Relaxing at Coal Creek Camp

Brian and Rachel strike a pose in front of our transportation for the day on the Eagle airstrip. After only one day off in the town of Eagle we were flown about 50 miles into the park to Coal Creek Camp. A remote residence camp for National Park Employees, Coal Creek Camp is closer to our next work location which we would travel to using boats on the Yukon River.

Flying over the town itself I was able to get a nice view of the locality and its namesake bluff looming in the background. All the abandoned buildings and old vehicle remnants make the town appear much larger from above. It was pleasant staying the small town, but we were off to an even more isolated living situation.

We flew over many of the scenic tributaries which wind their way across tundras and past mountains before pouring their contents into the Yukon.

I snapped this photo as the pilot swung us around for our final descent. Coal Creek Camp stands out among the expanses of trees, rock, and water. Miles from anything, this was certainly going to be a remote time off.

Above is the main building at the camp. It houses a few storage rooms, an open kitchen, a mess hall with a few tables and the laptop I am using right now (ironic how the best internet access I have gotten so far in Alaska is the farthest from civilization). There is also a small room with an old TV and a bunch of VHS tapes (an strangely high number of which are Mel Gibson films).

A few cabins stand in a row. Inside are just a few mattresses and a wood burning stove. Pretty spartan place for our time off, but we welcome the solitude and are never bored of spending time in the woods. 

The three of us are the only ones at the camp, so we spend our days leisurely. Aside from playing innumerable games of cribbage and scrabble, I enjoyed strolling down to the nearby creek where three beavers were tirelessly toiling on their rather impressive dam.

It was entertaining to watch these funny animals as the seemed to just to build for the sake of building more...sounds like another animal I know. It seemed as though they really could benefit from having opposable thumbs.

A little creek that trickled by the side of the camp.

Brian and I played basketball in the dry heat (in the 80s!) using a rim nailed into a tin shed that must have been at least 50 years old. The camp was originally a mining camp back around the turn of the 19th century. As the gold ran out, and the miners' luck with it, the camp slowly transitioned into park service land which is how it is used now. Gold can still be found in the streams nearby (one of the maintenance guys who helped drop us off actually panned some out for me), but it is all tiny little specks not worth the time, effort, or environmental destruction, to actually collect.