The Road to Moosefest

by Jerry McCarthy

Way back in 2009, my wife gave me a DVD as a birthday gift, and said words to the effect ‘take a look at this; you might enjoy it!’ So, one Saturday evening, the disk went into the DVD player, and we watched. And I was gripped, addicted; I wanted to be part of it; I wanted to be there! So what was the content of this DVD?

It tells the story of a young doctor, freshly qualified in his native state of New York, who, against his will, is moved to the small town of Cicely, Alaska, which is about as different from New York City as can be imagined.

His is a typical fish-out-of water story, and this DVD, the rest of the season of which this DVD was the pilot, and the subsequent five seasons tell the story of his, and the other residents', lives, in humorous detail, in a show known as Northern Exposure (or just NX to the cognoscenti).

But what does this have to do with VISA? Well, I was idly browsing the web one day, and discovered that every summer, a gathering of fans of this long-since finished show takes place in Washington State, in Roslyn, which is a real town where the fictional Cicely was imagined to be be, and is the town where most of the filming took place. We had always wanted to visit Seattle, which would be part of any journey around Washington State, and thus plans were laid; and we took a tour around the area in the hot summer of 2010, including the fan gathering known simply as Moosefest.

The story starts prosaicly, with a short flight from Los Angeles to Seattle (we had spent a few days in LA looking at Hollywoody things) and we were now flying up the west coast of the USA looking down at the Moonscape which seems to separate towns in California and Oregon. I was particularly taken by the snow-capped mountains visible to the right, some of which, perhaps worryingly, seemed to be smoking. Shortly after the smoking mountains (or was it just clouds?) we landed at Seattle's SEATAC airport, and we rode the light rail to our hotel, which, conveniently, had a light rail station right underneath it. We were planning a few days in Seattle before pressing on to Moosefest, but first, a more pressing requirement, dinner!

We were directed to the water front by our hotel, and I was surprised that there were many nice-looking restaurants by the water front, but that they were overshadowed by the roaring noise of an elevated highway running just a few tens of yards away. I later learned that this is the beginning of the Alaska Highway (the Alcan) which runs through British Columbia up to Fairbanks in Alaska and that there are some hopes to demolish this concrete monstrosity and route the traffic elsewhere at some time in the future.

The next day, we had decided, would be a good day to wander around Seattle, and, in particular, ride the famous Monorail, which was built for the Seattle World's Fair in 1962, and also visit a new (but now closed) Science Fiction museum, which had been created by one of Microsoft's founders, Paul Allen, just next to the iconic Space Needle. A pleasant day was spent in the general area of the Science Fiction Museum, and we returned to our hotel, tired but happy.

The next day, we collected a rental car from Avis, and proceeded along the highway to Roslyn, and our accommodation in the nearby town of Cle Elum. En route, we stopped for lunch in the town of Snoqualmie; the nearby waterfalls (Snoqualmie Falls) were a frequent feature in another TV show, namely Twin Peaks. Our accommodation in Cle Elum had been specially selected to be quirky; we were staying at a Bed and Breakfast hotel called the Iron Horse Inn, a railway-themed hotel which uses re-purposed decommissioned railroad cabooses as hotel rooms. The one in which we were staying had rather unusual upstairs seating accommodation!

We then proceeded to Roslyn, the town used as the fictitious town of Cicely, to look around and to get our bearings before the Big Event, Moosefest. A feature of that town, which was used in every episode of NX, is a mural on the side of a café in downtown Roslyn. It seems to be a thing people would do, to be photographed in front of it, so we thought we ought to do the same. We started taking pictures of each other, but a passer-by who was driving by stopped, said words to the effect that we couldn't have pictures of only one of us in front of the mural, got out of his truck, and took a very fine picture of us.

After this, we returned to our caboose, and prepared with anticipation for the morrow, the first day of Moosefest. The evening was enlivened by the passing of a friendly skunk who ran across the yard in front of our caboose as we toasted each other with a night cap in preparation for bedding down.

The next day, we returned to Roslyn and its Moosefest. There was basically to be a two-day programme, with a walking tour on the first day of the local filming sites, and a bus tour on the second day for the more distant sites. On the two evenings, there were to be dinners with interviews with some of the cast members.

Once Moosefest was completed, we drove further around Washington State and landed up in the city of Yakima, home of the Yakama (sic) nation where we had booked a couple of nights at a hotel. At this time, the temperature had crept up to around 100°F, so we ended up not doing too much in the way of outdoors activities, but chose to mostly drive around sight-seeing and doing indoor attractions. One particular place of interest was a museum, formally titled The Yakama Nation Cultural Heritage Center which lies just outside the city of Yakima on the outskirts of the town of Toppenish. It had a nice gift shop, and interesting displays of native life in the area. Toppenish itself is famous for its murals. On our last day in the State of Washington, we set off to drive around in the mountains for the day before catching our flight back to LA and then our onward flight back home to London.

First published in VISA 101 (Feb 2012)