This post may be a bit late... but better now than never!

When we last wrote a blog we were in Juneau getting ready to catch the ferry to Petersburg the following day.  Things did not go quite as smoothly as the preceding sentence might indicate.  First I got a voice mail informing us that the ferry we were scheduled to take had in fact had some minor mechanical problems (we found out later that it had been out of commission for several days and was out for a total of 2-3 weeks) and so instead of a 6 hour fast ferry ride we would be on a 24 hour ride.  For this privilege we also got to be at the ferry by 3:45 in the AM instead of 6, yeah!!  After we had sorted out the ferry issues we headed back to our campground only to find.......it had been evacuated because of a flood warning (see we weren't just complaining about a bit of rain!).  Lucky for us there was a cop there who let us in so that we could collect our camp gear and re-locate. 

The next day, after we finally woke up, we enjoyed the ferry ride to Sitka and then had our first sleeping on the ferry experience.  Lucky for us before we went to bed we found the ferry lounge and had a couple of beers.  The lounge was straight from the seventies and had very large signs saying "Tipping is Not Permitted" as all employees are state employees.  We slept out on the Solarium deck where they have giant heaters above you.  I felt a bit like a rotisserie chicken under a heat lamp.



We arrived in Petersburg early the next day and set about exploring the limited road system and meeting the islands 3000 people.  We were pretty much the only tourists and certainly the only out of state license plate around.  We spent most of our first day drying out and checking out town.  As we were drying out our gear we watched a bald eagle catch a pink salmon which it was unable to take off with.  The eagle spent the next several minutes walking up a sand berm, using the salmon as a snow shoe, until it had sufficient elevation to make a labored take off.  Lucky for us the there were several trails on the island that we made use of.  Because the ground is so wet (it actually squishes out water when you walk on it) all of the trails were board walk.  Each lake along the trail had its own shelter and row boat for people to take out; I guess if one of the boats disappears it won't be that hard to figure out which of the 3000 people did it!



We caught another early morning ferry over to Wrangell for a visit with the towns 2000 people and to check out the extensive 25 miles of paved road.  We had a great camp up on a bluff overlooking the water where we spent many hours watching the whales, fishing boats, and a young bald eagle.  As a side note we got to see the young eagle's second flight ever which was pretty exciting for us (I think your definition of excitement changes when you spend a lot of time with few people).  We drove to the far end of the island, 50 miles of gravel road, and I did some fishing and calculating how much gas we had in the truck after the gas light came on.  Luckily we were spared the embarrassment of running out of gas on an island with so few miles of roads.



Our third day in Wrangell we went into town and checked out the local museum and the restored tribal house of Chief Shakes.  There were also a number of interesting totem poles in town, one of my favorites had the beaver pictured below right.  Lucky for us we had picked up a couple of pairs of extra tuff boots in Petersburg, these were handy for walking around on the spongy ground and the extra benefit of making us look a bit more like locals.  It sure was one lucky week!!  Luckily!!