All five of the Pacific salmon have a common name, and a really common name. Chinook salmon are also called kings. Coho are also called silvers. Sockeye are reds. Pink salmon are also called humpies. Alas, the poor chum salmon, whose common name conjures up images of ground-up fish gruel used to attract sharks, are also known as dog salmon. This name stems from the practice of using chum salmon as dog food… so in at least one respect, both of these monikers end up more or less in the same linguistic place – ground-up fish gruel… one for attracting sharks, the other for feeding sled dogs.

Chums get no respect.

In many places in Alaska, the run of pinks and chums more or less coincide with each other. These runs also coincide with the silver salmon run, and often people will be actively fishing for silvers, but catching pinks and chums. Most people don’t keep the pinks – by the time they reach fresh water, their flesh is quickly deteriorating in quality, and since people prefer the silvers, they toss the pinks back. Almost nobody keeps chums. Chums are for dog food. Nobody eats dog food.

Yesterday we were fishing (for silvers) and catching a lot of chums. They may not be the choice for the table, but I tell you what, they sure are strong. They’re not jumpers, they’re pullers. Pullers and head-shakers. They’re aggressive and take lures readily. They can get quite large. They’re colorful. The lure of choice is typically a Pixie or a Vibrax, and this is exactly the lure you’d be using for fishing for silvers. Unfortunately, chums are so strong that they often straighten the hooks on the lures! So when you’re fishing for silvers and hook a chum, you often experience the double-disappointment of catching an undesirable fish and having to retire your favorite lure, because the hooks are ruined!

When I was fishing this weekend, I had a couple of guests with me from the East Coast. Neither had ever caught a salmon before. The silvers were being elusive, but the chums cooperated, and both of my friends landed hard-fighting chums. It is an experience I am sure they won’t forget.

After my friends left, the rest of our fishing party started to discuss how chums really need another name… something that doesn’t conjure images of ground-up fish gruel. The commercial fish people have done just that, and when you see chums in the supermarket, you’ll see them under the name “silverbrite” salmon. Seems a little misleading, doesn’t it?

In the spirit of full disclosure, until yesterday, I had been disparaging the chums myself, by grouping them together with pinks, and calling them “humpies and chumpies”. But I am past all that – I have seen the error of my ways, and now I have a new-found respect for them. I may not want to catch them and take them home and cook them… but as fighters, they’re top notch.

So, we narrowed down our new name for chums to two choices. Which do you prefer?

Alaskan River Marlins or Tiger Tuna?

I did something this year that I hadn’t done in the past… I bought a ticket for the PSEA Matsu Valley King Salmon Derby. If you’re not familiar with the concept of a fishing derby, the basic idea is you purchase a ticket (in advance) and then you check-in and weigh the fish you catch, and you are eligible for prizes.

In past years, I hadn’t purchased a derby ticket, and in most years I catch some pretty respectable fish. Last year I caught a fifty pounder, and the year before, a forty-eight pounder. These fish aren’t winners, but they’re close… I figured if I put the time in, and focused on catching a really big fish, I’d have a good shot at the top prizes.

What a mistake.

So I started fishing hard in June, and I caught four king salmon… But I released them all, because they were too small.

Then it happened… with three weeks left in the season, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game closed the rest of the king salmon season. The numbers of returning kings was so small, they were concerned about making sure that there were enough fish to spawn.

When fishing closed, I hadn’t kept a single fish… and I realized that I hadn’t really enjoyed fishing all that much. Fishing, when there is money (or prizes) on the line… and making a choice to compete for them, is a lot more like work than fishing.

Don’t get me wrong… fishing derbies can be fun, and in Alaska, they raise money for some great charities. But doing what I did was a mistake. I thought it would be fun, but it wasn’t near as much fun as just fishing would have been.

Back in 2006 I wrote this post about the advantages of visiting Denali National Park in the shoulder seasons. I have to say that this is definitely the way to go when it comes to visiting Denali National Park – you can take your own vehicle, stop where you like, and really enjoy the park without the crowds. Short of winning the road lottery, there really isn’t a better way to see the park.

I usually make the trip to Denali once a year to go into the park – I have gone both in the spring and in the fall, and both are worth the trip. Both times of year have their advantages, but the weather can be iffy, too.

The National Park Service does not keep the road clear in the winter, so once the road gets snowed-in in the fall, it remains closed until spring. A friend of mine who works for the National Park Service alerted me to the fact that it is now time to start clearing the park road of snow.  This annual ritual, called “Spring Road Opening” or SRO, started a few days ago. I find it amusing that something as mundane as getting the heavy equipment out and plowing the road has an acronym.

This activity also has its own web page, so you can follow the progress. Fortunately for all of us, the page is actually rather entertaining – you get updates on the latest progress, see photos of the park and the snow removal effort, and reports of animal sightings are posted.

According to the latest update, there is a chance that the road will be open as far as the Savage River this weekend. It will take a few more weeks to get the road open to Teklanika, which is as far as they allow the public to go in the spring… but you can hike or take bicycles beyond that point, if you like.

If you get the chance, head up to Denali before the middle of May, and take the drive out to Teklanika. It is a great trip, and a great opportunity to see wildlife and experience Denali National Park without the crowds.

And if you can’t make it, follow the progress on the SRO web page!

I have always been a bit of a weather nut. Those of you who are also weather nuts know what I mean. At a point earlier in my life, I was destined to become a television weatherman, but alas, I was defeated by calculus. But before I suffered that defeat, I did get my feet wet in that field, and I even worked for NBC News in Washington, DC, where I was assistant to their longtime weatherman, Bob Ryan.

One of the main reasons I moved to Alaska was my love of winter weather. I moved from Washington, DC to Fairbanks in 1986, and to say that the winter weather in Fairbanks was different, well… that would be an understatement. But I fell in love with the Fairbanks winters, and when I got into the business of creating custom tours for clients, I always thought that there was room to do winter tours in Alaska – after all, the first thing that many people think of when it comes to Alaska is snow and cold.

No matter how much I love winter, I thought it was a bit of a stretch when I heard that The Weather Channel had declared that Fairbanks was among the top ten winter weather locations in 2009-10.

Wow.

Really, it isn’t that big a stretch to realize that winters in Fairbanks are pretty spectacular… but it is a little surprising that others would figure it out. It is true that Fairbanks gets modest amounts of snow, but the climate is otherwise dry, and late in the winter (like in February through April), the skies are clear and the sun is bright most days. The weather is just perfect for winter activities, and a lot is happening in Fairbanks in March, including the World Ice Art Championships, and the Open North American sled dog races. Many of our guests go to Fairbanks in the winter for dogsledding adventures and a visit to Chena Hot Springs. I even created a special website just for Alaska winter tours.

So, a hearty thank-you to The Weather Channel for recognizing something we here in Alaska already knew.

We do winter right!

Alaska Governor Sean Parnell traveled to Miami to attend the Cruise Shipping Conference in Miami Beach… where he was scolded by the cruise lines for Alaska’s tax and environmental policies. At issue are wastewater discharge standards, and a $50 head tax. The Miami Herald quotes Stein Kruse, President and CEO of Holland America Cruise Lines, who says the industry is, “faced with overzealous regulations” and without relief, “we [the cruise industry] can and will redeploy our ships.”

The cruise industry’s arguments are specious. While it may be true that the taxation and regulatory environment in Alaska is rather stringent, it isn’t punitive. The revenue from the head tax goes directly to infrastructure and services costs that are related to the industry itself. With regard to the wastewater standards, I think that it is fair to say that any community would enact standards to protect their local waters, especially when the use of those waters are shared with other sectors, most notably, commercial fishing.

In the same Miami Herald article, Governor Parnell is quoted as saying, “I heard clearly the need for some change to the head tax and the need to have environmental regulation based on good science. . . I’m going to try to work to reduce costs for the [cruise] industry,”

Back in December I wrote a piece detailing the cruise lines objections to the head tax. Their complaints are no more valid today.

The cruise lines have decided to punish Alaska by reducing the number of cruise passengers coming to Alaska by 140,000. In some Southeast Alaska communities, that will be a disasterous blow. But there are some (myself included) that believe that just because the cruise lines reduce the number of sailings to Alaska that does not necessarily mean that demand for Alaskan destinations is reduced. That isn’t the case.

While the cruise lines scale back their sailings, the airlines have added 930 seats a day between the Lower 48 and Alaska. That is almost 100,000 additional passengers coming to Alaska by air. When you consider that many Alaska cruises are one-way — meaning that they originate in Vancouver, BC and end in Alaska (or the other way around), most cruise passengers use airlines to complete their cruises. If you estimate that half of the cruise passengers travel to or from Alaska by air, then the reduction in cruise-related air traffic might be around 70,000. So does it make sense that the airlines would add 100,000 seats to Alaska routes while there are 70,000 fewer cruise-related air passengers? Not unless there was going to be other demand for Alaska travel.

While the reduction in the number of cruise passengers will hurt port-call communities in Southeast Alaska, the rest of the state is going to benefit. In addition, the cruise lines stated at their conference in Miami that they plan to introduce 26 new ships between now and 2012, and these new ships represent an 18 percent increase in capacity. Clearly the cruise industry expects growth, and that would suggest that the demand for Alaska will remain strong. I doubt that $50 per passenger is going to make much difference at all in the demand for cruises in the long term.

Governor Parnell should stand firm against the cruise lines demands.

When people plan their Alaskan vacations, many come with a list of must-see and must-do destinations and activities. Unfortunately for most of them, they miss out on one of Alaska’s most spectacular destinations – Wrangell St. Elias National Park.

The park itself is the largest park in the National Park Service system, and is the home to numerous glaciers and powerful rivers, and nine of the 16 tallest peaks in the United States.

Mount Wrangell, seen from the Richardson Highway near Copper Center. Note steam plume in the background from the summit.

But like anywhere in Alaska, the scenery and landscape only tells part of the story. If you venture into the center of the park, you’ll experience one of the most interesting and beautiful places in Alaska – the towns of McCarthy and Kennicott.

Kennecott (sometimes spelled Kennicott) was born of the search for minerals and metals. Unlike many of the locations in Alaska, the draw here was copper, not gold. The Kennecott Copper Company built a mine and a company town to extract the rich copper ore. Along with the buildings and machinery for the mine, a railroad to the sea was built to haul supplies and copper back and forth.

The town of McCarthy sprung up next to Kennecott – and while the mine closed in 1938 and was abandoned, McCarthy continued on as the small, remote outpost in the middle of the Wrangell Mountains.

Visitors to McCarthy and Kennecott come for the exceptional beauty of the land. Kennicott Glacier flows past Kennecott and right to the edge of McCarthy. A short walk from town takes you to the toe of the glacier, where you can walk across the moraine, and sit at the edge of the lake as ice and rocks fall off the face of the glacier. From Kennecott, daily guided hikes head off up the valley and guides take you out onto Root Glacier (a tributary glacier of the Kennicott Glacier).

Hikers on Root Glacier, Wrangell St. Elias National Park

Hikers of all ages head out onto the ice with guides, and the more adventurous can head out for extended glacier hikes and ice climbing seminars. If you’re both adventurous and a history buff, you can take a guided hike to the mine entrance, over 3000 feet above the valley floor. If you’re a history buff but prefer to stay in the valley, you can take guided tours of the mill building, or just walk around and explore on your own.

Photographers will love McCarthy and Kennecott, because there are so many varied subjects. Whether you want to photograph the ghost town, or prefer landscapes and scenery, you could literally spend weeks there choosing interesting things to shoot.

When it comes to finding a place to stay in McCarthy and Kennecott, there are a number of great choices. The two main spots are Ma Johnson’s Hotel and Kennecott Glacier Lodge.

Ma Johnson's Hotel in McCarthy

Ma Johnson’s Hotel is in McCarthy. The building itself was a rooming house in the early 1900’s. It has been converted to a hotel. The rooms are rather small, but are decorated with period-authentic furniture. When one walks into Ma Johnson’s, you can’t help but feel that you’ve been transported back to 1920.

Kennecott Glacier Lodge is located among the old abandoned mine and mill buildings in Kennecott. The architecture is striking, as the building itself hugs the mountains, and overlooks the glacier.

McCarthy is what I call an “end of the road” town. What that means is that it is a place where people are drawn who prefer to avoid some of the trappings of modern life. As a result, the town is full of colorful and eclectic people – all of whom have interesting stories about how they ended up there at the end of the road.

Getting to McCarthy and Kennecott can be a bit of an adventure. The McCarthy Road is a 60 mile gravel road between Chitina (pronounced ‘Chit-na’) and McCarthy.

Kuskulana Bridge on the McCarthy Road

The road itself was built on the old railbed that ran to Cordova. The road is narrow, and drivers should take their time. But you’ll be rewarded with spectacular scenery and some thrills along the way. If the road seems a little too adventurous for you, there are companies that will either fly you in to McCarthy or take you by van. You could even combine the  two, and see the road, and also experience the park from the air.

We include McCarthy in many of our packages. It is a great destination for visitors that are looking for some adventure, some history, a great photo safari or just an amazing authentic Alaskan experience.

(I wrote a blog a few weeks back about the Iditarod – click here if you’d like to check it out…)

Alaska Vacation Store has been doing Iditarod packages since 2005, and they’ve increased in popularity every year… to the point where they are booking up earlier and earlier. The problem planning an Iditarod adventure is that in some of the locations, lodging is very limited, so there is a limit to the number of guests we can accommodate.

That is the way it has been this year… until yesterday, when I was able to find a few more rooms in the Talkeetna area. That means we can take another party or two for the Iditarod this year. So if you’ve been thinking about coming to Alaska for the Iditarod, but figured it was too late, here’s your chance to see the Last Great Race.

Our packages start in Anchorage, then head to Willow and Talkeetna, where you will fly out to Rainy Pass checkpoint for the day. After that, there’s plenty of room to customize your trip.

As I mentioned, space is limited… but I am really glad I was able to find a little more space. One of the best parts of this job is making people’s dreams come true… and the Iditarod is a dream of a lot of people.

Here’s your chance!

A lot is made of the darkness in Alaska in the winter.

We do get some sun, though. Would you like to see how much?

Check out this video made last week at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. You get to see sunrise to sunset in one two-minute video.

We’ve been getting some phone calls today from one of our leisure travel clients who is feeling a bit put out because of weather-related travel delays. Fortunately for me, she’s not my client, but rather, my office-mate’s. But if she were my client, this is what I would tell her:

Relax.

There are a whole constellation of things conspiring against our client – the weather, the fact that everyone is trying to get back to Alaska after the holidays, and unfortunately, unrealistic expectations.

As a professional travel planner, I arrange a lot of airline flights, and coordinate them with our custom tour packages. One of the most important aspects of planning a trip is to make sure that potential for airline delays don’t impact your other plans. For example, when we plan a trip for clients, we never plan any activities for the day you arrive in Anchorage – the flight is long, and you’ll be tired… but more importantly, there’s no guarantees your flight is going to arrive when they promise it will. And for our Iditarod packages, we often will allow for another full day, especially if the guests are coming from the east coast or Europe.

Airline delays have become such a problem that many airlines have taken to pushing back arrival times – it doesn’t slow down the travel, but it changes the expectation. On a recent trip, all four of my flights arrived early… presumably because the airline added another half hour to the expected travel time to help pad their ontime performance.

But really, this isn’t what our client is complaining about. She wants to be here in Alaska, and she’s stuck in some airport along the way, and because of weather and heavy holiday traffic, she’s not going to arrive here when she had hoped. That’s a shame. But being upset about it doesn’t fix it. She needs to relax.

Once I was traveling from Fairbanks to Washington, DC for the Christmas holidays, and it took me twenty-four hours, four airports, and a lot of improvised scheduling to get around the weather and traffic delays.

I had a blast.

Whenever I travel, I bring a book… or two. It is really the only time I get to sit and read, so for me, the book is the treat. I also bring my mp3 player and some really nice headphones. I don’t go anywhere without my laptop… but that can be a mixed bag, because that is just one more heavy thing you have  to lug around with you. If I have a layover – whether scheduled or not – I make sure I take in some of the amenities that hub-city airports have to offer. For some, it could just be a nice lunch, or a drink a the bar. If the layover is extended, you might want to consider buying a one-day pass to one of the airline suites. Most have free Wifi, snacks and drinks, comfortable seats, a friendly concierge or two, and all the latest information on your flights. Sure they’re a little pricey, but when it comes to your sanity, it is often worth it.

The most important thing you can bring with you to the airport is a good attitude. Of course, you want to get where you’re going as quickly as you can. But if you can’t – so what? Make the most of the time you have. Be prepared to have fun. Treat yourself  to a good meal, people-watch, browse the Internet, catch up on your reading, or get to know a fellow traveler. And the key to it all is in the planning. Make your travel arrangements so that a delay of an hour or two doesn’t end up stressing you out and screwing up your plans.

After all, it’s a vacation!

There’s a certain irony about coming to Alaska to experience an unspoiled environment. The average round-trip flight to Alaska releases over 1000 pounds of CO2 per person into the environment. When you add the gasoline you use once you’re here – most of our packages are self-drive – you’re getting near one ton of CO2 per person released on a typical Alaska vacation.

That seems like a lot to me.

I started to research what a company like Alaska Vacation Store could do to become more environmentally-friendly. I thought it would be really cool if you could create a carbon-neutral vacation package.

It turns out, from a practical standpoint, you can’t.

Sure, you can get on the Internet and do a search on carbon-neutral travel, and there are plenty of web pages there… but nobody has made it easy, or even practical, to take a carbon-neutral vacation - and this is really the key. The people who are passionate about it (perhaps to the point of obsession) will do whatever it takes to be carbon-neutral. But there is a large segment of the population that believes that it is important to limit carbon emissions, but are unable or unwilling to make the kinds of sacrifices that you need to make for a truly carbon-neutral trip.

When I did my research, I was immediately drawn to the idea of purchasing carbon offsets. The average trip releases X-amount of carbon, and you purchase enough offsets to cover the carbon released on that trip.

But there’s a problem with that… and that is, from a consumer standpoint, purchasing carbon offsets is a lot like donating to a charity. Part of the cost goes to overhead. So in a really well-run charity, (or carbon offset company) most of the money goes where it is intended…  and in poorly-run ones, most of the money goes to overhead… or in the worst cases, somewhere else.

If I purchase a carbon offset worth a ton of CO2, I want to remove a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere. And since the whole  premise of carbon offsets is that they are like commodities, one ton of carbon offset needs to be the same as another. But they’re not.

Moreover, when you research environmentally-sound travel, a emphasis of many websites goes towards making the office more green. I think that is important, and I have made some strides there. But in all honesty, the amount of carbon my office operation has released into the environment over the years I have been in business is an order of magnitude less than the average CO2 release on a typical vacation. And I’ve planned hundreds of vacations. Fixing my office doesn’t fix the carbon footprint.

In my office I am transitioning my record-keeping to a more electronic system. Almost all correspondence with clients and vendors is done by email, and I am reducing the amount of paper I use. I have switched my old CRT monitors to flat screens – they’re both energy efficient and larger. My next project is to turn my hundred-page confirmation packet into an electronic document. One advantage of my packages is that our vendors do not require vouchers, so a guest could, in theory, take his or her entire trip and keep all the documents on a CD or DVD, and never need a piece of paper. Unfortunately, that method of delivering documents is not practical for every guest, because not everyone brings their laptop to Alaska with them. But you could create an electronic document with all of the descriptions, maps, driving directions, etc. and put them on a CD. In fact, it could be cooler than any paper document packet. You could include audio and video. It is coming, but we’re not there yet.

That addresses at least some of the environmental concerns… but the larger concern – how to remove a ton of CO2 per person for every visitor to Alaska – remains unanswered. There are some human activities that by their very nature, and not particularly friendly to the environment, and flying across the continent is one of them. I am not suggesting that people stop traveling. Instead, I think the win-win here would be to find a way to negate the impacts of the travel. As the owner of a tour company, I would like nothing better than to be able to offer my clients a way to offset their carbon footprint in Alaska. I think it would be a great selling point, and great for the environment… Not to mention that this isn’t an Alaska-only solution. You could use this to offset travel (or anything else) anywhere.

Now one could argue that reducing the carbon footprint of a 737 is the responsibility of the airline… and that’s true. But for the moment, that part of the equation is not considered, and really, we’re not talking about reducing the footprint of a jet, but rather, eliminating our footprint as passengers through offsets. A jet is always going to emit CO2. If at some point in the future they come up with a more efficient and carbon-friendly jet, or  the airlines decide to offset its emissions in some other way, that just reduces what we as consumers need to account for when we shoot for carbon-neutral travel.

When someone comes up with a carbon offset product that a consumer could buy that actually removed carbon from the environment, and assured the consumer that the money spent was actually going towards  removing carbon rather than paying salaries (and other things), my guess is that travelers will be eager to use them to make for carbon-neutral transactions.