Alaska

In Alaska:

You see so many moose that you almost get used to it.  

There are incredible mountains. We saw Denali, the highest peak in North America.  

You can see multiple glaciers on the same stretch of highway

The Fairbanks museum has a blue mummified bison

We saw baby Musk Ox

We took a float plane for a tour of the mountains. Amazing ride and the sixty two year old pilot looked our age. Must be good living here.



You can camp for free at any roadside pullout, and most come with an amazing view.

Dall sheep are easy to spot on the cliff sides.

Trumpeter swans are everywhere and they are wild! Today we saw a pair with five cygnets, and also saw a lake with almost two dozen swans. All wild!!!!

Russians are here! We ate piroshki that we bought from a youn woman in traditional Russian garb. We visited a Russian Orthodox church, with a cemetery full of windflowers, all overlooking the Pacific. A great place to be dead!

Halibut fish and chips are amazing ( and expensive!)

Rivers are an incredible jade like green. So are some lakes. 

Reindeer are simply farmed Caribou. They make pretty good sausage, as do Elk and Yak. 

There are bears everywhere, but the only live ones we saw were at an animal rehabilitation center. Still, when the nine hundred pound grizzly walked out of the bushes twenty feet from me, my heart beat quicker and I knew that it could get through the fence if really wanted to. The claws on that thing! And the size!

We saw many stuffed Grizzlies, or Brown Bears, as they are called here. The dead ones were even larger than the live ones. However a live one did take a hiker’s backpack a couple of hour before we arrived at a closed trail in Denali National Park. 

They grow huge vegetables here. A short growing season is offset easily by twenty plus daily hours of sunshine.  

You can drive to the end of either (or both ) the most northerly or the most westerly highway in North America. We went west.

The town of Homer release salmon fry into a salt water pool on their spit. The salmon return to the pool to spawn, which they cannot, because it is not fresh water, and so effectively must either die by spawning or by being caught, as their instincts are telling them that they have arrived, but the habitat is not suitable for spawning. It is a diabolical way of stocking an ocean pool. The result is maniacal and unsporting fishing of large Pacific salmon on a daily basis by hundreds of tourists, some whom I suspect have never fished before. I would say you be the judge, but I obviously have some feelings about it. 

Across the road from the pescacide, a miracle. Sea Otters are frolicking in the ocean on their backs, diving down and coming up to stuff their faces. We saw at least five, two of whom were doing much more than eating!  

Traffic is nuts around Anchorage. 

The nature here is huge and unspoiled.   

Oh yeah, the place is also full of active volcanoes.