2004/06 Yukon trip - Getting there - Hyder, Alaska |
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Saturday 17th July
The crossing into Hyder, Alaska is on the other side of the bay from Stewart. There are no US customs or immigration there as there are only about fifty houses and shacks and ten miles of road, so if you were an illegal immigrant, where would you go? I expect the US coastguard keeps an eye on boats going in and out, but the road is an open border. There is also the 
question of why anyone would want to go to Hyder! Its main street has a bad dirt road, and most of its houses and businesses are boarded up. They claim it’s part of their antique charm. It just looks to me like nobody’s cleaned it up since the 1800s.
The reasons people go there are the bears and the glacier. The bears are to be found at Fish Creek just outside town. Fish Creek is a spawning channel for chum salmon. The forest service has erected a platform along the creek where visitors can watch the salmon come from the sea and river into the shallows to breed and die. The female digs a redd in the gravel, and lays her eggs. The males fight for access rights and then one of them gets to fertilize the eggs. Then they die. Not real romantic, but quite a spectacle to watch from the platform, as these are 20-30 pound fish, a couple of feet long. If you want to eat them then you need to catch them in salt water as they go mushy and taste bad once they hit the fresh water. This doesn’t seem to bother the bears though! They catch them and eat the brains and stomachs, as these are the fatty bits they need. However they don’t do it at noon very often, so we planned to come back in the evening at the bears’ usual dinner time.
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Fish Creek chum (3.08) |
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We took the old mine road up along the Salmon River and round the mountain to the Salmon Glacier. The road soon crosses back into Canada, but no one seems to care and there’s no customs office here either. There’s still one mine operational, so the road is sort of maintained, but this is offset by their crazy drivers who hurtle down the mountain with their dump trucks full of rock.
To our surprise we met another Tiger CX halfway up the mountain. It was an extended cab version, longer than ours, and 
about two years old, but otherwise much like ours. The owner, from New Hampshire, was doing a similar trip to ours. We couldn’t talk long however or one of us was going to get nailed by one of the crazy dump truck drivers.
The road runs a few hundred feet above the Salmon Glacier, a great river of ice that flows down the mountain and turns to fill the valley below. Black lines on the ice show where the glacier is carrying along rocks that have fallen onto it. It cracks and compresses on the bends, forming great crevasses with deep blue ice in the depths. The meltwater from the glacier’s toe forms the Salmon River, another mass of goopy water that rushes down to the valley behind Hyder. I’ve seen many pictures of glaciers but nothing prepared us for the 
sheer scale of what we were seeing.
There was a guy selling books and videos and placemats at the end of the road. He’d taken photos of the local animals and placed them onto backdrops of the local scenery. Very similar to what I’ve done for the Christmas cards and calendars. Maybe that’s what I’ll be doing soon to eke out the pension!
The sign said “End of maintained road”. This means that no one fills in the holes or pushes the rockfalls off the road. We followed it for a few miles, inching around the rocks on the road, and got a view of more glaciers and avalanches, and ended 
up at the mine entrance. Down below in the valley there were enormous house-sized chunks of ice, stranded by the low water levels. Up in the mountains behind us, the sky was turning black and ugly, so we retreated 
down the mountain. We had fog and rain and sleet but it quickly cleared up as we got back to the valley.
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Salmon Glacier (2.58) |
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Fish Creek Bears (29.04) |
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The Germans had told us about a side road that led to a good camping area and, sure enough, there was a track, overgrown and narrower than the Tiger. The track dived into the woods but then 
opened up a bit, running along the top of the dyke for the Salmon River. But first, we had to see the bears! When we got to Fish Creek there were a grizzly sow and cub already in the creek, but they soon ambled off downstream. We had a couple of hours of no bears when the only entertainment was a family of bald eagles, two parents and two young, that came in to feed on what the bears had left. Then at about 10pm it all started happening. We had another sow and cub arrive, and the sow caught a salmon and seemed to be looking for another for its cub, when a boar, a male grizzly, showed up. He 
headed towards them and the sow took off upstream while the cub, we think, climbed a tree. The boars 
will kill and eat cubs if they can. Then another boar arrived, this one very large and menacing. He, though, was spooked by a passing car and went back downstream. All this action had taken place in dim light, unfriendly to photography, hence the grainy pictures. Now the light had gone completely.
We went around the back of Fish Creek to the river dyke to spend the night. No one else used the road and the river was roaring with glacier melt, so the night ended up being peaceful and a little foggy and chilly from all that cold water.
Sunday 18th July
In the morning we stopped off at Fish Creek again to check on the bear situation, but the few morning bears had been and gone, so we moved on. We had no problem getting through Canadian customs. About their only question was whether we’d bought anything in Hyder, in which case we’d get zapped with Canadian GST, but we didn’t see anything in Hyder that looked appealing. Even their one and only gas station looked like it had been closed for a decade.