On the 18^th we flew from Anchorage to Seattle, then up to Vancouver. We’d commissioned skin-on-frame boatbuilder Robert Morris to make us an Eskimo umiak, the traditional skin boat. We looked over the frame in his shop and scouted our intended put-in spot on the harbour. We spent the night on Granville Island, where I’d rented sea kayaks a few years ago on vacation. Vancouver is a very attractive town and we enjoyed the evening in a Columbian restaurant.

The next morning we were in Robert’s shop bright and early, and spent most of the day with him doing final assembly stuff on the umiak. This kind of boat is basically sewn together. The keel and major frame components are glued, but everything is lashed together, and the painted nylon “skin” we used was sewn on as well. It was an elegant design, expertly crafted by Robert. We took some geologists and archaeologists out to the harbor and loaded five people into the boat. After a few hundred pounds of ballast, she was going just great. The paddlers were all impressed with how well the boat responded. These craft are designed to carry probably a ton or more of people and cargo, and this one weighed about sixty pounds. Pretty impressive.

On the 20^th we flew back to Anchorage, via Seattle again, and shot some stuff at the Alaska Fish and Wildlife offices of Brad Griffith, et. al, looking at aerial census photos of caribou.

On the 21^st we went to Matthew Sturm’s house and did an interview with him, learning about how he came to find the old photos from the 40s that he’s based his shrub study on. Basically the tundra is getting shrubbier, and its due to drying and heating, which causes more [local] drying and heating.

Then we met David Yesner again and drove south to the Broken Mammoth archaeologial site, where we heard more about how this site and others like it have added to the archaeological knowledge base and made people realize that there were humans here long before Clovis man, 11,000 years ago. We don’t know if they came across some land bridge from Siberia, boated down the coast following food sources or came through an ice-free corridor during the last ice age, but those are all theories in play at the moment.

Then we drove south, beyond Delta Junction to Glennallen for the night. Glennallen is an interesting place in that it’s a dry town, and was established by some religious people. There can be no alcohol sold within a certain distance of a church, so they put churches every sixty feet or so, I guess. The town liquor store is about seven inches across the town line though, and it didn’t look like he was going broke.