Day 28 Ends Shaken & Stirred @ Teklanika

007 — Bond ... James Bond — might like his martini shaken, not stirred ... but we didn’t have a choice tonight. Forget the martini, it was us that were both shaken and stirred tonight.

It was around 11:00p when we were woken from our deep slumber with the rig moving violently.

Mui and I quietly went through the same checklist.

Strong winds? No, the trees weren’t moving.

A bear trying to get inside? Surely not ... but we each peeked out our bedside windows anyway.

An earthquake? Yup, that was it … certainly, it felt like some of the big quakes we’ve experienced in Turkey. After what seemed like a minute or two — but was probably more like seconds — all was calm again.

It really was a matter of when not if we would experience an earthquake here in Alaska. The state’s location at the edge of the “Rim of Fire” pretty much guaranteed we’d be shaken and stirred at some point during our trip.

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Update on 31 May: During breakfast, Mui said there was another quake around 3:15a. Not nearly as violent … certainly not strong enough to wake me. There are bound to be aftershocks ... and the one that woke him up was most likely one of them.

Update #2 on 31 May: With no connection to the outside world, it wasn’t until we later talked to Scott, our transit bus driver, that we found out the quake was a 5.8 on the Richter Scale … the epicenter about 75 miles away. Later, a camper here at Teklanika said that their driver told them that it was a 6.1 quake … about 120 miles away. I’ll have to see what I can find out from official sources once we are back in civilization.

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Update #3 on 4 June: I finally have a strong enough data signal to do some research on the quake that we experienced on 30 May. What I found confirms a couple of posts on Facebook, including one from my friend, Sue. USGS categorized the earthquake as a 6.1 ... epicenter in the Talkeetna Mountains.Read more