with Jim and Gayle

July, 2007

We continued our Alaska adventure this month.

From Fairbanks, we moved to Denali National Park.  Mt. McKinley lived up to its reputation of being hard to see.  The day we arrived it was visible (it's the ghost at the center of this picture) but we could only get to within 75 miles of it.  The day we took the park tour, the mountain had disappeared behind the clouds.

The motorcade stopped in Anchorage.  We didn't do much there.

From Anchorage we moved on to Seward.  We quite enjoyed Seward.  It is a coastal town with salmon and halibut fishing.  We didn't fish, but we did go to Exit Glacier.

Our RV park in Kenai overlooked the mouth of the Kenai River.  The river had opened to dipnetting (Alaska residents only).  It was fun to watch how successful this was.

Homer on the Homer Spit was a very picturesque stop.

On our second visit to Anchorage, we took a float trip among the icebergs of Spencer Glacier and down the Placer River.  It was pretty cool to float with the icebergs.

Valdez was an amazing stop.  We did so many things here.

We took a Prince William Sound Cruise to two glaciers.  The first was Columbia Glacier one of the largest tidewater glaciers in the state.  It produces the largest icebergs outside of the Artic and Greenland.

We then went to Meares Glacier where we could get right up to its face and hear it crackling and see it calving.

The end of the Alaska Pipeline, the TransAlaska Pipeline Terminal is at Valdez.  We cruised past it, and later, our RV campspot faced it across the bay.

One of the things I've always heard about Alaska was the creeks full of spawning salmon.  I got to see one (Solomon Creek) in Valdez.  Even though the pink salmon (humpies) were at the end of their run, the creek was still jammed with them.

Throughout Alaska, we saw these amazing "braided" rivers formed by all of the sediment being carried by the meltwater flowing out of a glacier.  This one was near Valdez.

Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh, my!  No lions or tigers, but plenty of other animals. We saw moose, eagles, otters, stellar sea lions, puffins, caribou, sandhill cranes, grizzly bears (that's a mother griz and her two cubs), stone goats, reindeer (at the Large Animal Research Station(LARS)-- does that count?), halibut, dall sheep, wolves, black bears, musk ox (again at the LARS), humpback whales, and bison (also salmon though not pictured).