Back in Wasilla, I bike upon a gold panner mining the Little Su (as for India, there is plenty more to come)

I pedaled my bike over the bridge that crosses the Little Susitna River at Schrock Road and saw that there was a tiny number of people downstream but no one upstream, so I decided to go upstream.

It had been awhile since I had pedaled along the Little Su. Last summer, due to the fact that I was recovering from my injury and shoulder replacement, I could not pedal a bike at all.

Sometime before that, I had bounced off the back of a snowmachine and broken my tailbone and although that injury did not lay me up, it made it too painful to ride a bike for quite awhile and so I did not.

When finally I was able to ride again, the seat injured my prostate and gave me pain that lasted a mighty long time. The only way I could ride my bike was to stand up all the time and never sit down and sometimes I did, but not much and I did not go to the Little Su.

Then, the summer before last, I felt like I could ride again. One of my sons had borrowed my bike when I could not ride it, but now he was buying a new one for himself, so I told him I was going to come and pick mine up.

"Wait, Dad," he said. "I want to get it all tuned up for you first." The whole summer then passed with my sometimes telling him that I was going to come and get my bike, and he responding that I must wait until he could get it tuned up.

So last spring, I just went and bought a new bike, rode it maybe one dozen times, then went north, took my big fall off of chair and could not ride again until this spring.

So I did not know that someone had put a barricade up, to keep all people off the trails that go upstream. But, as you can see, someone had.

In Alaska, we all own the waterways and no one can keep you off of them. But they can keep you from getting to them. On one hand, I felt mighty irritated at the private property owner who lives somewhere else but chose to put up this barricade. On the other hand, it is a hard, undeniable, fact of life in Wasilla that there is an army - yes, a minority of the whole but an army none-the-less - of snowmachiners and four wheeler drivers that have absolutely no respect for anything, be it property, nature, peace and civility and they will tear things up and throw their litter and beer cans anywhere and everywhere.

So I suspect the property owner has had some problems with these folks.

I suspect he still does. This little barricade will not stop them. They don't care. They believe that what belongs to them belongs to then alone but if it belongs to someone else or to the public, they got the right to trash it however they want.

Meanwhile, they cost the rest of us access that should be ours.

So I crossed over to the downstream side, and soon came upon this fellow panning for gold. He introduced himself as David.

David told me that a geologist told him that 100 percent of the dirt in Alaska has gold in it, its just that, in most cases, it is there in trace amounts.

Before they turned the Hatcher Pass area into a state park, there were many active gold mines on the Little Su about 15 to 20 miles upstream from here, but they are all gone now.

David told me that a friend of his once had a bunch of gravel fill brought in to fill his driveway. He panned that and got gold out of it, so David figured that proved that his geologist friend was right.

David studies his pan for color. He doesn't see any.

He says he has found some, though, and its here, miniscule flakes, in this little bottle. It might not be much, David says, but it is a better way to spend such a beautiful, sunny, day than to sit inside and watch TV.

David, the gold miner. Wasilla, Alaska, USA.

Down stream aways, on the next island over from the tiny one upon which David has established his gold-mining operation, I see a man on a four wheeler and his black lab dog. The dog swims in the water. I decide to pedal over and see what's happening.

So I charge into the river, pedaling hard, determined to keep my feet out of the water.

I fail - perhaps because I was trying to take pictures and pedal at the same time - and into the water my feet go. The water will get deeper and soon it will be over my knees. The river water that I got into in India was warm - very, very, warm - but this water is cold.

Very cold. But it feels good. I am glad to have fallen into it.

And this is the man and his dog and it is the only frame I was able to shoot, because my pocket camera battery went dead. It was the dog's first swim ever, and the man was mighty proud of him. The man had come to do some fly-fishing for trout, catch and release.

I should say right away that I am most confident that he is not one of the outlaw-type four wheel drivers that I complain about above. Earlier, I saw him turn upstream on the opposite bank of the river from where I had been, but as soon as he came upon a barrier, he turned around and headed downstream.

I agree - if I had stepped just a bit to the left, it would have improved the compoistion of this picture, but my battery had gone dead. When I lifted the camera and pushed the shutter, I did not think it would even take.

But it did. I tried again. The battery was again dead. Somehow, this one last shop sneaked in.

I turned around, and there were some late teenage boys, or maybe even early 20's, pumping air into poontoons for their pontoon boats. They were going to float all the way to the mouth.

"It's a long eight hours," one of them, a tall, lanky, fellow told me. "We did it just a few days ago and you should have seen it. There was a bald eagle and a duck, and that bald eagle was diving on that duck. The bald eagle was trying to eat the duck. It was some crazy shit!"

He said the duck escaped. I could not get another shot out of my dead battery, so I left them un-photographed.

Then I looked up and saw two jet trails, side by side, reaching from directly overhead all the way to the Talkeetna mountains. The wind up there was blowing at different speeds, so there were curves and bends in those two trails. The sky was deep, deep, blue. It was so incredibly beautiful to look upon, but I could not photograph it.

Then I pedaled for home. As I went up Church, through the midst of a marshy area, I suddenly heard some mighty splashing and thrashing. I looked to my left, and there was a moose, charging out of a pond.

I could not photograph it, for I had forgotten to recharge my battery.

That battery is charging, right now, as I type this very sentence.