Storytime....er, travelogue.

Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows I hate the heat. In fact I have been known to moan about the heat fairly often in the summer. I may even be annoying about it given the fact that it happens every year and, like Christmas, I do know it is coming! So you may imagine my delight in getting to go someplace that I have always wanted to go....and it is cooler...like 20 degrees cooler!! I spent the two hottest weeks of the summer in Alaska!!

Great grandad Walter Quint

Please bear with me as I share the back story...My maternal grandmothers father (my great grandfather) Walter Quint went to Alaska in 1900, at the urging of his uncle (his mother's brother) Andrew Jackson Meals. He came home with, according to family legend, a gold nugget he had made into a ring. He did not become rich, unfortunately for the rest of us. His uncle though, became the stuff of family legends. 'Uncle Jack Meals' was someone I had heard of my whole life. He was the quintessential gold rush guy in my mind and I even had a mental picture of him that included a pick and shovel and all the trimmings. Here was the best part...he stayed in Valdez, Alaska! Alaska...home of Grizzly bears and Caribou and Igloos, home of the tallest mountains in North America, home of Louis L'Amour novels and stories. Alaska loomed large in my mind back then, the romance of the 'last frontier' in the mind of a 'western girl'.

Fast forward to 1997. My Grandmother was a month and a

Walters parents Wm Quint and Amanda J Meals

half away from 85 and she too had always wanted to go to Alaska. So she did, and she took her 3 daughters and their husbands with her. They stayed in B & B's, they went fishing for salmon and halibut, they saw a lot of country, and they went to Valdez, where they were hoping to find a trace of Uncle Jack. They stayed in a B & B in Valdez that just happened to be run by a lady who was a veritable historian of Valdez. She knew the Meals family...

We had this picture of Uncle Jack

Andrew Jackson Meals went to Alaska in February of 1898 with another man from Nebraska, George Cheever Hazelet. Mr Hazelet was a former Superintendent of Schools and was well educated. He kept a journal, painstakingly handwritten at the time. The history lady at the B & B had a copy and let mom and her sisters copy it. There was a home built by A.J. Meals' son Owen that they got to tour, there were streets named 'Meals' and 'Hazelet', they got to meet Marie who was a cousin, just a couple of years younger than grandma! Turned out Uncle Jack and family were kind of famous! The only problem was they were near the end of their trip and would have like to spend a little more time.

Uncle Jack's Sister Amanda Jane

My mom spent a lot of time carefully copying and typing and eventually we all had a typed copy of what we called Hazelet's Journal. It read like a novel, Hazelet was a good writer and he told the story well. Mom and her sister kind of wanted to go back, and I had wanted to go to Alaska forever it seemed. We had done some more research and found some more family history. Now we wanted to go there and see it, knowing where they were, we wanted to trace their footsteps as it were. When mom started making noises like she wanted to go soon, I shamelessly encouraged her. We decided on the summer of 2018 in the summer of 2017.

I decided I needed to reread Hazelet's Journal since it had been quite awhile. I had forgotten it ended sadly – the last phrase he wrote was “sign yourself a failure and quit”. I knew though, that he had become successful, and I sort of needed a happier ending. I went on the internet and googled him thinking I might get lucky....and did I ever!

Grandad had this picture from Alaska

The first thing to pop up was a book titled “Hazelet's Journal”, I couldn't believe it and I raced to Amazon to check on this book, I was so excited when I read the synopses...it was the same journal, published by his great grandson John Clark! This journal though, had the family pictures and some extra information and included pictures of A.J. Meals that we had never seen. I immediately ordered two, one for me and one for mom. Of course both of her sisters had to have one as well, and now we were well and truly 'up for the trip'.

If you have read my blog for awhile you might remember that my mom and her sister Aunt E met at my house a couple of years ago and then headed up to Glacier National Park, in Montana and Canada, drove the frightening “Road to the Sun” the day after it snowed, and then drove all the way back to moms in California. So when mom said she'd like to spend our inheritance and take my brother and I and our spouses to Alaska, oh and Aunt E is coming too...the question was not "will these two old ladies be OK" but – 'will us 'young ones' be able to keep up and not embarrass ourselves!"

Here we are in Anchorage ready to start!

We did keep up, I think and we are hard to embarrass so we had a wonderful time, covered a lot of territory and accomplished our goals and more.

We needed to stop here!

We all met in Anchorage at the airport, picked up our 15 passenger van with a row of seats taken out in the back for luggage and we were off. We ate that night at the number one restaurant in Anchorage overlooking the Cook inlet, the first of many seafood dinners! The next morning after a stop at Wal-Mart (obligatory) for food, drinks and an ice chest we headed north to Denali. Denali was amazing, we went to the park and spent time at the visitor center (very nice center) and then took the 'Tundra Wilderness Tour' (about 120 mile round trip) mostly gravel with a tour guide to tell us what we were seeing and about the history.   We saw Caribou, Red Fox, Doll

Sheep, Moose, Willow Ptarmigan and two Grizzly bear mamas with two cubs each. We left there and drove to Fairbanks and got there late but it's ok because it just didn't get dark!

Denali was spectacular!

It is hard to describe the immensity of it

We went to museums in Fairbanks and then headed for Tok (Pronounced toke) which is the first stop

This riverboat went up and down the river to Fairbanks!

in Alaska on the Al-Can Highway. We spent the night in Tok, the motel was a little 'rustic' but the people were nice and we had wonderful food at 'Fast Eddy's'... seriously, it was so good we went back for breakfast in the morning and had reindeer sausage. Up until now we had been over new territory and were doing the tourist thing, and really enjoying it, but now we got out our copy of Hazelet's Journal, set out the maps and started down the road that would lead us to the places where we could say “Uncle Jack could have stood here” or “Granddad might have walked through here”. We were going to be seeing the mountains they saw in the distance as they came over glaciers,

We went to North Pole Alaska

worked streams and rivers, or took a break and gazed out over the landscape comparing it to home.  This love of family history and the desire to know more, comes from Aunt E and my mom so I was in good company!

There was a lot of this going on all the time!

The sign says "trail of 98"

We stopped a lot of places, read historic markers took pictures. We saw the river they went up to stake the first claims, the trading post town that existed only for the miners, we stopped at a roadhouse and took pictures of a building that had been there since the gold rush. I ate pancakes that were purportedly made from 100 year old sourdough starter.  (I even bought some of the starter!) We spent the

This was one of those "They could have been here" places...

night in Glennallen and started out ready to find even more of the route. We went to Wrangell- St Elias National park, which is the size of Yosemite and Yellowstone and Switzerland together. We were constantly amazed by the shear immensity of Alaska. We got close to a glacier on the way south, saw trail markers for the 'trail of 98', and finally got to Valdez where we would stay 2 nights. Our hotel was directly across the street from a museum – heaven!!

Mural on Main Street

Valdez - the first night was a meal on the wharf – wonderful seafood again. And we drove around just looking at the town. It's not that big – a little less than 4000 people.  (About the same size as my hometown) Getting a feel for where things were. The next day we did two museums – and both were full of stories and memorabilia from Uncle Jack Meals and his son Owen Meals and their contributions to the area.  Owen was an aviation pioneer in Alaska among other things. We were just tickled at how much information we were finding on the family that we didn't have before. By lunch time we needed to eat and Mom and Aunt E and I were the only ones who wanted to go out to the old townsite (pre-1964 earthquake) and the cemetery. Having watched the videos and read

The original township

stories in the museums about the people who were killed in the earthquake, the old site was kind of eerie. They moved the homes that could be moved and burned those that were left as a safety hazard. The Meals and Hazelet families donated land for the new townsight of Valdez (where it is now), going to the museums in the morning made the old site much more meaningful. We continued on to the cemetery.

The Cemetery has signs for famous people!

Alaska is famous for it's mosquitoes.  There is a joke about the state bird being the mosquito. The cemetery was full of them and we were walking up and down the rows looking for Uncle Jack's headstone and swatting bugs,

Our new cousins!

when this nice woman came up to Aunt E and asked her who she was looking for - she might be able to help. When Aunt E told her, she asked if we were related and we said yes, turns out she was a descendant as well and a cousin of ours. She was there visiting her mother's grave as it would have been her Mother's birthday and she had passed away not long ago. She called her cousin who lived in town and she met us at the coffee shop with an envelope full of pictures of Jack Meals – some of which are in the book Hazelet's Journal! We sat and visited until the coffee shop closed, traded emails and swore we would stay in touch. It was such a treat to talk to them and it really was like we had known each other forever, they were both so comfortable.

By the time we got back to the hotel my brother and his wife had decided they wanted to go for a

Mom, Aunt E and our new friend Mike

helicopter ride over the glacier. Mom and I and Hubby decided not to (I was sure my vertigo and a helicopter would not be a good combo!) but Aunt E thought that sounded cool and she would go along too. They made reservations and Mom and I agreed to drive them to the airport. The road to the airport wound up toward the Valdez glacier and we decided we had time to drive up the road a little ways. We ended up going all the way to the lake at the foot of the glacier and it was amazing how cold the breeze was, just blowing over the lake. We went back to the airport and met the guy who worked there, a pilot, who asked the innocent question “what are you doing in Valdez?” and got the whole 'Meals connection' story.  He then told us that Owen Meals was his hero and he used to visit him at his home and feed bluebirds.

Kind of small huh?

Owen was the reason he learned to fly and that his dad and Owen had been friends and told us some stories about them. The helicopter ride was enjoyed by our intrepid 3 but we all agreed that meeting new friends and relatives was by far the high point of the day! Our new acquaintances had managed to lift Uncle Jack and his son Owen off the pages of newspaper articles and out of the museum displays and make them real people, people we think we would have liked.

 The next day we had to leave Valdez, and of course we've decided we need to go back there. But our

Braving the deck in the chill.

Alaska trip wasn't quite over yet. We drove onto the ferry in Valdez and rode the 'Alaska Marine Highway' to Whittier and then drove south on the Kenai Peninsula to Seward where the famous Iditirod dog sled trail (not the race) begins.

The tunnel from Whittier to the highway to Seward

The Sealife center rescues and studies marine life

On this day we had our first clouds and rain which was something of a miracle since Alaska tends to be kind of rainy in the summer, but it was a soft rain and seemed to fit the locale. We ate at another marvelous seafood restaurant, got up the next morning and set out on our last day in Alaska. We went to the Sealife center in Seward, drove north through beautiful scenery, a drizzly/misty day, Kenai Fjords National Park, Chugash National Forest, and didn't run into real rain until we got back to Anchorage completing our lopsided circle of an Alaskan tour.

                                                                       

Beautiful flowers everywhere - anyone know what this is?

We flew out the next morning together to Seattle and then to our homes in California, Idaho and Missouri. We had a wonderful time, beautiful weather, great company and we left wanting more which I have been told is the best way to end an excursion.

I will end this post by mentioning that it is probably a good thing slides are out of style – I would probably want to inflict them on my friends. I have come home to heat but the end of summer is near and you can kind of feel it in the air – of course that could just be wheat dust and mint harvest!