Get Up and Go - Anchorage to Denali to Tangle Lakes

Part 2 of our trip to Alaska....

After journeying down to Seward and back to Anchorage, we woke up early to meet our tour group.  Most people who visit Alaska seem to lean towards the myriad of cruise alternatives.  We started this way, but decided we liked a very active, land-based tour instead.  Julie, my favorite travel agent, spent a lot of time researching alternatives on the web before we settled on Get Up and Go Tours.  As you will see, these tours are active, see a lot, and have small groups, all things we were looking for.

As we sat in our hotel lobby waiting to hook up with our guide and other tour members, we discovered two of them.  Joe and his son Danny were from the Bay area in California.  Soon we discovered that we had now met all the members of our tour!

Our guide Ian arrived to pick us up and get us on our way.  The next big surprise:  Ian works in Alaska during the summer.  The rest of the year he lives just outside Park City, about 8 miles from us.  Now that is a small world.

Pictured from left to right:  Ian, Danny, Joe and Julie.  Get used to them.  They are in lots of pictures.

This was our touring limo for the next 10 days.  For a normal sized tour, they pile all the equipment on the rack on top of the van and put the people in the 4 rows of seats.  With a total of only five people, we had two rows of seats and just hucked everything into the back.  Over the next few days, we evolved a seating strategy.  Ian drove.  We took turns in the passenger seat.  The other two adults were in the next row.  Danny, being a normal 16 year old, laid down in the back seat and slept.  We woke him for all the cool stuff. Getting up early every morning is not what many teenagers would equate with vacation.

If you read the first blog entry of our journey, you know we were encountering rain and clouds every day.  As we started leaving Anchorage north towards Denali, we got a view of Mount McKinley.  Little did we know that this would be our best view.  Even on fairly clear days, that mountain is so large that it creates its own weather, and frequently that involves a lot of clouds.  A recurring theme for us in Alaska was our inability to judge the enormous size of things.  This view of the mountain is taken from about 125 miles away!

On our way to Denali, we stopped and did what was the first of many hikes.   The scenery was beautiful, even with the drizzle.  It was a few miles of reasonably steep hiking and I think it gave Ian the opportunity to see what condition his group was in.  Fortunately, all four of us were capable of doing the numerous hikes over the next few days.

With this particular tour, you have the option of camping or staying in lodges.  The lodges are fairly primitive, but they are warm, dry and have showers.  We stayed at the McKinley Creekside Cabins, about 10 miles outside of the national park.  They were a delight.  Quiet, comfortable and they had a babbling brook 30 feet from the front door, complete with comfortable lounge chairs. God apparently knew we were coming and put a good little pizza joint about 200 yards away.

The next morning we started by heading over to the national park and visiting the sled dog camp.  Denali has very tight restrictions about how and when motor vehicles can be used.  During the winter, almost everything is done by sled dog.  I was surprised when I saw racing sled dogs in Park City. They only weighed about 35-40 pounds, much smaller than Jasper.  These huskies were meant for hauling large loads and they were probably closer to 80 pounds.  They seem to love sunning themselves on their dog houses.

Several of the sled dogs had to be in pens instead of out in the open on a chain.  To aggressive?  Nope.  They seem to have a bad habit of eating rocks so they had to have a concrete floor.  I love dogs but damn they can be stupid.

We watched a brief sled demonstration and then did a few mile hike over to the visitors center.  After learning all there was to learn, we headed out to our next adventure: white water rafting.

I wasn't about to take my nice camera on the raft.  In fact, I wasn't about to take my little pocket camera either.  We did get one shot before we headed off to the river.  Those pretty blue outfits we are all wearing are dry suits.  Seems the water is only 38 degrees, which I guess one might expect when it is coming from melting glaciers. Our outfits had all the styling of Oompa Looompa with the color scheme of a Smurf.

The rafting was fun, exciting without being scary. Most of what we saw were Class 3 rapids, which I am convinced our raft could have made it down without navigation from a guide.  That might have moved the needle over to scary though.

The next morning was our trip into Denali.  There is only one main road into the park and it could easily be a traffic nightmare.  They did something smart though.  Almost no one can drive into the park.  You get to the visitors center and then board school buses for the trip in.  Instead of having thousands of cars driven by people who will always do unpredictable and frequently stupid things, you put 50 people on each bus and have a professional, knowledgeable driver.

Notice how the river is very wide, shallow and full of little cuts through the gravel.  That is very indicative of a glacier fed river. It is hard to see, but the water is very grey and cloudy from all the silt picked up along the way.

The bus rides are not the best solution for photographers.  The good news is that the buses will stop for interesting wildlife along the way.  The bad news is that you can't get out so you are frequently shooting out bus windows full of 50 other passengers.  Just the same, we had some decent sightings.

This caribou was sporting a beautiful rack.

We saw a half dozen grizzly bears along the way, some mothers with cubs and one off on his own.  These grizzlies are smaller than the huge ones down around Kodiak.  The difference is their diet.  The Denali bears are mostly eating berries and roots.  The Kodiak bears are gorging on fatty, high protein Salmon.  You can tell that the fall colors were just starting to kick in.

This is a terrible photo of a Dall Sheep, but it was the only one we saw that wasn't from an airplane. They tend to stay way up on hills or cliffs, away from predators and photographers.

This grizzly was the only one considerate enough to come in reasonable camera range.  He was about 150 feet away and didn't seem to care about us at all.

When you are riding the buses, you can get off anywhere you want, hike around, and then catch another bus later on.  The only time they won't let you off is when wildlife is around.  We ended up taking the 66 mile trip all the way to the Eielson Visitors Center.  That's about 4 hours each way on the bus.  Why bother?  Because this is where you stand the best chance of getting a spectacular view of Mount McKinley.

See that snow capped mountain on the right?  That's not it.  It is only about 10,000 feet high.  That cloud in the middle?  That's it. If you look very closely and squint a bit, you can see the right hand edge of McKinley heading up at about a 45 degree angle.  That started coming into view and we had hopes that things might clear up.  Not a chance.  The bus ride was a total of eight hours and we didn't make it to the end of the road.  That's more like 12 hours round trip.

The next day it was time for us to leave the national park area and head east.  We hopped on the Denali Highway, the key east-west corridor between the thriving metropolises of Cantwell and Paxson.  The only downside is that they apparently forgot that "highways" are supposed to be paved, not dirt.

We stayed at the Tangle River Inn, which I would describe a a little village of hunting/fishing cabins.  Truly in the middle of nowhere, I was astounded to find that they had their own cell phone tower.  And as is so common when you aren't in a big city, Verizon had great reception and AT&T had absolutely nothing.

It was still raining (yes, this is like day 7 or 8), but we did go canoeing on the Tangle Lakes and followed that up with a scenic hike.  I wish I had brought my camera canoeing to document the adventure of having a canoe with a slow leak.  Slowly but surely, our boat was filling up.  By the time we pulled it to shore and dumped it, there was about 2-3 inches of water at my end of the boat.  Something about Julie weighing 60 pounds less than I do kept her boots from getting soaked.

The next day we left Tangle Lakes and an amazing thing happened.  THE RAIN STOPPED!!  I will spoil the ending. We were now set up for lots of sunshine.

Even as things started to clear up, we still had the problem of not seeing all the majestic mountains off in the distance.  I think that was my biggest disappointment with the rain.  It didn't stop us from our activities it made the photographs look more like Ireland and less like Alaska.

As we were driving towards the entrance to Wrangell-St Elias National Park, we spotted this coyote along the highway.  Ian stopped the van and let us watch him and shoot his picture for a while.

He was hunting, doing the leaping attack you see with fox.  As best we could tell, coyotes just aren't as good at this as foxes are.  He jumped, moved to a different spot, jumped, ... and so on.  Never once did we see him come up with anything.

How is it that I have never heard of Wrangell-St Elias National Park?  It is over 13 million acres of land.  As big as I thought Yellowstone is, this is 6 times bigger. You'll see lots of pictures of this fabulous park in my next blog entry.

Having now seen bears, moose,coyotes, sheep, caribou, mountain goats and more, we got into a discussion about what we wanted Ian to find us next.  We were getting to things like a bear throwing a moose, but I went with something more challenging:  a yak.  Even though they have no business in Alaska, Ian came through. As we were driving along the highway he pulled over for an entire herd of yak.   I guess I should have wished for something better.  Wasted that one.

Notice the blue skies! Life was getting better.  We did another hike to one of the many thousands of little lakes scattered around this old glacial terrain.

This one gave us quite a view though. 

Down on the lake there were some nice reflections of a northern spruce forest.  These are often referred to as drunken forests. The trees have really shallow roots and grow in boggy areas.  As a result, they never look very healthy and a frequently leaning at different angles.  By comparison, the southern spruce grew taller, straight, and beautiful.

As we were hiking down to the lake, I was taking some pictures of different moss and mushrooms.

The I ran across the famous Penis Mushroom.  This is a fairly small example, but it was a bit chilly.  Actually I have no idea what it is.

Now we are into nice weather and the trip (and the photography) keeps getting better.  Another blog entry soon.

Alaska - Anchorage and Seward

I have finally gotten far enough with my photographs that I can start tackling the blog in sections.  I just can't tell you how overwhelming 16 days in Alaska is.  Huge state.  Huge vacation.

Just getting to Alaska was Julie's 50th state. It may be a very long time until I reach that goal.  I have 47, missing only Mississippi, Arkansas and Oklahoma.   Honestly, I might be happy just leaving it that way.

We flew into Anchorage late one evening, spent the night, and then drove down toward Seward.  It isn't on this map, but it would be about the "P" in Kenai Peninsula. On our way, we were surprised to see a sign for the Alyeska Ski Resort. We had heard of it, but pictured it being up in some massive mountains.  The base was surprisingly close to sea level.

As you will see in these first few photos, there was a recurring theme: rain.  We knew that we were making a trade-off going in late August.  You are into the beginning of the rainy season but you have less bugs and fewer tourists.  What we didn't know was that we would spend good parts of the first 8 days in clouds, drizzle or plain old rain.  You just roll the dice and get whatever weather Mother Nature serves up.

Wet weather does make for pretty flowers though.  I was frequently surprised at how many flowers we saw in Alaska.

Heading to Seward, we also stopped at the Portage Glacier Visitors Center.  The clouds were hindering the views of the glacier, but we did stumble on the celebration of Smokey the Bear's 70th birthday.

Once we got to Seward, we found our little house we rented on VRBO.  I have mentioned this service before:  Vacation Rentals By Owners.  We have used this over and over again to find great places at reasonable prices. Once we settled in, we headed to the grocery store, which also housed the liquor store.  Talk about making you feel at home!  One of the first things we see is a whiskey made right here in Park City.

Seward is a funky little boating town with a population of about 3,000.  The harbor is deep enough that they can bring in huge cruise ships, which seems to double or even triple the population of town for a day.  We quickly started to find examples of "Almost anything goes in Alaska.  Do what you want."  Interesting yard art.

This guy decided that an easy way to make money was to drag a young reindeer around on a leash, let people take pictures of him, and then ask for donations.  It was a form of pan handling that both Julie and I abhor. Reindeer (better know as Caribou when you aren't reading Santa stories) belong out on the tundra, not locked up in some pen.

Our first adventure was supposed to be sea kayaking, but the waves were running too high so we switched and did our planned Exit Glacier hike instead. We hiked about 2-3 steep miles to get to the glacier and then booted up with crampons and helmets before wandering out onto the ice.

Between the hiking and the surprisingly pleasant weather, I was in a t-shirt on the way up.  When we got to the glacier, we discovered the katabatic winds.   These cold winds from the Harding Ice Field were flowing down the ice fall.  Suddenly I was wearing a fleece and fairly heavy rain gear.

Doesn't Julie look ready for anything?

This was our first day with glacial ice and we were stunned by the colors, shapes, textures, and massive size.  Little did we know that we would see ones that were much bigger and more impressive as the trip progressed.

In August the glaciers are retreating pretty aggressively.  It was stunning to see how much the glaciers have disappeared in the past few decades.  If you don't believe the climate is changing very rapidly, take a quick trip to Alaska.  The evidence is everywhere you look.

The next morning we got up to do our sea kayaking trip.  Once again, the waves were just too rough for us to go out in anything other than the local harbor, which is well protected.  Hard to imagine looking at this shot way up in Resurrection Bay.

The challenge is that we wanted to go down around the point, into the next bay, and up to the Aialik Glacier. Once you got out to the Gulf of Alaska, the waves were running around 10 feet.  The 25 foot water taxi that was supposed to take us kayaking didn't stand a chance.  We still wanted to see the glacier so we found a site seeing tour that was heading that way. We went on the Spirit of Adventure, an 85 foot catamaran. You can't get much more stable than that.  Can you?

The first clue that even a 85 footer might live up to its Adventure name was when the captain (a female by the way) said that if you had ever considered taking any type of seasick medication then this might be a great day to start.  Neither Julie nor I had been sick before but we decided to heed the warning and we popped some Bonine.

Sure enough, 10 foot waves are BIG and can toss around a decent sized ship with ease.  Here's a photo of Julie standing next to the doors that burst open when a wave caught the side of the ship.  That basically allowed a big wave of very cold salt water to pound inside where it didn't belong.  Both of us got drenched.  Thankfully my camera was in a backpack a bit further towards the bow.

Sure enough, quite a few people did get sick but the good news is that once we got around the point and into the next bay, the waves were calm and surprisingly, there were no other boats there with us.  Go figure!

The reason that we were motivated to get over in Aialik Bay was to see tidal glaciers. These are glaciers that terminate in water.

It was a bit hard to photograph from a distance, but we did get to see some good-sized blocks of ice calve off and splash into the water.

Although we were able to hike on parts of the Exit Glacier, most areas on the glaciers would be impossible to get around on.  With the never ending compression and decompression, the ice is badly fractured.  Most of these chunks are as tall as a 4 story building.

Another reason to go on the boat ride was to see the sea animals.  One of the highlights of the trip was this humpback whale.  While I only captured crappy back and butt shots like this one, he did breach pretty close to the boat, coming most of the way out of the water.  It was spectacular to see but too fast to get a camera up, aimed and focused. 

Julie and I love the river otters and sea otters.  They are just too cute, floating around in little groups, snacking and enjoying the sunshine.

These were the only mountain goats we saw on the trip.  It's a mom and her young one.

We also saw thousands of nesting sea birds, including puffins, gulls, and kittiwakes. Seals and sea lions found a lot of the same rocky outcrops a nice place to stay. Watching them climb to the top must be interesting.

The next morning we had to check out of our house and head back to Anchorage. Along the way we stopped in to visit the Alaska SeaLife Center. This place was part aquarium, part rehab for injured animals and part research. They had fish, mammals and birds, like this Puffin.

In Anchorage, the wet weather continued.  Our planned hike to the top of a mountain with great views wasn't going to be much more than a view through a cloud.  Instead we did a long hike on their Coastal Trail.  It felt a bit like Park City when people kept coming by on roller skis, training for cross country skiing.  While a lot of the places in Alaska don't get as much snow as we do, the very short winter days and sun closer to the horizon prevent a lot of solar melting.  That helps if you are trying to keep your cross country skiing tracks in good shape.

Finally the sun broke out in the afternoon.  It was only a short reprieve but it gave me a really cool photo of a building.  Anchorage is by far the largest population center in Alaska and looks a lot like many other cities with a few hundred thousand residents.

From here we start on the organized group part of our trip....

Back from Alaska

I know it has been a long time since I have posted anything out here.  We spent 16 days in Alaska where I took several bajillion photographs.  I am now sorting through them, although a bit slowly.  At some point I will get things posted out here.  Quite possibly the best trip we have ever taken!

In a completed unrelated photo, I was with Jasper at City Park today and ran across this.

They must have had a baseball or softball tournament and someone got the idea of leaving ball caps along the fence.  There were hundreds of them. Anyone in Park City needing hats, I know where you can get some cheap.

The Steigs come to town

John and Pattie Steigerwald, two of our best friends from Raleigh, came out to visit for a long weekend. We seemed to be dealing with on and off thunderstorms the entire time but we managed to get in two rounds of golf, a visit to the Kimball Arts Festival, a Utah Symphony concert, and a wonderful outdoor lunch at Royal Street, my first of the year.

A visit from Laura

Our niece Laura is on her summer break from Gonzaga, up in Spokane, WA.  She was on a road trip with her boyfriend and two other friends down to Price, UT.  On their drive heading back to Gonzaga, they were kind enough to stop by and say "howdy".

We had breakfast together at Squatters before they started off again for another 10 hours of driving.  It was great to get to see Laura. It has been too long.

Jasper still has the speed

Julie and I took Jasper to City Park for some exercise.  At almost 11 years old, the dog can still fly!

Teaching a photography class

Every once in a while, I teach a photography class over at the Kimball Arts Center.  This time, it was two afternoons with six teenagers.  The first day we were walking around Park City.  The second, we hopped in the Pilot and went to some more remote locations around town.

I mostly kept my camera in my bag and focused on their efforts, but every once in a while I would snap a quick shot.  This is just some quick examples of the things you can shoot.

Two blocks from the center, there is a stream that normally runs pretty dry in the summer.  This year, because of some pipe construction, there is more water running.  It's a great place to learn about long shutter speeds versus quick ones.

Down the creek is Park City's famous shoe tree.  Lots of opportunities to find different angles and play with depth of field.

One of the reasons I like working with kids is they are always finding creative things to shoot.  This student turned out to be the daughter of two people I got to know through CrossFit. That's life in a small town.

The skateboard park is normally a good place to learn how to predict where action will happen, but you never know whether anyone will be doing bigger tricks.  This was a fairly hot summer day to be out in the sun and the boarders were pretty lethargic, even when lured by six photographers.

There are a number of places around town with funky art to shoot.

Then we hit the city park playground. We were trying to find creative angles to get shots.  The star burst next to her head is from a reflection off a car windshield a long ways off.  It's pretty distracting, but I liked it anyway.

Another student, Zach, in the playground.  I shot him from the side a number of times, but that was looking pretty boring.  Then I managed to get this one where it almost looks like he is standing on the fence, looking over the bar.

Park City's Old Town has so many interesting subjects, even just walking along the street.

Day 1 was very hot and everyone was melting by the end.  For Day 2, we traveled by car between stops and kept it a little shorter. We even made a quick Slurpee stop at the 7-11.

Up at Guardsman's Pass, the flowers were blooming big time!

Sadly, we lost two of the kids for the second day.  One had come up from Salt Lake City and they weren't sure they could get her back to Park City again the next day.  Never heard from the other girl, Emily.  Sad to have lost her, but these four were great!

Teenagers are  fun to work with because they are creative, motivated, and suck up information like a sponge.  I really enjoyed it.

Running a 5k

As many of you may know, I am not supposed to be running at all because I basically have bone-on-bone in my right knee.  Running can earn me a knee replacement surgery.  Just the same, I get the urge to run the occasional race.  To avoid all the wear and tear, I do absolutely no training.  I rely on some combination of a natural inclination to run and brute stupid will.

One race I do every year is the July 4th 5k.  This year there were a little over 1000 runners, and more women than men.  My goal was to grind out a sub 8:00 minute mile pace, and I made it with about 20 seconds to spare.  I was 7th out of 50 in my age/gender and I would have crushed it if I was allowed in the age 70-99 category.  Now the humbling part.

Living in this uber athletic town, I am used to being beaten by 15 year old high school track stars.  In this race, one beat me by about 6:30.  Nice run! Two things did bother me.  The first was getting beaten by a 6 year old boy.  I was standing next to him at the starting line and he came up to about my hip. At the 2.5 mile mark, he was ahead of me.  This pissed me off so I started cranking up the pace.  Right then, a 12 year old girl passed him.  That pissed him off and he accelerated dramatically.  Are you kidding?  There was no way I could catch him.  I slowed down and he beat me by 40 seconds.

In a different category was the 10 year old girl who smoked me by over 5 minutes.  Grace Ping ran a 19:15.  Essentially, she was out of my vision after the first 400 yards or so.  I read up on her.  She ran a race back at the end of April, doing a 5k on a track in 18:02!  For those of you struggling with the math, that's 5:48 miles.  Yes, she shattered the world record for 10 year old girls.

So, while I was OK with my ability to run a decent race without no training runs for nine months, I still feel somehow robbed of any joy or pride. Getting your ass kicked by a 10 year old girl and a 6 year old boy is pretty humbling.  Normally I would crank up my running and start dpoing some intervals for speed.  With a bum knee, I just go for a bike ride.