This morning was brilliant sunshine. Today’s aim was to drive the long trip back to Anchorage including some stops of interest before flying out late tonite and overnite for Denver then immediately onto Los Angeles where we are stationed for a whole day before the really long flight home. Today’s features included two wayside stops to see Mt McKinley and a chance black bear sighting. Both Denali viewing points were at either end of the Denali State Park which is another special area but run by the state of Alaska as opposed to the national park run by the federal government. [View Full Entry]

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Today’s critter sightings- we finally caught up with some Snowshoe hares near one of the currently unused winter ranger stations, this one was not far from Savage River and the Parks Road in the Denali Wilderness. This is a log cabin in the bush. Outside there are half a dozen wood dog kennels. The outside window battens of the cabin have long nails protruding thru to the outside to stop nosy grizzlies from taking a further interest. It was near here, amongst the very soft under foot, sphagnum moss undergrowth that we saw a few of our hares and got some [View Full Entry]

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Well last night’s sleep was interesting, it never got really dark and twilight was probably a better way to describe the 4 or so hours of night. This morning we caught the 10:30 am 6 hr return bus into the Denali Nat Park and almost immediately, critters started appearing. First a gray wolf (gray to white) trotted on the road just in front of our bus for about 50m before catching a small rodent and disappearing into the grassy undergrowth - we know wolf sightings are quite rare so what a start to today. Then we came across a mother grizzly [View Full Entry]

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We left Anchorage about 10.30am for Denali National Park about 250 miles inland after obtaining some quick food stocks from our local mall. The drive was uneventful passing thru suburbs and towns. We did see a few businesses advertising building log cabins with examples out front; we saw float planes on a river bank and on a lake. Whilst mentioning this, Alaska has the highest number of float planes than anywhere else in the USA (we saw them at the side of the main Anchorage International Airport where they have a water runway and at the local airport where I assume [View Full Entry]

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Today is the start of the last leg of the trip. No problems all this morning, our pre arranged coach trip from the boat at Whittier to Anchorage.. 60 miles away went off without a hitch. We picked up the rental car, another Chevy Cobalt at the airport and off we went. Anchorage is about the size of Geelong 250,000 pop if that’s a fair comparison. Its pretty flat, has some big shopping centres. Although the temp is 11 degrees and sunny, many people are in T shirts (but not us). The traffic appears to be like Canada, that is, much [View Full Entry]

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Unlike the last few days, it began cloudy but the sun came out late afternoon (our luck continues). We made for College Fjord 60 degrees north of the equator. There are about 8 glaciers here all separated from each other. Yesterday we were told the visibility here, was zero, which wouldn’t have been good for yesterday’s tourists but today our luck continued and its a horrible thought but, you can literally come here only once in your life and if it’s the wrong day … a terrible thought. Anyway we saw sea otters lazing on big flat house size icebergs only [View Full Entry]

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This beautiful sunny morning we were 50 degrees north of the equator in Glacier Bay, Alaska. Glacier Bay is a deep narrow inlet where many millions of years ago, a giant glacier receded to let the sea come in. Usually two cruise ships enter this bay each day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. A National Parks Ranger boards the ship and gives a permit to enter and then makes a running commentary of the area from the ships bridge. We headed to the end of the inlet to Margarite Glacier and to Grand Pacific Glacier. As we [View Full Entry]

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Today we woke to be in Skagway. A pretty town pop 800 and a sunny day with no wind. The town sits at the mouth of a large valley that finishes at an inlet where we are berthed. The town is clean and all painted up in a recreation of a cowboy town including all the classic shopfronts and wooden sidewalks - only the cars and the bitumen road bought it into the 21st century. I don’t know this, but its an ideal movie set if that hasn’t already been done here at some time. Maurs found a quilt shop and [View Full Entry]

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We woke this morning to find the ship berthed here in Juneau, the capital of Alaska. The pop is 30,000 without cruise ships (4 in here today). The ships berth right close to town just as they do in Ketchikan. The main town difference here, is that Juneau is larger, looks more prosperous, has the usual tourist shops which seem to account for most of the city shops. Outside the immediate town limits is the suburbs that have the more usual shops and services. We took a ride on the Skyway Tram to the top of Mount Roberts, which offered a [View Full Entry]

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We woke up this morning with the ship in port at Ketchikan (Alaska), a small fishing town that swells massively when, as there was today, 4 cruise ships in town - that’s 8000 more people. The tourist industry just goes bang when this happens. We got a local newspaper that shows on average about 3 ships visit here each day for the next week ! the tourists are so important here, that the town puts out crossing supervisors to stop the traffic, so tourists can safely cross the city streets. It was cloudy and about 15 degrees but otherwise good weather. [View Full Entry]

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