Interesting Factoid

I just found out last night on TV that mules (the result of a cross between a male donkey and a female horse) can see all 4 of their feet, while horses can only see 2. That's one of the reasons why they use mules to traverse the Grand Canyon trails. Interesting, no? I was absolutely fascinated. Can you imagine? Horse girl didn't know that! I just had to share.

I have one more back post that's been sitting idle while I satisfied my Alaska obsession. I will get to it, I swear! Ron and I also now have one day off together! HURRAH! So maybe we'll do more exploring. :) By the way. I don't know how I messed up my font, but I know that little one is icky, so I'm going to try to change it.

The Last Day :(

Finally - the last of my Alaska posts! After our boat tour in Seward, we headed to Exit Glacier so Ron and I could see a glacier up close and personal! I guess that means we did see some of Kenai Fjords National Park because it encompasses the area we visited. In fact, it's the only area of the park accessible by car.

We first walked the lower trail that took us to the outwash area at the glacier's base. We touched the water just to see, and it was FREEZING! We got a kick out of it though. We didn't want to cross that cold water in our shoes, so we next hiked the upper trail that goes closer to the glacier. As we neared it, we started to feel the icy air flowing toward us from over the hill. It was like standing near an open walk-in freezer door. The air was extra fresh and crisp. The glacier itself was beautiful. It's an alpine glacier that is part of the ancient Harding Ice Field. You can hike the 7 miles to the ice field, but we didn't have the time or stamina. That's another on our list for next time! Click here for an account from someone who did. It's very interesting. My favorite part was seeing the blue spires in one section of the ice. I had always seen those photos of gorgeous blues in glaciers and was happy to find them on that one section there. This photo gives a decent perspective on size and color.

We stayed overnight in Seward in a lovely Army townhome, and visited the Alaska SeaLife Center the next morning. It's a beautiful center of native sea animals, made possible by money from the Exxon oil spill years back. We highly enjoyed ourselves and managed to get a closer murre photo.

We then headed back to Anchorage and explored a little more of it before our 1am flight to Phoenix. We were very very sad to go. Both Ron and I could have easily spent another week there. And it was made all the more wonderful by our fabulous hosts whose love of Alaska is infectious. Thanks and love ya!

This chocolate waterfall at the Mooseberry store in Anchorage has nothing to do with wildlife, but I think it was Ron's highlight (aside from the whale sightings), so I had to post it just for him. :)

July 28th - Our trip to Seward

We made the drive to Seward with the whole family! The drive is just gorgeously full of picture perfect views. Of course isn't that Alaska? The first part cuts along the Turnagain Arm (fun name huh?) with the mountains to one side and water on the other. Here we saw dall sheep MUCH closer than in Denali. They were easy to spot because of all the cars pulled off on the side with people pointing. :) It's also said that you can often find Belugas here, but we weren't so lucky.

As you get closer to Seward, the mountains start to surround you again, but the views are no less startling.

Our main draw for going to Seward was to take a boat trip into Resurrection Bay to view wildlife and alpine glaciers. It would have been nice to go into Kenai Fjords National Park (pronounced KEE-nye, but we were worried about seasickness, time and money. Oh well, on our list for next time!!


The first things we saw on the trip were tufted puffins! I was so excited to see them because puffins are just adorably clumsy little birds. They are much smaller than they seem in photos.


A short time later we saw horned puffins, which I find even cuter. Their bones are more dense than usual for a bird to better allow for diving. As a result, watching them take off for flight was very interesting. :)

Along with the puffins, were lots of common murres up in cliffs. Though they are capable of flight, I've heard murres referred to as the penguins of the north.

We also saw the huge stellar sea lions. It was so funny to hear so many of them vocalizing at once. This was the "young adult" population. The rookery is farther out.

The last boat photo we have is of the kittiwake colony farther out in the bay. We didn't see any babies, but it was cool to see even a small colony of cliff nesting birds.

As we were looking for birds, our captain caught a blow from a whale. On the second blow we saw it too! It was a young humpback doing "sounding dives" according to the captain. We had one good view of his flukes and back, but he never came up out of the water. We saw one other young humpack doing the same thing. Even though they didn't breach, it was still so cool to see them. We didn't manage to catch it on film though.

When we headed back toward the dock I was a little bummed. We hadn't seen any sea otters. So I scoured the waters in the hopes of catching a glimpse. At the last minute, I saw a body floating on the top of the water. It was the otter! We actually saw two on the way in. We didn't see them close because there were too many boats, but man were they cute! A harbor seal also popped its head up on the way in to see what was going on. She was so close I could see her big dark eyes. It was very exciting.

When we got in, my aunt steered us toward the fish filet table. Ron was in his element. We saw salmon, rockfish and halibut. The halibut were SO huge! I had never realized how big they were! It may sound silly, but I also hadn't realized they were built like flounder. You can see them here in the big cart.

OK, I know, I know, this is a huge post, but I have to close with this shot of the cousins.
I only have one more Alaska post to tell you about the SeaLife Center and Exit glacier. It's been hard to get to it with our house closing coming up tomorrow!

We saw the mountain!

On the way back from Denali, the clouds started to lift, and the sun came out. We stopped in that beautiful area we've come to call "our valley," and took more photos. As we were pulling out, I looked up and saw a white peak cresting just above a line of clouds. I whipped out the binoculars and said, "Ron LOOK! It's Denali!!!" We were still just a few miles outside the park, so that 20,320 foot elevation was absolutely astonishing. It's not the tallest mountain in world, but it has the greatest gain in elevation. It juts straight up to its full elevation. I can't even explain how massive and breathtaking it is.

You may have noticed that I referred to it as "Denali." In that area, most Alaskans call the peak "Denali" even though nationally it's recognized as Mt. McKinley. I preferred to call it Denali (the great one) as well. Go to this site for more information on the fascinating conflict over the peak's name: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/liesacrossamerica.htm

When we were in the park gift shop, we saw a 30% pin. The cashier explained that only 30% of the people who come to the park ever see Denali because it's so often in clouds on the south side. We felt very fortunate to be in that minority and decided to get to the state park lookout site as fast as we could. We kept getting tantalizing and majestic glimpses of the mountain the whole 2 hours to the state park lookout point. The difference from our first stop there was amazing. Even from hours away, Denali was so imposing and gorgeous. Yay! We saw it!!

And the biggest deal for me??!!!

DENALI NATIONAL PARK! This was the cornerstone of my experience. Everything else was awesome, but this was beyond for me. I've wanted to see this park for as long as I've known it existed. It is 6 million acres and the only complete ecosystem that's protected in the United States. It's large enough for all is wildlife so that wardens don't have to drive animals back into the park or introduce hunting to keep numbers healthy.

We had shuttle bus reservations for 9:30 am to Toklat. (which is a river and means dishwater by the way. haha) We got up bright and early so we could have time to meander and get front row seats!

The trip is 53 miles into the park and almost 6 hrs long, but so worth it. In fact we want to go deeper into the park. You wind through lowland scrub spruce terrain up into tundra and on trails etched into mountain sides. At one point, buses had to stop for oncoming buses because you couldn't pass each other on the same cliff road. One lady was having vapors, but I thought it was fun. Anyway, I thought I'd just give you a rundown of what we saw and let the photos speak for themselves. In the beginning we saw mostly ground squirrels that look sort of like a prairie dog, red squirrels and snowshoe hares. They were so beautiful with their soft gray fur and huge ears and feet (the better to hope through snow with!).

By the end of the trip, we had seen 10 grizzlies, 2 while we were standing at a rest stop overlook, 4 caribou and countless numbers of dall sheep that looked like white dots on the mountainside. We also saw a male northern harrier which I didn't even identify right away because I was so not looking for it. :) There were so many other animals to be on the lookout for, like pikas, wolverines and marmots, but they're harder to see.

Enjoy!
Polychrome Pass was my favorite scenic point on the drive. The photos don't do justice to the gorgeous mountain colors and beautiful overlook.
Dall sheep far off on the mountainside. Nice sense of scale huh?
This caribou ran directly in front of our bus. Both sexes have antlers and lose them at different times, but this one is a male.
We were lucky in that we saw this mother and her cub twice. This second time they were much closer to the road. This cub is the only one they've noticed born this spring. They know that because he's such a dark color. In Denali, the bears become blonde as they age. The cub was eating the white bear flowers that only cubs eat.

The Perch

The Perch is the cabin "resort" where we stayed south of Denali. It was an
absolutely charming, if spare, little place. We shared a bath house. You should have seen me sneaking out, fearful of bears, at 3am to use it. I made Ron go with me. hehehe

Anyway, the Perch's restaurant is a beautifully Alaskan decorated little building "perched" on the side of a hill, overlooking the mountains. We had breakfast there the morning of our Denali adventure. It was a sunny, beautiful morning, and we played on the deck and watched the birds and squirrels eating bread thrown by the proprietor. (which I don't endorse, by the way! ;-)

The red squirrels were so small and cute! I'd never seen them before.
The gray jays there are slightly larger than blue jays, but so much fluffier that they look a lot larger. They were such a gorgeous soft gray, and less bold than ours.
This is a dark eyed junco (I think). Very cute.
Since we didn't see an actual wolf, I had to show you this gorgeous carving.

A Beautiful Drive to Denali

On Wednesday we picked up our rental car and headed out on the 4.5 hr drive from Anchorage to Denali. We actually took 7 hrs because we enjoyed stopping to drink in the scenery so much. As far as wildlife goes, we saw tons of common ravens and heard their crazy calls. We also saw many black billed magpies. They were so pretty with their mix of black, white and blue. It was hard to ID small birds from the road. We DID manage to see a rock ptarmigan though. He was standing in the middle of the road and didn't move even when we swerved to avoid him! As the cars behind us swerved, he still refused to move. Let's hope the silly bird made it.

Here are some highlights:
This is the only way we saw a moose. ;-) These signs were all along the raod from Wasilla on.


All the town signs farther up north were hand detailed, but this one cracked us up. Talkeetna is a base camp for climbing Denali. The "tna" on the end of words means "river."
We could not see Mt. McKinley because of the cloud cover, as is usually the case, but the scenery in Denali State Park outside the national park is spectacular. This was Hurricane Gulch and caught us entirely off guard. We stopped and Ron ran back onto the bridge to get this shot. Good job honey!Much closer to Denali, we came upon this valley. The purple flower is fireweed. The absolute silence, fresh pine air and larger than life scenery was so overwhelmingly beautiful.It was so odd to have daylight until 11pm and then to not have any total darkness at all, but it sure allowed us to enjoy more views! Here's the view from our little cabin.
Think that's enough? Too many photos? Just wait until the actual Park and Seward posts... mwahahahahaha