Haines

Leslie Saturday, June 28, 2008

It finally stopped raining! Thankfully. I read that Haines receives only 60 inches of rain annually making it one of the driest places in southeast Alaska.

Neither of us have been able to send email for several days. We can both receive email but can’t send. This is strange because we use different Robert spent most of the morning talking with various technical service representatives at earthlink. Because we are paying for one internet connection at this RV Park, we can’t both be on-line at the same time. Earthlink decided that Robert’s problem was actually an earthlink server problem that may take several days to fix. Next I called my service provider and went through the same cycle – escalate the problem to the engineers and they’ll get back to you in 3-4 days. This is certainly not satisfactory. Suddenly several messages that had been sitting in my outbox left. Only time will tell if they fixed my problem. Robert is still in the dark.

I had read that there is a Farmer’s Market in Haines on Saturday from 10:00-1:00. We were hoping for fresh veggies and maybe some fresh fish. What we found was jams and woolen hats & scarfs. As you can see, the weather here is quite chilly.

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The Farmer’s Market is located at the Fair Grounds. Entering the Fair Grounds we saw a street of old buildings.

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Later we learned that this was a movie set for the movie "White Fang" that was filmed near here. Peering in to the windows I saw that most of the little building are currently being used as studios or for other small businesses (bicycle repair, massage therapist, etc.) The fairgrounds also had a community garden with individual plots divided by timbers.

This afternoon we drove north on the Haines Highway to see a Bald Eagle Preserve. We will drive the Haines Highway again on Monday when we leave here but while towing it is very difficult to stop enroute. This spot on the Chilkat River is the gathering place of 3,500 Bald Eagles in early November. The eagles gather here to eat from the last salmon run of the year. At this time of year there aren’t many eagles because they are more dispersed. We commented that for us the real eagle coup was Ketchikan.

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Along the Chilkat River there are two fish wheels that scientists use to tag and measure fish. After the fish are tagged they are returned to the river.

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A cold wind has been blowing since the rains stopped. At 11:00 pm the temperature is 48 degrees. We actually saw a high today of 60 degrees but with the wind it feels much colder.