving event in Feb. – Mar. and they don’t stop after the event. And to turn them down could mean that the channels would dry up so we continue to take food all year ’round. Not as much as we do in Feb. – Mar. but enough to feed the few people that are here as volunteers all year ’round.
Moon over Fairbanks, Nov. 2010
Then in late Nov. the Chinese carvers start showing up to do ice sculptures around town for various businesses and they do most of the cooking. One thing about this particular group of Chinese is that they use far to many sweeteners in their cooking for my liking. I saw one of them pouring around a half cup of sugar into a traditional Chinese soup! I don’t care for sweetened entrees so all that sugar in the food helped me avoid eating to often or to much. I did do some of my own cooking but it’s easy to fall into a routine of eating what’s offered when other people cook and clean up.
Nothing much to report about Christmas or New Years. I stayed home both holidays and mostly just watched football. And now it was January 2011.
My RV all settled in for the winter. Still had the heaters going at this time. This was taken around 3pm.
Another shot of the moon.
The weather is pretty bleak this time of year what with the sun going down at 4:00pm and not rising until 9am but you get use to it. Sort of. Helps to stay busy.
My RV again. Looks cold out there.
It started getting busy at the park building the first week of January as volunteers started showing up to get ready for the Ice Carving event. We got a new bunch of computers donated by a local company so I had fun getting them all ready for the event. Then we started getting the Webcams ready with all equipment that goes with them. Checked out the web cam computers (we use four just for web cams), got the stands ready, etc. So I was pretty busy from Jan. 3-4 until a couple days ago (March 7th). And of course in mid February I slipped on the ice at the bottom of some stairs, hit an ice titty (a mound of ice the shape and size of a breast that had accumulated from a few warm days we’d had that caused some melting), and spent a week with racking chest pain. Thought I’d broken a rib until the first time I had to sneeze. That’ll show you right off if a rib’s broken because (I’ve heard) you may pass out from the pain caused by a sneeze. I didn’t so I knew it was only a strain. And no bruising on the skin so it must have been internal. The fall knocked the air out of my lungs tho so at the time, for a few seconds, I thought I’d killed myself. And it was late at night, I was just going out to my car to get something so I didn’t have my phone and I’m laying there wondering if I could shout for help. But after 10 minutes of agonizing pain in my back around 2-3″ to the right of my backbone, I was able to roll a bit and 10 minutes after that, I could breath somewhat normally so I climbed (crawled) back up the stairs and into my room. Then I spent the next week wondering if I should go to the doctor. Never did, but at least I thought about it. Likely all a doctor would have done is give me a chest wrap and send me home. I did that myself with my back brace.
March 7th, 2011
The Ice Carving event started on Feb. 22nd and we on the webcam crew were ready. Everything has gone well this year, even my PTZ (Pan, Tilt, Zoom) camera after I redesigned the inputs and added filters to keep the camera from rotating itself when I hadn’t asked it to. You can see it for yourself for a couple more weeks at http://12.12.107.3:8002
You can control the zoom function from the web page that pops up but I handle the pan and tilt using scripts from a local computer. It’s set up to pan every 10 minutes so if it moves on you, it’s suppose to and you didn’t break it.
I’ll put up pictures of the ice carvings in the next couple days. Talk to you later! And thanks for reading.
So, you’ve been at this for close to seven years now. Is there anything you’d do differently? What about the RV you bought — did you make the right investment? What would today’s Jim say to the Jim back then?
I’d have liked to have gone over to the East Coast. I’d have liked to have applied for a roaming gas main leak tester job in the west that I discovered…but I never got around to it. Traveling on someone else’s money suits me. I also have had a plan for several years of appearing in person (in April) to apply for a technical job in Antarctica, because I’d like to spend a winter there. But I never seemed to be in the right place to make the trip to Colorado where the job office is. Applying on-line hasn’t seemed to get me anywhere.
As far as the RV goes, although I spent a year researching RV’s, I wasn’t prepared to judge the unit I ended up with. Partly because I was in a hurry to buy. Because of that, I’ve had to spend $13,000 on repairs and improvements. I know these things are money pits, but I thought I could fix most anything myself. Unfortunately, that didn’t turn out to be as true as I’d hoped. The engine has been pretty reliable though, and I’m happy I went with a diesel. I’d like to have $8,000 of that money in my own pocket right now.
Damn. Our boy’s caught entirely up with his blog, Guys! ’bout time.
I think he needs to find a nice retired nurse on a pension to take care of his sorry rear when it crashes and burns. I found a nurse 33 years ago, and she’s saved my butt a couple of times since, but she didn’t come with a pension, darn it. Jim, if you slip and fall like that again, be sure to go to a hospital that offers its employees a good benefit package LOL.
Let’s see, should Jim’s nurse be Eskimo or Mexican? Hmmm. He likes those Mexican women, but down there he’s more likely to get shot than slip and fall; but, hey, whatever gets you to the hospital, alive that is.
I digress. I need to go check out his ice sculpture webcam. Keep the blogs coming, Jim.
Joel
Thanks for the hint Joel. But I have complete medical coverage through the VA for free. I just never bothered to go in to have myself checked out. The first 3-4 days were the roughest but like I said, I could pretty much tell that no ribs were broken so didn’t think they would be able to do much for me other then drugs. I usually avoid pain pills, no matter what the situation.
Hmm. Watched webcam for 20 minutes or so and the camera stayed at 250 degrees. Zoom works okay. Picture retakes every 4.5 seconds okay.
No sculptures, only the back of an apt. building/motel or something. Only action was a kid sledding once in a while.
-Joel
I don’t know what’s going on there. Must have been something at your end though.
Okay, I think I got it re the webcam. I clicked “pop-up” and a pop-up appeared with the same image at 250 degrees. But when I clicked to exit the pop-up, the original window converted to a live shot at 110 degrees, and the Netcam logo appeared in the upper left corner where there had been only an empty “x” field before.
-Joel
Oh, good. Glad you got a picture. We have several web camera available showing the artwork at Our web site.
Here’s a list of all the direct access cameras:
I’ve removed the list since the cameras are all out of service now.
The park doesn’t open until 10am Alaska time so there aren’t any people right now. These links will be good until around March 27th, 2011.
Cam ‘Memorial’ isn’t working right now (8:30am, March 9th) but we’ll get it back up sometime today. That’s the cam that’s trained on a work in progress that the Chinese sculptures are building. Once the cams back up you can watch the sculpture being created live. Quite interesting watching them work up close from the comfort of your own home.
Monkey cam shows the backs of the heads of us webcam people in the webcam office while we’re working. If we are in there at all.