Hotel @nyware

Being There
Wow What a Summer-Alaska is a lot like pizza. When it's good, it's really good.
When it's bad, it's still pretty good; and like the Pizza Guy, Alaska always delivers.




Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe videos. Nature's living mirror, however is water---whether still or in motion,The most beautiful landscapes go  better with H 2 Ooooooooh! 

The Happy go Locals don't tan, they rust, and if they smoke, they smoke salmon.The  cruisers who inhabit this place for 6  hours a day may have come on different ships, but they are all in the same boat-Mother Nature's.



Here are my top 5 Videos:

Keep close to Nature's heart...and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean-John Muir


Write? Right!

Here are my travel blog entries:

• ▼  August (15)
  • Salmon Fishing- Reeling In The Years
  • Wings Over Misty Fjords-Flightseeing
  • Tongass---No Rain, No Rainbow Falls
  • B.E.S.T. Bears Eagles Salmon Totem Poles
  • In The Sky-Wings Over The Inside Passage
  • S E Alaska-Here Comes The Sun-
  • Tongass Rain Forest-On The Waterfront
  • Misty Fjords-Active Rain
  • Seattle- I Have My Reservations
  • Alaska,,Where Mother Nature Lives
  • Glacier Bay-WWJM(John Muir) Do?
  • The Chilkoot Trail-Miner For A Heart of Gold
  • Inside Passage- Grass Is Greener Where You Water ...
  • Ketchikan- A River Runs Through It
  • Tracy Arm Fjord- Inside Passage- Vivid Blues

• ▼  July (13)
  • Travels in Alaska-Quinn The Eskimo
  • Juneau--The Wild Gospel of Nature
  • Ketchikan-Path of Moist Resistance
  • Glacier National Park-Of The Mountains
  • Skagway-After The Goldrush
  • Juneau-Enlightened Land
  • Seattle-The Flannel Manner
  • Alaska-The Great One

There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on a bridge looking like an idiot unless you are in Alaska holding a salmon

 It is truly the king of fish

I have been fishing all season but not for the fish, but what the wild salmon symbolize--- the Pacific Northwest's natural splendor.

The 1000 year-old salmon run is alive and well

More like Blue Sky Fjords 

205 inches of rain a year and not one drop today.

A unique Alaskan experience— We took off from Ketchikan Harbor Seaplane Base,  and the self-proclaimed Salmon capital of the world---the place where people don't get old, they rust...and rust never sleeps.

Up in the air for 30 minutes on the single engine "flying boat" and the small remote mountain lakes  we saw below would be next to impossible to reach on foot, a reminder that most of this area is still wilderness and accessible only by small boat or plane.  In the heyday, I could imagine how snail mail (US) delivery runs must have been done this way.

Hey Hey, My My

Yet they were spectacular by air, like waves  each one  more powerful than the next. Pilot Jeff Carlin, picked out one of the lakes, landed the "puddle jumper"  and  JC turned off the noisy diesel engine that was a reminder that we left  the  the buzz of everyday life. A kind of Dorothy, "No Longer In Kansas" moment.

We stepped out on the pontoon,  a big sitka spruce log , leftover from the lumber jack harvesters, lead  us to a small granite island. This was to be our platform and ad hoc dock for just now. I   breathed in the fresh temperate rain forest  air, listening to the silence, and seeing the unspoiled beauty in a 360 panoramic view--- it was awesome. The plane itself was the only man-made object as nature took over.  I could imagine being dropped off with fishing gear for a few days and living off this great land  on my wits.

Roll video...

A flying boat is a fixed-winged seaplane with a hull, allowing it to land on water. Anywhere there is blue on the map you can find them. Seaplanes don't need runways.Taking off and landing in water has a romantic fascination because float planes  can go places that you can't get to otherwise.

Smooth air and a great ride with Jeff Carlin.

The way I see it, if you want to see Rainbow Falls, you gotta put up with the rain.

I think salmon fish in the package is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

Many consider the Tongass National Forest to be the "crown jewel" of our national forest system

 One thing for sure- It's a  Watershed Moment---A point in time when nothing after will ever be the same as before when it comes to my appreciation for precipitation. It's no longer  the path of moist resistance. I like the rain.

I finally got my bearings...

Come On Dog, Mush!

And the vagabond wind, whispers over the bay and the songs and the laughter, are carried away in the sky

Anywhere there is blue on the map you can find them. Seaplanes don't need runways.Taking off and landing in water has a romantic fascination because float planes  can go places that you can't get to otherwise.


 De Plane, De Plane

And I Say It's Alright

5 days a year there is pure sunshine, the rest are liquid. The Ketchikan-Misty Fiords Ranger District encompasses over 3.2 million acres of temperate rainforest, mountain peaks, glaciers, alpine tundra, muskegs, lakes, rivers, and streams. Time to take a hike and listen to The Beatles...

YESterday was cold and rainy

But Here Comes The Well -Deserved Sun

If people concentrated on the really important things they'd be a shortage of fishing poles. Carpet Diem means fish of the day around here. Pinks and Silver-Ko ho salmon.

Fishing is actually boring, unless you catch an actual fish, and then it is disgusting

I Hear Invoices 

I am thinking of that movie with Brando " I coulda been a contender." the central theme of the coulda, shouda, woulda crowd. At sea, however,  we have no CNN effect  nor 57 channels  to tell us our dancing, singing and comedy  is not good enough as American Idol-click- or DWTS-click, TMZ-click or Reality TV.

The Way In Is The Way Out

It's all self referential which ends up being the way out of the Contender Syndrome and  America’s culture of envy, and wanting be, do, and have more. The disease of more is  really an indictment of our  own judgments that we haven’t accomplished enough. Reaching our potential comes from a discrepancy between the ‘actual self’ (who we are), the ‘ideal self’ (who we’d like to be), and the ‘ought self’ (who we think others want us to be).

I am paying myself first.

Back in Ketchikan, Its Tlingit Indian name, Kach Khanna, means “spread wings of the eagle".  and I have seen many of them. I am within minutes by float plane from Misty Fjords and the Tongas National Rain Forest.

Timber harvesting is all but over, and the environmental narrative is about this place, while not being  as bio-diverse as The Amazon, Tongas  is denser and the largest rainforest  in the US,at 17 Million acres

Among the salmon and deer and black bears, and trees

If a man speaks in the forest and there are no women around to hear it, is he still wrong?

I, the land

I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured. I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!) My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods, No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair, I have no chair, no church, no philosophy, I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange, But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooking you round the waist, My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road. Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself. It is not far, it is within reach, Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know, Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land. Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth, Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

Tranquility Base, The ego has landed—male energy  and efforting doesn’t pay off-conquering mountains, owning the  ocean, the weather and wilderness won’t make you, it will break you,  if you are in competition instead of collaboration and cooperation with Gaia. —The idea that I, the land take's hold.

 I get it. It is not a place of domination, nor does nature reward aggression. Too much respect for it doesn’t make you a wimp. and you have to know your limitations

Have a nICE Day

“The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.” -JM

Same Ship Different Day

I had a similar epiphiny in the

Norwegian  Geirangerfjord-Mother Nature and Father Time Are Effing Special.

“I'm past the point of no return,” Mother Jones

As I get a glimpse of the deeper, random, chance  encounters of my 3 pound  universe (brain), with Mother Nature and Father Time being demoted from actual reality, to my mere subjective experience of my consciousness, I feel immortal.



We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells..Without mind, matter doesn´t "matter". It hovers  in   waves  of probability. Thus, there is no absolute grid we live in where things occur independent of our own thinking about it.

Although our body may self destruct, the 20-watt  fountain of energy operating in the brain. doesn’t go away at death. Father Time simply reboots. The universe is in our head,and not out there seperate from us. What the bleep?

Finding Alaska is easy. My eyes mint gold. Nothing shines so brightly.

The scenery  paints itself. I'm just the middleman.  You can't create experiences like this, you undergo them.

You can mine for gold or you can sell pickaxes

One man's wilderness is another man's theme park

On a cruise ship- nothing fails like excess.

You don’t buy clothes, you wear them –North Face, Columbia and Patagonia; and in that order I see the passengers in gear, rough and  ready for some precip(atation) with anticipation. As I am doing laps, swimming onboard  the Golden Princess’ heated pool, 250 year old glacier melt's myst hits my face at the speed of trust. I have to re-evaluate my assertion: If Hollywood is loneliness beside the swimming pool, then Norway is  solitude by the fjords. 

Every one has a photographic memory, but not everyone film

Glacier bay is closer now, and it plays like a Hemingway story; everything is  sepia-toned and bristling with subtext and I catch the mystery, power and vulnerability  of nature.

I love watching the sun  on the water, but I don't have to go to the sun. I just love knowing it is there. Same goes for AlaskaI probably will never get there again after this season, but I can imagine being there. I'm just content knowing this big wilderness is still there.
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Even after all this time, the sun and mountains never says to the earth 'you owe me'. Look what happens with a love like that. It lights up the whole sky

Alaska Salmon

Why do they do it? The urge to merge-

The Pacific Northwestern salmon is hell bent on its quest to travel hundreds of miles upstream against the current, with a single purpose, sex of course, but also... life.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.

Any fish  can achieve failure and get caught. But  a salmon fiasco is a disaster of epic propotions. I witness this "programming" and it makes me  feel more alive because it didn't happen to me.

To make matters worse, young bears bulk up with salmon for a long winter' s sleep.

Snow and Ice Fire And Rain

Nature is more, Man and Cruiseship, less.

A fjord is when sea water floods a valley carved out by a glacier. I have cruised in New Zealand's Flords, and Norway's, and this one, Tracy Fjord is equally astonishing and beautiful. The Fjords are Alaska's  Ecstasy.

The definition of ecstasy is that you are not doing your ordinary everyday routine....essentially stepping into an alternative reality.The blue glacier ice makes the invisible visible. Glaciers appear blue in color because water, including the frozen water that makes up glaciers) is very good at absorbing light.

Love is a blue sky on a glacier  pasture, and I am Quinn the Eskimo eating it all up

The more icy and clear an iceberg, the bluer it appears.

I met  a guy named Art. I took  him to a museum, hung him on the wall, criticized him, and left. Alaska, however, makes me want to wrap myself in tinfoil and walk on the moon.