Dog Days of Summer

It is hot today, and humid, and the sky is gray instead of blue. Reminds me of Virginia in some ways. There is a large forest fire burning now just south of the Yukon border so the traffic on this highway is very limited lately. Pretty slow and quiet at the lodge. The smoke from the fire is thick around here now and the sun could not really penetrate it. I went home to the cabin on Saturday night and on Sunday, I rode my motorcycle some 60 km. to the Eskay Creek Gold Mine, which is not active now, but over 3.5 billion dollars worth of gold was taken out from there between 1994 and 2009. Now just four people are watching over the facilities there which were designed to house over 200 workers. The site is near the tree-line (about 4,000 feet above sea level) and I saw many piles of Grizzly bear shit on the road, but no Grizzlies. An average winter brings about thirty feet of snow at this site. I had lunch with the good folks there and then drove back down the road to the lava flows that created the Iskut canyon. I was able to ride the bike to two different points near the rim of the canyon and took photos. I found huge patches of beautiful wild raspberries there along the access road on the lava. There was a huge male black bear feasting on them.