Blogs from Alaska, United States, North America - page 4

Today was a good day that left me a bit in awe of Alaska. I woke-up and forced myself to go exercise like a normal person. I have met my step goal every day on vacation but today I actually huffed it around the track for over 2 miles and got my heart rate up and even sweated a little bit. It felt great!! It’s not surprising how fast I can walk with no dog on the leash and a nice, level surface. After walking and breakfast, I watched the movie “Gifted” on our stateroom TV. It was okay. Today our ship sailed to the Hubbard Glacier which is the most northern part of this ship’s journey for us. The glacier is 76 miles long and 6 miles wide and is the largest glacier in North ... read more

Today is a day where the ship moves to a new place and doesn’t stop anywhere. They call them Sea Days. You sleep in, walk the ship, play games, etc. I slept until 6am (that's 8am Missouri time). I walked a little bit of the ship which is ornate but not too gaudy. The fog was so bad today the captain had to blow the horn every three minutes for most of the day until late this afternoon. The only thing we could see off our balcony was fog. It still felt great sitting out there… for about 15 minutes at a time. There was no view and it was chilly-chilly. This afternoon things have cleared-up and you can see the mountains peeking out from the clouds. I found the REAL walking track after dinner tonight!! ... read more

In some ways Anchorage feels like any other US city, with wide streets set out in a grid pattern, but look up and there are snow-covered mountains in every direction. Sea-planes fly overhead, snow-mobiles sit in backyards and houses have moose fences. Alaska is huge, over twice the size of any other US state or, in European terms, larger than France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined. And it is remote, it took us over three hours to fly here from Seattle, the nearest city in continental USA. There are few tourists so many locals want to chat. A police officer checks that we are not lost and then recommends a good coffee shop and places for dinner; the mail man assures us that the 'dead end' does lead to the shore; a couple who are gardening ... read more

Today I had booked a 3 hour guided hike with Walk Denali, a local hiking company. And then I decided that wasn't enough and did another hike in the afternoon. I think I'm all hiked out now. I grabbed breakfast from the lodge because that's basically the only option for food. Pickup for the hike was to be between 7:45 and 8 so I headed up to the parking lot to wait for the guide to arrive. There were two couples on the hike plus myself. Our guide, Jeremy, has lived in Alaska for 15 years and really likes hunting. But he was also very knowledgeable about the plants, landscape and wildlife. He took us to the Three Lakes Trail, which is part of Denali NP but we used a trail head at the south end ... read more

Denali National Park was established in 1917, however it was then called Mount McKinley National Park. Apparently people were huge fans of President McKinley and thought that was a better name than the one the native people's had called the mountain. I had to look him up because I couldn't even remember his first name or when he was president. The name debate continued and in 1980 the name of the park was changed to Denali NP but the mountain was still called McKinley. Finally, in 2015, the mountain was officially resorted to Denali. The park is a little over 6 million acres and has one road that extends 93 miles into the park. The first 15 miles is paved and open to cars, the rest is by tour bus or campground bus only. However, as ... read more