Fall in North Dakota!

The crisp cool mornings, frost on the ground, changing of the leaves, harvest time and hunting season. Without a doubt fall is our favorite season of the year and there are two places that really speak to our hearts and bring all this together for us; the woods of northern Wisconsin and the farmlands of North Dakota. What is interesting about this is that Barb and I were both raised in suburban or city settings but soon after we married we moved out to the country and have never looked back.

Although we have not gotten back to Wisconsin during the fall since being on the road fulltime, we have been lucky enough to spend several weeks at our friend’s farm in North Dakota each of the last few years.

With anticipation levels high, we left Salt Lake City, spent one night in Casper, WY, and two nights at our favorite campground; Ditch Creek in the Black Hills of South Dakota. This is a great little campground we have a knack of hitting in the off season. Which incidentally is free after Labor Day. We arrived to find only two other campers in the campground. Perfect!

This little guy was just down the road from the campground

We spent two days driving around the area getting to know it better as this area is on our short list for our future home if and when we decide to get off the road. We are looking for 5-50 acres bordering National Forest property and are open to vacant property or a fixer upper and if we find the perfect place we would probably buy and slowly get it ready for that someday when we RV part time rather than full time.  We are prepared to buy if we find the perfect property. Although we saw some great property, saw some elk, sheep, turkeys and other wildlife, we did not find the perfect property this time around.

Moving on we spent one night in Medora before we arrived at our final destination for the next several weeks at the Finken/Sobieck Farm in Douglas, North Dakota. In addition to getting to spend time with our good friends Bob, Deanne, Chris and Holly, we get to pursue a couple of other passions; hunting and helping out on the farm.

The day arrived I was able to jump right in a tractor and help out while Barb got the rig ready for our long stay.

Our home for the next few weeks

They were in the middle of harvesting soy beans and I was able to “Cart”, something I have never done before. Carting involves driving a tractor and a grain cart alongside the combine when it gets full so the combine driver can dump the beans into the cart. It was a little intimidating at first as you need to drive within a foot or two of the combine lining up the chute of the combine with the middle of the cart, otherwise it was be a costly mess. Once the cart is full I dump the beans into a semi truck. They then go either to the grain elevator in town or a grain bin like one behind our rig in the picture above.

My farm toy this week!

Chris unloading into the cart when we were stopped

Going to get some more beans!

Over the past week the weather has not cooperated with farming, the lows have been in the upper 20’s and high’s in the 40’s the last couple days. This has made for some frosty mornings in the rig! We can see our breath when we wake up and turn up the furnace. We have come to realize that the perfect temperature is one where the dormant flies hiding in the rig can walk around but are not warm enough to fly. Combine this with 20-30 mph winds and it makes for some bone chilling cold that we are not used to!

We were able to get out duck hunting a few days with varying success but it was great to get out in the field.

Opening morning on a North Dakota Pothole!

Could she look any hotter?

A beautiful morning of field hunting

Although the bow deer season is open, I am going to wait a week or two longer before hitting the field as the bucks become more active in late October and early November. Deer sign looks promising however and the cameras are showing some nice bucks in the area. With luck we will be able to but some venison in the freezer this fall!

What's Barb up to you ask? Well, she has been making herself busy with a crocheting project she started in Alaska. (Ask me in 3 years how this project is going). She has also been baking all sorts of apple desserts using the fruit from a couple trees in the yard and last but not least she ahs been taking walks working on her photography. I must say I am very impressed with some of her pictures!

If you look REALLY close you can see a coyote howling on top of the round bale

Here's a closer look

As much fun as all that sounds, our biggest discovery came when we saw a new appliance in Holly's kitchen. We were telling her how hard it is properly cook a pizza in our oven and she pulls out this appliance that she says not only cooks the perfect pizza every time but will also cook toll house cookies and....wait for it......Tater Tots, another thing we have a hard time with in our oven! I was like an instant infomercial in Holly's kitchen!

I am happy to report that we are now the proud owners of our very own Pizza Pizzazz Plus!

Until next time.........

There's Gold in Them There Hills!

 Similar to many hunters and fishermen, gold seekers are a secretive bunch. Ask a hunter if there are any big bucks in the area or a fisherman if they are getting any fish and you will get a pretty vague answer that will not help you at all. A typical response will be: “Seen a couple small ones” or “Getting a few here and there”. I first learned this the hard way when we ran into Crazy Al, a backwoods gold miner outside of Haines Junction. He pulled up and talked to us when we boondocked next to his claim, talking our ear off for the better part of an hour. But when I asked him how this claim was doing I got a weird look from him and all I heard was crickets in the background.

Well in our latest adventure we were going to see firsthand how these gold miners operate. We were on our way to our son-in-law’s claim outside of Idaho City!

The drive from Craters of the Moon to Idaho City through the Sawtooth Wilderness area was gorgeous, along 75 highway and through the city of Ketchum where the infamous Sun Valley ski resort is located. We boondocked on some national forest land just outside of Galena. It rained on and off through the night, the next morning we woke up to frost on the ground around the camper and snow in the mountains we were about to cross over. Fall was definitely in the air!

Frosty Morning!

Following highway 75 we ascended the mountain to Galena Summit down the other side and turning right onto highway 21 headed towards the town of Lowman. We thought there was something wrong with our GPS when it said it was going to take us over an hour to travel the 30 miles between Lowman and Idaho City but the steep inclines and switchbacks quickly reduced our speed to 35 mph and it did indeed take us over an hour to travel the 30 miles.

Shane had given us the GPS coordinates to their claim and we soon found ourselves at their site the day before they were to arrive. We set up, did a little exploring and waiting for Jessica, Shane, Dylan and Kendall to arrive. We had not seen our grandkids since last April and were looking forward to seeing how much they had grown.  They arrived the next day and after the greetings and hugs were out of the way we started setting up the mining equipment. Their claim is a 20 acre section that follows along a creek where Shane concentrates most of his efforts.

Beautiful Creek

A fire came through last October

He has a portable dredge (~4’x6’) that comes complete with a built in pump and air supply. He set up the dredge in the creek put on his wet suit, hooked up his air supply and went to work. The dredge itself acts as a huge vacuum cleaner sucking up everything in its path up to the size of a tennis ball….rocks, pebbles, sand and anything else that may be in the creek.

Getting everything ready

At first glance you have to wonder why the wet suit and air supply is even necessary as the creek only appeared a foot deep in some of the deepest spots. We soon learned both of these were needed. Since gold weighs more than all the other material it works its way down to the deepest areas it can go so Shane started by moving a boulder and sucking up everything around it, then he moved another boulder and another sucking up all the smaller material around them. Deeper and deeper he went moving everything bigger than a tennis ball by hand.

See how shallow it is?

Getting started!

The big vacuum hose

Several hours later......

Drone shot of the creek and camping area

All the material that is sucked up goes into the dredge where it runs over a series of mats designed to let everything but the heaviest material pass right through while the heavy material settles into the mats. There really wasn’t too much that we could do at that point except watch Shane dig deeper and suck up the material. At about 4-5 feet deep he hit bedrock which is solid rock and is the best place to find the gold as it cannot go any deeper than the top of the bedrock. 6 hours later he had a hole about 4-5 feet deep and 5 feet wide. Then it was time to clean out the mats and see what we had! After cleaning out the mats he had about a coffee can of “heavies”. We could see lead from .22 bullets, we could see lead BB’s from shotgun shells and we could see gold!

This is where Barb and I could start helping out. We would scoop a couple spoonfuls and start panning it by hand. It took a little practice but soon we were panning out all of the lighter material and all we had left was gold. Some pans had a dozen or so flakes while others had much more and bigger pieces (pickers).

We got color!

This process repeated itself for 3 days, Shane in the water all day followed by a couple hours of panning. By the end of the 3 days he had a hole dug 4-5 deep down to the bedrock and about 10 feet square. A lot of work, and a very interesting process.

But alas, it was time to go. As much fun as that was we had even more fun awaiting us back in Salt Lake. Just days before meeting us, Jessica accepted a job in Pennsylvania and we had 5 days to get things ready and 5 days to pack up everything they owned into a semitrailer and get their house ready to go on the market, pick up and move back into our 5^th wheel and sell that camper. Should not be a problem right?

In the end it wasn’t…. we got everything packed, moved back into the 5^th wheel and got the camper sold! Not a lot of pictures, just a lot of hard work. We even managed to take in two of Dylan’s baseball games.  

Dylan up to bat

Baby K sporting some new upside-down sunglasses

We left Salt Lake with mixed emotions. Salt Lake had kind of been our home base since being on the road. But earlier this year Forrest and his family sold their house and went on the road, now Jessica is moving to Pennsylvania. Although we are happy for both of our kids pursuing their dreams, for us, Salt Lake will never be the same.

So, I am sure many of you are wondering how did we really do gold mining? Well Shane would not let me take any pictures of the gold we found and told me to write "We found a little color".

Our Alaska Adventure Recap

5 months, 13,905 miles, 15 breweries, 31 National Park/Monument Passport stamps, 5 World's Best Cinnamon Rolls and good times, that pretty much sums up our Alaskan travel adventures. No new pictures in this post but some of our favorites!

Our Favorite Brewery

We had no idea what to expect when we left Salt Lake City on April10th embarking on this journey. Filled with anticipation and a little bit of worry at the thought of leaving our 5^th wheel in storage for so long and living in a sub 100 square foot camper for the next 5 months. Now, 153 days later we have returned to Salt Lake having fulfilled lifelong dreams.

Where to start? The fishing? The wildlife? The existing friends we met up with along the way? The friendships we made while we were up there, the sights we saw or the adventures themselves? You just can’t put them in any order as they all were great. But alas, I must try……

Although the sights themselves were incredible, I would say that the highlights of our trip included the people that we met along the way. Working our way north we stopped by Sequim, WA and spent a few days with Johnny, then it was on to Sidney, British Columbia were we met up with our Quartzsite friends the Colibaba’s spending over a week with them touring the area. There were other planned meetings as we knew several of our friends were working or traveling though British Columbia, Yukon and Alaska. We met up with Lee and Trace in Glenallen, Bill and Kelly as well as Steve and Linda in Seward, and Les and Sue in Homer. In Fairbanks we met up with Wisconsin friends Bob and Lorriane, Minnesota friends Tom and Shelly and our main Fairbanks attraction; Barb’s cousin Lori and her husband Jim. Then there was Jo and Ben who we crossed paths with in Chicken and of course we can't forget Dino and Lisa in Yellowstone! We looked forward to each of these visits along the way happy to see a familiar face, catch up and compare adventures.

Then there were the friendships we made along the way. Each of these were unexpected and just icing on the cake! We met George and Nancy in B.C, catching up with them several times in the following months. Rod and Sharon of the Lazy Salmon who we had a chance encounter along the roadway outside Soldotna and the Ross’, Rich, Susan, Angela, Billy and Sandra (see our blog on how we met them here) who graciously allowed us to camp in their front yard for several days at a time on 3 occasions, took us fishing, whale watching and played several aggravating games of Aggravation! And last but not least Faye and Dave in Fairbanks. Encounters that we are grateful for and hopefully friendships that will continue.

Fishing…..We caught 4 variety of fish that we had not caught before; our best Grayling fishing was at Smith River Falls in B.C., a tough and remote area to fish but we caught several fish over 20”’s. Haines provided us with our best Dolly Varden fishing with some nice fish that provided a nice fight when combined with the current of the river. Thanks to our new friends Rich and Susan who took us halibut fishing we caught several of these tasty beasts. Not the hardest fighting fish but heavy and tiring to reel in when you have a big one on or the action is fast and furious. But our favorite fish by far was the Sockeye (Red) Salmon on the Kenai, Russian and Buskin Rivers. There is nothing like hooking one of these fish and have it spool you as it tries to run down the river. Not only was this our funnest fish to catch it is also the most hazardous as was demonstrated by several soakings from slipping in the river and injuries from reel handles banging against Barb’s wrist multiple times. We brought a variety of fishing equipment but next time we go we will one bring a set of 6wt, 9wt and light spinning rods along with good waders.

Barb with a Red

And a Dolly Varden

And a Grayling

Me with a Kenai Red

But let’s talk about the money as this was one of our biggest unknowns going into this trip. We researched many blogs trying to get an idea of how much it would cost so we thought we would provide our expenses to anyone looking to go in the future. We started out this trip with a loose budget of $15,000. I am happy to report that we came in under this amount at $14,195! We brought $5,000 in U.S. cash, $3,800 in Canadian cash and the rest in a Wells Fargo account that we had opened just for this trip. We chose Wells Fargo as they offer free foreign exchange and have branches throughout Alaska. While in Canada we paid cash for everything, food, gas, fishing licenses….everything…. we did not want to deal with the exchange rate on our cards. Ends up that we spent all but $5 so we pretty much nailed that amount on the head.

Our largest expense category was fuel at just over $3,400. Finding diesel fuel was never an issue as we tried to fill up anytime we got below ½ a tank. We only had one issue when we became extremely low on diesel exhaust fluid out in the middle of nowhere. Since that incident we kept an extra gallon or two with us.   

Next up was groceries at just over $2,700. We were told food was expensive in Canada and Alaska so although it was not a surprise but it was still shocking to pay 2-3 times lower 48 prices in some locations.

As many of you know we put our 5^th wheel in storage and bought a truck camper specifically for this trip. Doing this allowed us to access many remote locations and dry camp/boondock the majority of the trip. We only spent 45 nights in fee campgrounds, our total campground expense for the entire trip was $762 for an average of 4.98/night.

All figures are from Salt Lake in April to our return to Salt Lake in September

Many fulltime RV’ers want to go to Alaska but think they can’t afford it, well think again, it is does not really have to be that expensive. Although we were probably a little conservative financially, we did not live super frugally either. We just watched what we spent and spent it on things we really wanted. Our usual non-Alaska monthly expenses are about $2,000 a month on the low side so we would have spent at least $10,000 in those 5 months anywhere we went. Looking at it that way, Alaska on cost us $5,000 on top of our normal expenses!

We have no regrets on how we planned the trip knowing what we knew at the time. Knowing what we know now we would do a few things differently. One of our primary focuses on this trip was fishing. Although we had good fishing, we missed the peaks of the runs in a couple areas. Next time we go up we are going to try and time the peaks a little better and make sure we are in the right areas. We visited a lot of cool and unique places and we are glad that we went. But now that we have “been there seen that” so to speak, next time we go up we will probably skip a lot of those places and head straight to some of our favorites; Haines, Fairbanks, Homer, Ninilchik and Soldotna.

Traveling with a pet in Alaska was not an issue at all. We were asked for Daisy's rabies vaccination papers entering Alaska but that was the only time and most of the National Parks did not allow pets on the trails but other than that we had no issues at all and would not hesitate to bring a pet along. She had a great time seeing all the sights and going on hikes where she could!

So obviously by now you may have guessed that this is not a once in lifetime trip for us. We are already planning a return trip! Our emotions, memories and friendship are pulling us back and we want to go next year again. But there are so many other things to see! The lakes of Ontario are calling us next summer and the summer of ‘18 we really want to do the east coast, so right now it is looking like the summer or ’19. So to all of our friends, old and new, and to Alaska itself…..Thank you, hope to see you soon.