Monday 1 July
This morning, Robbie took Josh out for a flight around the mountains and the river, and they saw a sunken boat in the Talkeetna River.
Today we headed out to the log cabin that Larry and Naomi started building the cabin 1971 when the Government was giving out lots of land for people to develop and settle in Alaska. In those days they would walk for 3 hours into town to get supplies and it would take them 5 hours to get back along the railway lines. Then Chris and Ross stayed in it for 5 days in 1996, fished for trout and learned how to shoot a 44 Magnum in case they encountered a bear.
We took 3 quad bikes out to the cabin and it was an 8-mile drive so took around 30 mins to ride out there. The cabin looks out onto Wiggle Creek which flows into Kelly Lake which Larry named after his son, and is surrounded by Birch and Spruce trees.
We set about cleaning the cabin – while Larry fixed the furnace so we can come and stay for a few nights later on in our trip.
While preparing lunch, Danika and Larry managed to get themselves into a water fight and there was water all through the kitchen. We eventually sat down to marmite and chip sandwiches, but Larry stuck with his honey and peanut butter – and he thought we were weird! We then got stuck into some more cleaning, as he has been continuing the renovations and building of it in his ‘spare time’. We saw the chain that he had mounted in the cabin recently that he had retrieved from Stern-wheeler “Whitehorse” ship that floated up “Five Finger Rapids” on the Yukon River back in the days of the Klondike Gold Rush. It was used to tie on barges. Shortly after he retrieved the chain the historic ship burned to the ground.
Once we had cleaned up, Larry pulled out the canoe and taught Josh how to be a Steerer and how to do the J- stroke, and C-stroke. Mum, Tayla, Dani and Josh then went out on the lake without Larry, which was interesting to try and keep straight… He said “It looked like you were in a maze out there” on the open lake. We saw Beaver lodges and a couple of other cabins on the lake.
On the way home, we stopped into Larry’s friend Dennis and Dana DeVore’s’ log cabin where they invited us in for some watermelon and to show us around their cabin. Dennis and Larry spent their earlier years in Talkeetna together, helping each other out with building cabins surviving in the Alaska climate and lifestyle. We continued our trip home on the four wheelers and arrived home covered in so much dust that we even had dust lines from where our clothing and sunglasses had been.
We enjoyed another of Robin’s meals which were rice and sloppy joe made from the night before leftovers with Kay and Joyce Kinter. Kay is Larry’s first cousin who is from Kansas who has taken a month to travel up from Colorado, is traveling around Alaska for a month and will take a month to travel home.
