20 May (posted on 1 June from Petersburg due to limited internet)
We overnighted at the Walmart parking lot which is less than 2 miles from the Alaska ferry terminal. Saying good bye to Ketchikan came too quickly. As our first port of call, we were getting our “Alaska Legs” under us. New time zone, small community, and the positive and friendly Alaskan mind set. But it has rained almost everyday, the high and low temperature was 45 degrees, so yep, time to pop smoke (leave).
We have to check in by zero 730 and we expect it’s not gonna be near as crowded as it was on our last journey.
When I went to the check-in counter and gave the clerk my ID card I made sure he gave me two sets of tickets, one for Ann Marie and one for me. Now the purser onboard doesn’t have to chase me down and call me a stowaway. Yup. We boarded the ferry with no issues for our six hour trip.
When we got up to the the observation deck to grab a seat, a retired Army guy said, hey, I saw your truck campers driving down the boarding ramp and I took a picture of Bigfoot and Elkhorn from up here! We said cool, he airdropped them to us.
The weather was absolutely beautiful for this cruise, blue skies and calm seas. We saw tall of a whale, some otters, orcas and dall porpoises.
We ate lunch on board which consisted of BLTs, clam chowder and an Alaskan Amber for me and Virgil. Before the ferry docked, the nice woman (LaDonna) who gave us advice at the boarding ramp on our first ferry, well we had seen her multiple times on the ship and have sort of become friends. She sought out Virgil before we got off the ship and gave him a him a map with highlighted campgrounds that she suggested that we go to that would stay away from the young partiers over the weekend. Awesome!
The ferry docked at 1600 and we took Bigfoot and Elkhorn straight to the visitor center to try to get some maps on US Forest land and other information. Well, well the office was closed, no maps. So we followed
LaDonna’s suggestions. That’s exactly what we did, we headed south on the Zimovia Highway for about 12 miles and found a U.S.F.S. campground that had one picnic shelter and two other campsites. They were all empty and we were on top of a mountain overlooking the Zimovia Straight. Breathtaking! Another absolutely beautiful campground ! It’s just hard to beat, nobody was there, it was free and a spectacular view.
A little bit about Wrangell. Tlingit people and their ancestors have inhabited this island for thousands of years. It is the only city in Alaska that has lived under four flags. Tlingit, Russian, Great Britain, and the U.S. The population is about 2100 and there is not much going on any more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrangell,_Alaska.
Beginning as early as 1861 until 1898, Wrangell played an important role in three major gold rushes: the Stikine River, Cassiar and Klondike Gold Rushes. These gold rushes transformed this small subsistence community to a bustling supply center for the miners with warehouses, hotels, dance halls, saloons, equipment and food stores and the first of many churches in Alaska.
Timber, fishing, canning, and gold rushes are all gone now. Tourism for the occasional cruise ship. It is a charming little, clean city that has everything you need. The locals are super friendly and it looks like a nice place to live, if you want to live on a island in Alaska. Which honestly is quite appealing. One of the locals here said, we did not sell our souls to the cruise ship industry like Ketchikan. Also, the Stikine River flows just to the north of Wrangel.
Garnets are a thing here. Way back when, a man who owned the land that was mined for garnets bequeathed the land to the Boy Scouts
with the stipulation that only children could sell the garnets and retain the money. Adults could help the children mine the gem, but the bulk of the work had to come from the kids. Later the Boy Scouts gave it to a local church with the same rules. Kind of cool, maybe we could run into the “honey hole” of garnets by accident!