1988 - Chichagof castaways at White Sulfur Springs; Clomping up the Klondike; Dawson Creek and going for gold; Arcing into the Arctic
Click on the arrows below to open each topic
Click on the arrows below to open each topic
Although the cabin is gone and the hot springs reverted to a primitive state, White Sulfur Springs used to be a paradisaical wilderness retreat. A Japanese-style teahouse perched atop the hot springs, inside which visitors soaked in a stone-masonry pool, with sliding doors opening onto the crashing Pacific.
They got stranded there, as idyllic a spot as one could wish, but a bit desperate as the food ran out.
Here’s how THAT came down.
Two weeks, and a pod of sea kayakers pulled out for a soak of their own. After hearing the situation, they promised to get word to the handwritten list of essential contacts to both reassure loved ones (and employer) of their safety, but more basic, to ensure they would be safe, i.e., they’d get out. One kayaker declared it would have to be a seaplane able to touch down only inland on a lake a few miles away. Waving, the kayakers weaved and bobbed across the combers and back out to sea.
After two weeks of twice-daily hot soaks, chin above the lip of the deep pool gazing upon dolphins in the breakers among the rocks; hikes through the rain forest to the designated lake landing spot, spirits remained high, but food ran low. They never found out if the kayakers activated a response, but a US Forest Service crew showed up for routine cabin maintenance. No, nobody told them about the no-pick-up skipper, but no sweat.
Notifying a Sitka air service, a plane dropped in to haul their friends to safety and civilization, and to bring in provisions.
PS. They remained friends after that for years.
Their old friend, Judge, got the message, flew in, and spent the last week with them.
When the weather cleared the puddle-jumper seaplane came back for them. The only landing location possible, Sea Level Slough, they watched him glide in. Banking around the hour-glass shaped lake, through the wasp-like bent-at-the-waist slough, like a polar dragonfly the rescue seaplane settling down in a spume of spray.
Gulp.
Only one person could fly out at a time, so first Linda and Noah (he was light enough) clambered aboard. Taxiing to the tail end shallows of the slough, the pilot throttled up full, accelerating onto one pontoon as he rounded the curve. With the same tilting craziness as when he landed, they took off, ferrying the party one by one back to Sitka.
From there, they flew home.
At the heart of Alaskan lore, at least white man’s lore, was the great Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890’s. The archetypal symbol or image of that craziness and the only practical route to the gold fields was up the Chilkoot Trail and over the Golden Stairs. 40+ miles over an ice-bound 5000-foot pass, forced by a sole Canadian Mountie to have a year’s supply of goods to avoid the thousands of deaths otherwise feared by the authorities.
But it wasn’t just one climb. To get their ton of supplies to the top, a line of men back-to-chest, close enough so no one who faltered or fell aside could lever back in, climbed up and down multiple times through deep drifted snow in the blistering winds and cold, with one avalanche at least sweeping the slope clear, and the stampeders reassembling to labor upward again.
Crazy: especially in retrospect, given by the time 95% of those few who made it all the way arrived too late to get any of the ballyhooed gold.
Linda backpacked that legendary trail; 7 days with Paul from the sea to Lake Lindeman, headwater tributary of the incomparable Yukon River. An historical park now, the trail a hundred years later remains littered and lined with leather shoes, broken straps and reins, cutlery, large iron culverts, a cast iron stove, all hand carried in a crazed stampede for lust of gold. Scaling the Chilkoot’s “Golden Stairs,” she marveled at the insanity if ruggedness of those of the prior century in whose footsteps they climbed.
That summer they car-trekked with the family to Dawson City in the Yukon, the fevered fantasy destination for the gold-seekers a century before. There they met, or at least saw the original Madam of the Houses of Ill Repute for the miners. In her last years, her front teeth still embedded with two small diamonds, her smile literally sparkled – Diamond Tooth Gertie
Up to Cold Foot, “The world’s northernmost truck stop” on the Haul Road to the Prudhoe Bay oilfields, they crossed the Arctic Circle. After visiting Linda’s newly reconnected pot-growing cousin in Kenai, they rolled into Valdez the year before the oil spill. A celebration for the new town relocated from the disastrous earthquake of 1965 that leveled the town.
On the ruins and shards of the former town they found the carcass of a bald eagle, shot, decayed, except for the talons. They asked then felt permission, and with great reverence kept those talons as powerful magic of flight and ruin through the rest of their lives.
CAUTIONARY ADVISEMENT: This website intends to celebrate Linda’s life, to memorialize her accomplishments and her most elevated self. The Eulogy, the Timeline, and the Themes pages attempt to do that in the best way possible. Additional detail and personal reflections can enrich appreciation of what Linda accomplished yet may feel irrelevant or even controversial to others. To keep the primary focus on what matters most, additional detail is reserved for these Read More pages linked from the Timeline.
Please respect these additional subjective and in-depth accounts as intended to illustrate deeper and perhaps the most admirable aspects of Linda’s humanity, and as part of her partner’s bereavement and healing process. Sections with especially subjective first-person and personal recollections are identified with a note saying: Her Partner’s Personal Perspectives.