Monday, May 23, 2011 – Clear, 49 in am; 67 in pm. With an extra day in hand, we found a reference to a town named McCarthy, Alaska, so we had to try for it. We drove 140 miles toward Anchorage, then turned toward Valdez (25 miles), then toward Chitina (33 miles). The roads were paved, but speeds were 35-45 mph because of the many frost heaves. It turns out that the “town” of McCarthy is at the end of a 58-mile dirt road and a ½ mile pedestrian bridge beyond Chitina, so we pulled off into a free campground at the beginning of the dirt road and will try again tomorrow. With the rare clear weather here, we saw many views of the Wrangell Mountain range, including 18,000 foot peaks when the base is about 1,100 feet.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011 – Clear, 47am, 70pm. Left at 6:00 am for McCarthy, AK, arriving at 9:00 am. The road was dirt and gravel, but we have been on far worse in Colorado.
There weren’t many people around town, as it is still before Memorial Day, so we took a shuttle up to the site of the Kennecott Copper mine, where Kennecott was first started in the early 1900’s. The National Park Service is rehabbing buildings. There are good views of a glacier and good opportunities to rockhound for copper minerals Malachite and Azurite. We saw six moose in our travels today. By the end of the day we were 70 miles from Anchorage, and hope to see Mark and Suzie tomorrow.
Thursday, May 26, 2011 – Mark may have solved the refrigerator-not-working-on-propane problem! We have read whatever we could find on the internet about Norcold N-300 3R refrigerators. Basically (if your eyes start glazing over just skip the rest of this paragraph), there is no pilot light on this reefer. Pressing in a button safety valve on the door frame of the reefer inside the trailer allows gas to be sent to the burner, about 3 feet away, ignitable by a piezo clicker. The heat from the burner warms one end of the thermocouple, which creates a small (10-15 millivolts) current to travel along the 3 to 4 foot copper thermocouple to its other end. As long as there is the proper current, the safety valve will be opened, allowing propane to continue to flow without having to press the safety valve button. If the burner goes out for any reason, the lack of heat stops the flow of current along the thermocouple and the valve closes preventing any build-up of propane. Now if the current is not sufficient at the safety valve end of the thermocouple, the burner will not stay lit if the safety valve button is not pressed – this was our symptom. It could be a faulty thermocouple (which we replaced in Kent WA), a faulty safety valve, a faulty “interrupter” (another small part attached to the safety valve) or bad wires or connectors, anything that would cause an improper voltage drop. We found a few internet posting which claimed that for 2004 TrailManor trailers like ours, Norcold used wires that were too small (18 guage) and they should be replaced with thicker wires. Mark suggested that we (for now) detach and clean the wire ends and re-attach. To start with, he just detached them and re-attached immediately. The propane setting suddenly works fine. We are on the right track, but I’m sure there are further chapters to this little mini-drama. Stay tuned!
Thursday evening, we attended the rehearsal dinner, and enjoyed meeting the fiance’s family. The weather has continued to be beautiful every day, days in the 70's - nights in the 40's. We have also met for the first time our grand nephew and nieces. Saturday is the wedding, and we hope that the weather holds.
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