NORTH TO ALASKA 2025 - DAY 45 - OUR 1ST BABY MOOSE AT WILLOW CREEK

We pulled into Trapper Creek Inn RV park for the rest of the night after leaving the South View Point for Denali.  

We know it was another $35 to pay to camp there overnight, after already being paid up for the same night at Byers Lake. But we did what we had to do, to save our refrigerator and freezer food, and also have heat overnight. It gets down in the 40s here at night and we do need to run the furnace. At least with electrical hookups we could run the electrical heat pump in our Houghton Rec Pro roof air conditioner. 

We woke up to some beautiful sunshine streaming in at Trapper Creek Inn RV Park.  It was going to be a great day.

Steve crawled underneath the motorhome and examined the wiring to this electronic propane valve. One of the connector clips with multiple wires looked like it was corroded. It was attached but it was not making a good connection. He pulled it apart and cleaned in there with little tiny tools and a piece of an emery board nail file cut down into a narrow strip. He got the metal and little plastic sections cleaned up and the metal contacts looking good again. Then he coated everything with a tube of "dielectric grease". It's made to protect electrical connections that are exposed to the elements. This particular wiring clip is located directly underneath the motorhome by the propane tank and is exposed to all road grime and rain and anything else our tires could throw at it up while underneath the motorhome.

He put it all together and we ran a test. HOORAY!! It was operating correctly again. 

Like I said in my previous blog two blogs back, on our old motorhome we just had a valve with a knob to turn in an outside compartment for our propane. You turned it on and left it on. You turned it off and left it off. That was it. 

But on this Winnebago, they did a fancy electronic valve with a solenoid that registers electrical current from either an outside switch, or an inside switch located up above our refrigerator in a control panel. It opens and closes  each time it senses a need or draw from any of the multiple propane devices in the rig. It is also connected thru the LP detector and you cannot just disconnect it. What's supposed to make it easier, also makes it more complicated!

Now that we have propane to run our refrigerator, furnace, water heater and stove / oven... We are good to go again!

We set our goodbyes to Trapper Creek and headed south towards the town of Willow. A couple years ago we had watched a YouTube from Becca and Levi where she had gone shopping at this cute little thrift store in Willow. I had marked it on our map as a possible place to stop in if we were ever driving through Willow. 

Here is their Facebook link:

https://www.facebook.com/p/Willow-Rose-Thrift-Store-100063541752041/

We were greeted by the very pleasant owner, and wandered about through the store looking at their treasures.

There wasn't really anything we particularly needed, but you just never know. This little shop was neatly arranged and the items were in very good condition. I can see why Becca liked it.

We didn't find really anything that we absolutely had to have. Also, our space for carrying things all 0f the way back to Wisconsin is somewhat limited. But it was fun to look around and chit chat and just enjoy the visit.

Like I said, everything was neat and clean. It was a very nice thrift store as far as thrift stores go. 

It turned out that the owner of this thrift store was also friends with another homesteading YouTuber couple that we watch called "The Flat Tire Farm"

https://www.theflattirefarm.com/

They have a variety of interesting things on their YouTube channel and also sell items from a website. They have goats, and make goat milk soap. It turns out that Willow Rose Thrift Store sells their handmade goat milk soap! 

I had to buy a bar to try it out. Isn't this adorable? And it smells absolutely marvelous!!!  Yes, it has a little sheep and a couple stars and glitter melded onto the top of the bar of soap.

It was time to continue down the road. We saw the sign to lead us off to the West to go to Willow Creek State Rec area.

WILLOW CREEK STATE REC AREA:

https://dnr.alaska.gov/parks/aspunits/matsu/willowcksra.htm

This campground is located where the Willow Creek joins the large Susitna River. The Susitna is a very wide river basin where the sections of water undulate and separate and join back together again. It creates little islands and ever-changing terrain. This type of river movement is called "ribboning".

We drove in on the long winding road to get to the campground itself. This was a really interesting campground. It was made up of about five or six small parking lots. Each lot had a number of campsites painted in stripes and numbered. You either backed in or drove nose in to your particular numbered spot. Behind it in the grass were picnic tables and fire rings. So you were kind of just parked next to each other like in a parking lot?

We saw one spot occupied by a tent in one of the lots, and then we saw a fifth wheel travel trailer looping around to take another spot in another lot. We chose a lot closer to the river, and got set up in our motorhome. There was nobody else around us.

It was a rather unusual format for a campground, I must say. We got settled in for the night. 

Being close to the river, we were also a lot closer to natural breeding grounds for those big huge helicopters in Alaska known as MOSQUITOS!!! 

Of course, we have mosquitoes in Wisconsin. They are small vicious little buzzing attack creatures that bite you quick as a wink. We live right by swampy marshland and we have experience with mosquitoes. We use Thermacell devices and that really helps to keep them at bay when we are outdoors.

We have a few of the older versions

 with the cartridge tubes of butane....

and we have the newer version now 

with the larger cartridges of fluid and a rechargeable battery.... 

the both work well.

These Alaska mosquitoes are a different type. They are much larger and fly much slower. It's a lot easier to kill them! You can clap your hands on each side of them and kill them in between your hands. Almost every single one we swat at, we manage to kill it. 

Although we set up a Thermacell outside by the motorhome door (they really work very well) a number of those mosquitoes got in before we had lit the Thermacell. Now we had multiple mosquitoes in the rig that were hiding out so we couldn't kill them easily. They waited until we were relaxed in bed at night and would come buzzing around our ears. Then we would have to turn on a light, chase them down, and kill them either between our hands or with Steve's battery-powered mosquito fly swatter. It probably took us about an hour to get rid of all the straggling varmints that were buzzing around here and there. Once they were all dead, we could finally go to sleep.

The next morning was totally beautiful. Sunshine and no wind. We decided to take a walk before breakfast down to the river. We knew the mosquitoes would be out later as things would warm up. But we thought a walk in the cool morning air in the 40° range would be a good thing to do. 

Although we armed ourselves with mosquito spray, we really didn't need it at all! That was the trick, get out before the mosquitoes warmed up.

We walked along a trail through the woods and admired the new blossoms that were forming all around us.

Everything smelled so wonderful and fresh, and each time we walked past another type of flower it was a whole new fragrance.

At one point, Steve looked down on the trail and noticed the whole pile of fishing sinkers, swivels and one big fishing hook. It appeared that somebody had dropped their tackle box and a bunch of their gear fell out in a pile. We carefully picked it up to make sure that there were no other hooks than that first one laying on the ground. 

When we got near the river, Steve saw a stump sitting right by the stairs going down to the fishing platform. We figured this would be a good spot to leave it all, and someone else could come along and use it and put it into their own tackle box.

Steve walked down the steps first while I stood back with Nicholas. The water was rapidly moving with a pretty fast current. Nick didn't want to go down those stairs anyhow.

We watched from up above while Steve checked out the river. There was a long wire grid platform spanning the bank for fishermen to safely stand there and do their thing without falling into the river.

Steve came back up and took Nicholas's leash and I went down with the camera. 

It was a beautiful view, gazing up and down this section of the water. Perfect blue sky and a beautiful view in front of us.

I suddenly noticed some movement is something emerged from the bushes on the small island's bank across from us. 

Can you spot what I saw??

Awwwwww!!!

 It was a baby moose!

I had my GoPro operating, and it does not have a zoom feature. So I set that down and grabbed my long lens camera to look a little closer. We are actually quite a ways away from it... 

This is zoomed in...

I watched it for a few moments, and then started looking all around for Mama. There's absolutely no way we would want to get in between a baby moose and it's Mama. We had our bear spray and I had my canned air horn, but we would just rather not even see her if we could help it.

The baby appeared warm dry and fuzzy so we don't think it came from across the river. But that doesn't mean the mama couldn't be on the other side of the river. Which would be on OUR side of the river??? 

He started making some little grunting bleat sounds, calling for her. That's when we decided we better take off and get back to the camper as fast as we can.

I snapped all of these pictures quickly using a burst shutter in a row, and then went right up the stairs, back to Steve and Nicholas. We kept our "heads on a swivel" and made our way back up through the woods as fast as we could to the motorhome.

After we got back to the rig, I pulled up my Fitbit screen on my phone. Here was my heart rate when we had seen the baby moosr.  Lol! 

So finally, we can check a "moose" off on our wildlife spotting bucket list.  It may have only been a baby, but it was one darned cute little baby at that.

Here is the video on You Tube to go along with today's blog post:

74 miles traveled today 

4,470 miles so far