Contributing Photographer: Michael Weinstein We planned on making a variation of Dawn's Loop today. We left The Gateway at 9:00 AM and headed west towards Bent's Camp on the Cisco Chain of Lakes. The trail goes over 4 lakes in the chain, marked by orange barrels. We rode the lakes north to the Cisco Bar, then further north to Trail 2 in Michigan. We headed west on Trail 2 to to Trail 1, which we rode south to Presque Isle, WI. We stopped for lunch at the Skyview Lodge in Presque Isle: http://www.skyviewlodge.com/ At this point, we had ridden a bit over 50 miles, and every mile was perfect riding. We couldn't believe how smooth the trails were considering that it is a Monday after the weekend riding. After lunch and the welcome break we headed ... read more

It's been a very slow beginning to the snow season here in the upper Midwest. There have been a couple pretty good snow storms, but they have tracked much further south than the northwoods of Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where I usually ride. Southern and central Wisconsin have a large array of well maintained snowmobile trails similar to the northern trails. As a matter of fact, Wisconsin has over 25,000 miles of snowmobile trails, the most of any state in snow country. I rode in Green, LaFayette and Dane counties last week with my friend, Pat. It was good enough that I was more than willing to come back this week with Jan. We're staying at the Americinn in Monroe, just north of the Illinois-Wisconsin state line, north of Freeport, IL. The area ... read more

This trip has gone really well. The weather, which obviously is out of our control, has been fantastic. The planning, which we did control, was very good with one exception. I planned today to be an 8 hour bus tour of Denali National Park. Three years ago, I couldn't fit this into my itinerary and drove into the park with the Suburban to see what I could see. Well, you can only drive private vehicles 16 miles into the park and that doesn't afford you much of a look at the park. My mistake was driven by the faulty memory that it was about 50 miles from Talkeetna to Denali. It's more like 115 miles, which would take about 2-1/2 hours. We had to meet the tour bus at 8:15 AM, so we woke up around ... read more

We have another exciting adventure planned for today. At 8:00AM we drove over to Talkeetna Air Taxi at the Talkeetna Airport. Talkeetna Airport is the base for all flightseeing tours of Denali and also the base for climbers to be flown up to base camps where they start their climb of Mt. McKinley. Each year about1,200 people attempt to climb it. On June 16th, 4 Japanese climbers died climbing after hit by an avalanche. At 20,328 ft., Mt. McKinley is the highest mountain in North America. It is also considered to be the tallest mountain in the world from base to peak. According to Wikipedia: "McKinley has a summit elevation of 20,320 feet (6,194 m) above sea level, making it the highest peak in North America.url=http://en.wiki... read more

(Sorry, but this one's a biggie. It just has to be big! Just a reminder that you can see the full size pictures by clicking on any of them.) Today we were to fly to Katmai National Park to see the Brown Bears in the Brooks River feeding on salmon. Brown Bears are what we in the lower 48 call Grizzly Bears. I guess the correct name is Brown Bears as naturalists have been telling us. They are bigger in Alaska than in the west, and the biggest ones are the coastal Brown Bears that feed on the plentiful salmon. The inland bears grow to 600-700 lbs., but the coastal bears can go up to 1,200 lbs. The largest are the Kodiak Bears of Kodiak Island. They get as big as 1,500 lbs.! All Brown Bears ... read more