4th of July

Jack and I made our way to the Nolan Center to meet Corree and Mikayla, two USFS interpreters, at the staging area for the parade around nine this morning.

The weather was cool and breezy. Cool and breezy until Jack put on his costume, that is. As if my some divine intervention, the clouds parted and ket the beaming sun shine through the minute he donned the twenty pounds of foam insulation and fur.

We got him settled on the float about twenty minutes before the parade started and he spent another hour while the truck navigated the parade route.

The crowds were impressive and seemed to be much bigger than in previous years. Maybe it's that I'm always surprised to see any Wrangell street with more than four people on it. Jack did a great job and survived the clambering throng jockeying to get a picture of the world famous Smoky Bear. When we got him back to the dressing area and freed him from the foam rubber, he was drenched and looked pretty drained. I can't imagine what the Sun Devil's mascot must look like after a summer baseball game.

The 4th of July Queen was announced shortly after the parade ended. The queen competition is the main source of funding for the 4th celebration in Wrangell. The queen competitors get to keep roughly one third of their sales. This year's queen set a record for ticket sales, selling almost $ 60,000 in raffle tickets alone. This does not include all of the revenue generated by the food booths that they run throughout the month of June. Total revenue this year was rumored to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000.

After the ticket raffle, Jack and I did a load of laundry and then watched the logging competition at the city dock. We stayed for a couple of hours before heading back to camp to take a nap and relax. As Jack slept, I drove to the Pat's Creek LTF (log transport facility - really just a beach area used to store and load logs onto barges) to fish. Although I got several bites, I came home empty handed.

We drove to town around 9:30 and could smell the fireworks immediately. The downtown area was the same end-of-days scene that we'd witnessed the year prior. Scores of kids, over sugared and sleep deprived, handling high explosives- pure Alaska!

We watched the band while avoiding the occasional M-80 blast until around eleven when the show began. For such a small town, Wrangell puts on an incredible fireworks display. We were home and asleep by about one.