Exploring Wrangell Island

Robert, Monday, June 9
We went on an exploring mission today. The town of Wrangell is located on the north end of Wrangell Island. There is one road the leads south along the western side. After about 5 miles the pavement ends and you are driving on a logging road. That means the road is one lane with pullouts every mile or so. Most of thead has absolutely no shoulders so getting past someone without the pullouts is next to impossible. On the other hand we only met one vehicle while driving for several hours. We drove almost to the south end of the island. The views were spectacular. After we left the pavement there was a fifth wheel parked alongside the road with a sign that said campground host. There wasn’t anyone there when we drove in but they were there when we came back. It turned out they are from Golden Gate Canyon in Colorado. They live about five miles from us. We both thought that they had a lousy job. They didn’t have any hookups and they had to have water from town (about 5 miles). They had an outhouse and we don’t know how they got rid of their gray water. And there weren’t any campsites within several miles of them so they didn’t have anyone to talk to except people like us who stopped. After we got back to the trailer, we washed the outside. I had told everyone that we deserved an award as we had killed a million bugs and every one of them was stuck to the front of the trailer. Just to let you know how bad it was, the campground looked at the bugs and said, "We don’t have any restrictions on washing your rig." We backed the truck up to the trailer so we could stand in the truck bed and scrub. We have read the used dryer sheets like Bounce are the best thing for scrubbing bugs. It turns out that they work very well although the front of the trailer still needed a lot of elbow grease to get all of the *%$*&# bugs off. After getting the bugs off of the front, we washed the sides and back of the trailer. Many campgrounds do not allow washing rigs.