Journeys: Anchorage and Denali National Park, Alaksa - Sightseeing

Saturday, August 13, 2005

Anchorage and Denali National Park, Alaksa - Sightseeing

I'm back! I just got back to SLC this morning after an awesome week in Alaska. The weather was so unbelievably perfect!! Hardly a cloud in the sky all week and temps in the 70s. I didn't wear any of the cool weather gear that i lugged up - just shorts and t-shirts. The mosquitoes up in Alaska weren't as bad as i feared. I only broke out the 100% DEET one time.

DAY 1 - flew up to anchorage ... via phoenix (booo!!)
DAY 2 - hiked Flattop Mountain near anchorage with Jeff - awesome views up top and a pretty good hike. hit up Kincaid Park and the Coastal Trail later that day.
DAY 3- Alaska art and history museum in Anchorage. Then drove up to near Trapper Creek to spend the night. awesome views of Denali on the way up. watched the sun set over Denali after 10pm (stays light almost all night up there).
DAY 4 - all day biking with Jeff through Denali national park and preserve. Finally met up with Tim! He managed to hitch a ride on some random flight and they landed and tossed him out on the road near where i spent the night. We sat outside almost all night and waited for the northern lights - they never came. So weird how it never gets totally dark at night.
DAY 5 - tram ride and then a hike up to the summit of Mt. Alyeska south of anchorage. touched my first glacier. Tim and i played in the glacial runoff for hours - amazing views of the inlet and surrounding glaciers.
DAY 6 - saw a bunch of people fishing for poor defenseless salmon. boat ride out to Portage glacier - so awesome! saw chunks of ice falling off the glacier into the water.
DAY 7 - flew back to SLC via phoenix again. saw the northern lights and Perseid meteor shower from the plane!

Some Alaska pics...

"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards"

-- Edward Abbey

"The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. "

-- John Muir

"To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from."

-- Terry Tempest Williams

"There may be people who feel no need for nature. They are fortunate, perhaps. But for those of us who feel otherwise, who feel something is missing unless we can hike across land disturbed only by our footsteps or see creatures roaming freely as they have always done, we are sure there should be wilderness. Species other than man have rights, too. Having finished all the requisites of our proud, materialistic civilization, our neon-lit society, does nature, which is the basis for our existence, have the right to live on? Do we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness this right?"

-- Margaret E. Murie

"I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly. Why muck and conceal one's true longings and loves, when by speaking of them one might find someone to understand them, and by acting on them one might discover oneself?"

-- Everett Ruess