Independence Mine and Winner Creek

Two other sites we saw last summer were the Independence Mine Historical Park at Hatcher's Pass, and the Winner Creek Trail in Girdwood. The Independence Mine was a former gold mine that now sits in various states of ruin. Unlike the main gold rush activity in Alaska in the 1890s, this mine actually functioned on and off until WWII, and at that point it appears they just left everything at the drop of a hat. The buildings that are still standing appear to be maintained and habitable, and a few looked like they even had fresh coats of paint when we were there, but the rest is all a shambles with equipment just left where it was.

 
Also there were these little puffy flowers which we hadn't seen before. They were like dandelions, but the white part was more like actual fur and wasn't evenly spherical. It was kind of like a little field of tiny truffula trees.

Also while in Hatcher's Pass we attempted to pick some blueberries, but we must have been a little late in the season, because I think we only found 2 blueberries. But there was an abundance of what we later found out are called crowberries. They're little dark blue, almost black, berries that look a lot like huckleberries but don't taste like much at all. We could have picked as many crowberries as we wanted--they were just everywhere--but since we didn't know what they were or what to do with them, we just picked a small container of them to take home. (We were pretty certain they weren't poisonous because I learned in Boy Scouts that blue berries are always edible, red berries are sometimes but not always, and white berries are never edible...although I've never independently verified that rule of thumb.) We ended up cooking them in pancakes. Cooking them gave the berries slightly more flavor, and made the pancakes a little juicier and gave them a little pop when we bit down on them, but the berries were still mostly flavorless. But we tried something new!

Another day we took a hike down in Girdwood at the Winner Creek trail. It was a very rainy day, but we all had rain coats, and most of the trail is in the trees so we were fairly sheltered.

It's a nice forested trail that runs mostly along the creek. (It seems to be a trend up here that a lot of the "creeks" up here are are plenty big enough that I would have called them "rivers.")

And the blueberries were still in season in Girdwood. We stopped a few times to much on blueberries on the side of the trail. It's a nice trail on its own, but the main draw of this trail is the hand tram. At one point the trail crosses the creek over a ravine, but instead of a bridge there's a pulley system with a little tram that only fits 2 or 3 adults. To get across you just pull on the rope from within the tram, or if there are people waiting on either side of the creek, they can help pull you across, too. I don't know why they built this instead of a regular suspension bridge, but it's a pretty fun little thing to do on a hike. I've heard that on sunny summer days you'll need to wait an hour or more to get across since only 2 or 3 people can go across in a single direction at a time, but since it was rainy we didn't have to wait at all.

Here's the view of the river from the tram.

I was glad Marel and Matt went first and helped pull us across, because it wasn't very easy to pull myself with Caleb on my back.

After the tram Caleb must have got bored, because he slept the rest of the way in the backpack, with his little arm dangling off the back.