Final Alaskan Adventures

I’ve been back from Alaska for several weeks now, and I thoroughly apologize for my terribly tardy postings. The first post (below) was very long-winded and focused on a single day. I shall now try to summarize everything else and post a few more photos.

WILDLIFE
One thing people keep asking about is whether or not we saw a bear, eagle, whale, orangutan, etc. Okay, so nobody asked about orangutans but many have asked about what sort of wildlife we saw.

We saw a bunch of grizzly bears but they were all far away and non-people-eating, though I guess a few adolescent males have been having fun all summer coming through the Savage River campground and chasing campers. They hadn’t been seen for a few days when we got there and didn’t show up during our stay. Mostly I think the bears were gorging themselves on blueberries and couldn’t be bothered in their blueberry-drunk state to pay much attention to boring humans.

The bears we all saw were from the bus. I think we saw about six or so in Denali National Park and then a little black bear on the bus ride back to Anchorage. From the bus we also saw a lot of sheep and a number of caribou, which I thought were really cool and beautiful. The carribou were all rather far away so I don’t have any photos, but trust me they are lovely. The day before we drove through the park there had been a hunt and kill (wolves hunting and killing sheep) right by the road, but we missed it and didn’t see any wolves while we were in Alaska. I was somewhat disappointed as I did want to see a wolf, but we did get to see a lot of great big owls that lived in the trees above our tent and that was totally cool.

On our trip to Seward we saw salmon spawning in a river and they were so thick it seemed you could walk across the river on them. We also saw them jumping about at the mouth of a different river with some fat tourists trying to catch them before they headed up into the river. I guess you don’t actually try to get them to bite, you just jerk the line and hook along in the hopes that you’ll snag one that way. It seems like a silly method until you realize they are so focused on the spawning thing that they won’t bite anything and they are so thick in the water that your chances of snagging one are very good. We also saw a seal playing about in the water and he was having much more success catching fish.

The highlight, however, is my friend Muffin the Moose. I don’t know why I was so caught up in wanting to see a moose. They are everywhere in Alaska and are almost pests the way deer can be by eating our gardens and causing car wrecks. They are everywhere in Denali but we didn’t see any and I was quite sad. HOWEVER, in our friends’ backyard in Anchorage moose often come munching through and we saw several moose the two evenings we were there before leaving for California. I was quite excited.

EVERYTHING’S BIGGER IN ALASKA
People who say, “Everything is bigger in Texas,” obviously haven’t been to Alaska. If one were to cut Alaska in half, Texas would still only be the third largest state. Denali National Park – a small blip on the map of Alaska – is the size of Vermont. Their mountains are huge, their animals are huge and their vegetables are humungous! This summer was very wet so things didn’t get as big as usual but it is quite common to have 80-pound cabbages. One year there was a 900-pound pumpkin. NINE HUNDRED POUNDS! They have mushrooms bigger than your head and spinach that resemble palm leaves. We got to go to the Alaska State Fair and saw these suckers first hand. One of the dahlias was the size of a dinner plate.

GLACIERS
And speaking of big stuff… Another thing I was very eager to see while in Alaska was a glacier. We sort of saw one from far away on the bus in Denali, but I got an up close view of several when we drove down to Seward for the day. The Portage Glacier was quite pretty and you could see it glowing bright blue from quite a ways away. Glaciers are so incredibly dense – the snow and ice on top weighs down and compresses the snow and ice below – that you get whacky colors and textures and stuff so that it doesn’t even look like snow. From what we were reading they don’t even have a way to measure how deep some of the glaciers and ice fields are.

We also got to see Exit Glacier in the Kenai Fjords National Park. Exit Glacier is so named because it was one of the original “exits” explorers, scientists and other such adventurers would use when leaving the Harding Ice Field. Imagine a vast desert with rock formations and mountains jutting up. Now imagine that allllllll of that is snow and ice. I don’t remember how large the Harding Ice Field is but it is miles and miles and miles across and around and it is all snow and ice with little glacier tongues spitting out here and there. Unfortunately much of it isn’t really accessible by land (you generally need a boat or a plane) and the one hike that gives you a view is fairly long and grueling. In general we would be up for the hike and originally planned on it, but by the time we got to Seward and Kenai Fjords National Park we were a little worn-out from our adventures and didn’t have a ton of time to burn. Christopher also had a bum knee so we did the easy amble to Exit Glacier, wandered around a bit and then drove back to Seward for sandwiches on the beach.

CONCLUSION
I said I would summarize and implied I wouldn’t be long-winded, but it seems I can’t help myself. It is just that it was such a great trip with so much that we did and saw and thought that even all these words seem so pale in comparison with the memories. I know that my little babblings and snap shots don’t come close to conveying what it was like, but hopefully I've given you an idea - or maybe even just a glimmer of an idea.

To finish off in a very concise manner: we had an amazing trip.