South East Alaska Montage

 

Zarembo Sparkling Spring

 

This weekend we kicked another goal on our Southeast Alaska bucket list: Drink naturally sparkling water from the Zarembo spring.

 

We took our boat about an hour over intensely choppy sea to reach Zarembo Island.  Zarembo is an island in Southeast Alaska that is 183 square miles (by comparison Wrangell Island where we live is 210 mi.²). It is a popular location for deer hunting, trapping, fishing, as well as poaching, spotlighting, and other nefarious activities. It also hosted former logging, which left around 100 miles of gravel logging roads

 

 

We docked our boat at St John's Harbor and walked down the gravel roads. We forged a creek and squished across  a large mud flat. The mud flats are areas that are traversable with some sturdy Xtra Tuff boots at low tide, but completely covered with water at high tide.

 

We had to wander around looking for a while, but finally we found it! It looks just like a small pile of rocks, but there really is carbonated water bubbling right out of the ground. It's ice cold and tastes a bit like iron due to it's high content. It can actually be called an 'iron spring' which is evident by the rust colored mud surrounding it.

Zarembo mineral water was actually bottled and sold by a company in Seattle from the late 1890s to the 
early 1910s. The advertisement read:

"The water from under the sea." The natural, sparkling Alaska mineral water. Unexcelled for table use. Puts vim in "high balls." Delivered at your door.

It was introduced to American consumers in blue colored bottles at Portland's Lewis and Clark Exposition of 1905. We think when we find the rare blue beach glass it may be from an old Zarembo mineral water bottle.

 Watch our YouTube Video here

Sources:

https://dggs.alaska.gov/webpubs/usgs/wsp/text/wsp-0418.pdf

https://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/digital/collection/advert/id/88/

 

Why Alaska

 I hate to admit it, but I’ve been going through some sunny vacation withdrawal. However, it has caused me to take a deeper dive into why I choose to live in Alaska, why I love and am proud to be an Alaskan.

In Alaska you have to fight and work for what you have. Nothing is fed to you on a silver platter. Alaska makes strong kids, and stronger parents. 

You have to scrape ice off your windshield, shovel feet of snow, warm your car up 15 minutes ahead of time, and blow on little ones hands or freeze your own armpits to warm them. To reap the gem of various meat harvest bounty you have to brave impossible terrain, know how to field dress, pack heavy quarters over mountains and ravines, then wash, clean, cut, grind, and package. The bounty of the rivers, lakes and seas require knowing what, how, when, and where, working a net or hook for long hours, and equally as much time cleaning, hauling, processing, smoking and cooking.  To forage you must research and experiment in gathering mushroom, berry, chaga, birch sap, fireweed, fiddlehead ferns, sea lettuce and much more. If you’re brave you can harvest roe, clam, oyster, and scallops. You can learn to trap and tan otter, mink, martin, fisher, beaver, wolf, wolverine, coyote, lynx, arctic fox and rabbit. 

If you want to stay fit you will either spend countless hours in a gym or brave ice, snow, wind, sleet, rain, and darkness to run, hike, ski, snow shoe, fat bike, snowboard, snow machine, ice skate and sled! 

As a mother of young children you will be challenged with long dark winters of kids pent up inside- pushing you to creative outlets such as headlamp tag, blanket forts, rearranging furniture, play dates, dance parties, swimming, any and all community activities available…( I shouldn’t even try to begin this list) all while harnessing and bolstering your own seasonal discouragement. Oh and you better get good at planning ahead, depending on where you live, if the barge breaks down the grocery store will be out, and your Amazon order is running 6 weeks late…

You may have to brave the dangers of frostbite, wolves, bears, devil’s club, 12 ft seas, hypothermic waters, thin ice, avalanches, landfalls, ATV-swallowing mud holes, high winds, 20 to 50 below 0 temperatures, erratic weather, deadly crevasses, icy roadways and extreme tidal changes. If you want danger- Alaska is the place to be. 

In Alaska I’ve found you have to be intentional with friendship. With the tendency to hibernate within your own four walls, if you don’t initiate and seek out social engagement the seclusion can be soul crushing. 

I’ve experienced the challenges of life in remote or urban third world countries of Haiti, Costa Rica, Honduras, and the Philippines. But Alaska is just a whole other level.

But– with these challenges, you also get the freedom to walk wherever the dang you want on open mountains, likely without another soul in sight, and (hopefully) put a trophy on your wall. You get to see open roads instead of rows of traffic jams (mostly, except for Parks hwy and the commute to Anchorage…). You get to enjoy all four seasons in beautiful exchanges- actually five including “dark winter” and “light winter” :) You get to relish in the most gorgeous blue sky days with crisp, clean air, aroma’s of the season and calendar-worthy landscapes. You get to live in a tourist destination and show off the impressiveness of your state to enthusiastic visitors.  And in Alaska you can develop real friends who will drop what they're doing to help you, because they’ve been through the same challenges as you and they get it. 

Yes, I choose to live here. Alaska has made me stronger, wiser, and more resilient.  Besides, if not here, where else would I be?

 (But I’ll still look forward to my next hot climate winter vacation ;)

What Life is like in Wrangell

Your opinion of a place depends largely on why you are there, where you have lived before, and how connected you are to the community. This, is one of 2,435 (the 2021 estimated population, plus 5 Yoders :) opinions on life in Wrangell. 

 I have never felt so welcomed into a town. Right away nearly everyone who walked by our street either shouted and waved a "Hi! Welcome to Wrangell!" or stopped to chat for a while.  I have never once lived in a place with such a welcoming, safe, serving, and group-oriented community. It is so refreshing! 

How many people wish they had a sense of belonging, a group, a circle, or a gang? Even before COVID I heard many a depressed client respond when asked that she doesn't really have many friends, or doesn't get out much. It's a human condition to desire community. But what is community? This is what we have already seen in the short 10 days since our arrival:

Down Town

 Community is... seeing a poster for a community clean up day and actually showing up. It is making little brown bags of secret toys for boys or girls signed "From the Toy Fairy" and placing them around town for children to find. It's volunteering to work the concession stand, help coach a little league team, or starting an event called "Touch the Trucks" where kids get to go inside police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, and dump trucks. It's hearing that there's a new family in town without their belongings and inviting them to use your washer and bringing them fresh baked sourdough bread, toys for the kids, a queen mattress, French press and freshly ground coffee. It's volunteering for the fire department or starting a non-profit organization to help grieving loved ones pay for a funeral. It's posting on the community facebook page that you found a mitten on the trail, holding it for the owner to claim. Community is EACH PERSON taking that step that they wish others would. I'm sure there are "the Loners" as a driveway sign reads at a home out the road. But the large majority of residents here embrace the community mindset. We have been told by many life long Wrangellites, "It's a great place to raise kids!" If only more towns would follow suit. 

Driving in Wrangell is a breeze. With such a small town it is a quick an' easy 2 minutes to down town to run errands at one of the surname stores. I'm still trying to get them all straight, after walking into many asking for an item only to be pointed across the street.  If you want to drive "out the road" (up the one longer stretch of road), it's about 20 minutes or less to campsites, cabins, trails, and a lake. And there is literally NO waiting on traffic!! (cue angels singing). The Wrangell town passed a law that it is legal to drive ATVs on town roads so I just take the side-by-side down to do my grocery shopping and errands. It's so convenient! But sometimes you don't even need to drive. Cyrus walks to school and walks home, hallelujah! I feel like I have so much more time in a day! He and Darius can also walk to the school playground together and my neighbor even sends her 7 yr old son to walk to the post office to get mail. It's very safe and the community helps keep an eye out for kids.

Simovia Hwy, AKA "Out the Road"

Everyone in town has a P.O. Box instead of a mail box, and everyone is on town sewer and town water. We've heard the town water system is old and has traces of 5IAA. As our water filter hasn't arrived in our moving pack yet, I drove up the road and filled jugs up with water piped from a fresh spring. It gets tested regularly and tastes great!

We enrolled our kids in little league baseball and T-ball, which is a first for us. It's such a community event, parents volunteering or chatting and siblings playing in the playground and sand pit together. It feels like a slower pace of life, rather than rushing to this and that event.

This is the entirety of the produce section of City Market grocery store

Grocery shopping

Grocery shopping is a bit different. There are two basic “grocery” stores. The barge delivers on Tuesday to each, so the best time to get fresh produce is Wednesday. However, some produce is just never fresh- similar but slightly more so than in the Mat-Su Valley. We expected prices to be much higher, and for most things it is- like a carton of about to spoil strawberries for $10. But there are a few random items with prices similar to Wasilla, both in produce and dry goods. I also discovered that if something is on sale it’s not because it’s approaching it’s expiration date, it’s because it’s already expired! 

Sorting and picking up our Costco order. 

In an effort to be thrifty with money the people of Wrangell use multiple avenues for obtaining food and items. Group Costco orders is one of them. The minimum shipping cost for a Costco shipment from Juneau or Seattle is $300 so if you get enough people to order together it is worth the shipping cost. However, the more people on an order the more chaos and work. The picture to the left is with just four families ordering. The woman who complied the orders and entered them spent 5 HOURS on it. And then when it arrives we all have to take our lists and find each item in the unorganized jumbles of giant packages. They only order about once a quarter so you have to get what will last a while. But try to avoid oversights, like accidentally ordering 6 gallons of olive oil 😬 At least we’ll use it eventually.  It’s a work out just getting groceries!  

Other items are expensive here as well. Gas is currently $3.49/gal. Our house cost way more than other states for the 3 bed/2 bath home with basically no yard pictured here (on Wrangell terms this is a lot of yard!). Paint is $42/gallon for interior wall paint. And a large supreme pizza is $40!

Everyone in town is connected to town water supply  we heard that it is high in the the chlorine like compound called 5IAA. So some people (myself included until our moving packet arrives with a water filter) get water from a fresh spring “Up the Road” at the “nine mile pipe.” It was recently tested and negative for E. coli and tastes great! And kinda fun to go fetch my water from a healthy source  

Everyone seems to have a dog here. They walk them in the park, throw a ball for fetch, and clean up after them pretty well. I can't wait to get our Irish-doodle puppy in June! She will be so well socialized.

The first thing my 8 year old son said when he saw the town from the ferry was, "The houses are so old, and right on top of each other!" True, there is not much real estate in the town, so houses are closer than in Wasilla. Not so close that you can reach over and touch both at the same time, and not town houses or apartments (other than a few apartment buildings), but just close quarters. I could dwell on missing my huge green yard in our former home but honestly there are a lot of benefits of living close. The kids in our neighborhood roam around between houses playing every day. I often have no idea whose kid is in my yard! My children have been playing outside ALL day and coming home as dirty as a bug. Cyrus is in kid heaven. 

And the ocean is ALL around. After all, we are on an island. But the town is also on the point of the island, the beak of the flying duck. If I walk to the top of the hill we live on you can see ocean on three sides. The views are incredible. I have never enjoyed ocean so much, and I haven't even gotten out on the water yet. I guess we're just not "hot sandy beach" people, but Mountain Ocean, now that's exciting. My kids adore playing in the tide pools. We could probably stay out there all day, but watch out for the rapid twice a day tide change that can be up to a 20 foot difference in depth.  I emphasize depth, because what you see in the distance the water moves closer to your belongings that you thought were safely stashed, is much different. We honestly saw the water move closer to us  

about 1 foot every 5 minutes! At a "minus tide" (when the water level is lower than the average low tide) that's the peak time to find all manner of edible clams, sea cucumbers, mussels, and seaweed. I am not the expert on this (yet ;) but we endeavor to learn as much as possible. Our whole family thoroughly enjoys having fun AND gathering food at the same time. Hunting, trapping (to come), and foraging for animal, vegetable, fruit, and mushroom is a blast!

 

In addition to the sea, there is the Woods. As mentioned, it is a temperate (cold climate) rain forest. That means there are HUGE trees with hanging moss and very little undergrowth. There are multiple nearby hiking trails, a campground, and forest service cabins for rent first come first serve. There are also old logging trails for ATV use over the entire island, which we will explore as soon as the snow melts at higher elevations. 

Another notable change for us is the birds. I forgot how I noticed the absence of song birds when we moved to Wasilla from Pennsylvania. But here in this temperate rainforest there is a host of feathery friends I've never seen or heard. It's such a soothing sound I had missed and didn't even know it! A blue tailed crested bird, and red headed wood pecker, a back-striped black bird and several birds singing beautiful songs whom I wasn't able to spot the singer. There is a bird fest going on that I hope to get some more local fauna information from. 

Once we get a boat we can set crab traps, see the entire coastline, and visit neighboring island friends. We have so much more to explore! 

So from a 15 day new resident who moved from Wasilla, Alaska and lived mostly on the east coast of the lower 48, this is what life is like in Wrangell, Alaska. 

Ferry arrival to Wrangell

 We made it! After 2 days of driving, 1 day waiting in Haines, and 1 day and night on the ferry we have finally arrived to our new home. 

I apologize in advance for how jumbled this post will look  we don’t have internet set up yet so I’m doing this from my phone which is not great  

The drive to Tok, border crossing in to Canada, all the way down to Haines was gorgeous  we saw sheep, caribou, bald eagles, fox, and a coyote

The Matanuska ferry was a new experience for all of us! It was fun and rather relaxing (except for the intercom overnight)  the kids loved it!

The car deck  it is impressive how many vehicles they can fit down there!

The boys on the top deck  

One of the viewing lounges

The restaurant on board had pretty good food!

Our “State Room” berth  

Looking at the sights, mountains and water  

 

The sunrise at 5:30am as we prepared to arrive to our destination  

One of our first views of the town of Wrangell (except for Chadd)

Cyrus after is first view of Wrangell as we dock, feeling disappointed that all the houses are so “crammed together and so old”

Cyrus quickly changed his mind about Wrangell. He begged repeatedly to go tidepooling. He is in love. And he also met about ten kids already who were walking past our house to his school or playing next door. 

This place is maybe 5 minutes from our house!

On a run with my son on a trail right near our house. I’ll enjoy the few years left when he asks me to walk until it gets flipped around :)

Our new house! 3bed 2 bath with a 3/4 wraparound covered porch 

Downtown

The Wrangell airport 

The road to our house

This is the conditions we are preparing to get used to...

Our front porch, and the view on a perfectly clear day-which is few and far between so we’ve been told!

Cyrus, the top of the huge rock surface in our “yard”. They love to play on it. The town is built on a mountain so rocks like this show in several places. 

After a recent  negative 6 in Wasilla this 46 degrees was amazing!

Our house viewed from the road. It is a very small lot, but that’s pretty much all there is in town. There is a lot of work we want to do to it, but it is sufficient to make a home. 

I just could not stop taking pictures! We heard that this was the most beautiful weather since last summer. What a welcome to Wrangell. The Wrangellites told us, you arrived on the best day. Enjoy the sun (while it lasts)!

A covered courtyard at Cyrus’ new school. It was very foggy when we arrived. Which is one of the normal conditions. 

So it all looks good, EXCEPT... that our stuff has not arrived with the movers yet. We may have to cut up our veggies with a pocket knife, eat on the floor, and use the laundromat for two weeks 😬 I mean, no big deal, but these kids go through three pairs of clothes if we play at the shore. Thankfully some very kind neighbors who chadd had met on his house hunting trip are lending us a very nice queen mattress. It’s nothing compared to a third world country. But it would be nice  if we get our stuff soon!