A trip to Alaska

I've decided that we need to join the world of blogs, and so I am initiating a blog about our lives. Luckily, I get to start with an exciting post, since we've just returned from a lovely vacation in the state of Alaska. First, the primary purpose of the trip was to attend our friends' (Jeannette and Xavier) wedding in Fairbanks, AK. OK, so officially, it was their second wedding ceremony (the religious ceremony), but who's counting. (Jeannette's a friend of ours from college; Xavier she met in graduate school.) The event was an especially good time since the people attending were half American and half Spanish (since Xavier is Spanish), and everyone really knew how to kick up their heels and have a good time.


In Fairbanks, Tim and I hooked up with another college friend, Larissa, and after a few days seeing sights in Fairbanks, the three of us headed down to Denali National Park. Simply put, if this is something you haven't seen, get on a plane right now. It was just absolutely beautiful. I'm not absolutely sure we would say the same thing if it had been winter, but... we had beautiful weather in the 60s, basically 24 hours of daylight, and, oh yeah, more wildlife and mountains than anyone could dream of. We did a little bit of mild hiking, and on one of these hikes, we came within 30 yards or so of a female moose.


But the most memorable portion of the days in Denali was definitely the bus trip we took into Wonder Lake and back. It goes something like this:

Our bus and its tour guide (Peter, who was stellar, by the way) leave at 6:30am. On the way in, Peter says, "I hate to be optimistic, but it looks like a pretty good day to get to see things; it's been raining for the past week." Great news for us. So Peter's pretty chatty for the first few miles. He's pointing out that he chats up the beginning of the trip because it's usually a good distance into the park before there are good opportunities to see wildlife. Not but a few seconds later, Peter has to slam on his brakes for a caribou that's just hanging out, trotting down the middle of the road. A good omen, it turns out. Before the entrance into the restricted area of the park, we also encounter a pair of grizzlies (a good distance off the road, which is a good place for them, if you ask me).

The next big thing we see on our tour is, well, the mountain. Mount Denali. (Mount McKinley for those not Alaskan.) Apparently only 20% of the park visitors actually get to see the mountain because it is often obscured by clouds. So we're already doing well. We take a couple of breaks at some scenic overlooks, take some photos, see some Dall sheep (if you don't know, protection of the Dall sheep population was the reason the park was founded), and continue along. Until Peter slams on the breaks again. "Everybody be really quiet; there's a wolf in the road up here, and voices can scare them off." Sure enough, there was a wolf in front of the bus. Now, it turns out, Peter tells us later, that wolf sightings in the park are pretty rare. He does the tour every day it seems, and he sees a wolf maybe once a week. So again, we're doing well. Soon, another wolf joins the wolf in the road, and then a third. And then...they throw back their heads and howl. Just amazing. Sure, you've heard it on TV, but it's simply not the same. After a few more minutes, the wolves wander off into the roadside brush. Peter tells us that very rarely do you ever get to hear the wolves howl, and never from that close. Fantastic. We hang out a bit just in case the wolves are going to come back out, but they don't. As Peter goes to start the bus, someone in the back hollers, "Hang on, there are caribou on the ridge." Peter says, "Sure, we can hang around and watch the caribou for a while." There were four bucks just up grazing on the hillside, maybe a half of a mile off to the side. We watch them for a while, then off to the side, someone notices the wolves, slinking up the hill. Guess who else saw the caribou? The caribou, apparently not being the brightest animals in the food chain, hear something coming towards them and decide to check it out. Whoops. Then, just like you see in nature documentaries, the wolves start chasing the caribou. They single out the slowest one, one wolf flanks from the opposite side, and they start chasing the chosen caribou down the hill...back towards the bus. And in fact, after a minute or two, the caribou comes tearing out of the brush, crosses maybe five feet in front of the bus and disappears into the brush on the other side. He was followed at about 10 second intervals by the three wolves, and the pack of them headed down the hillside. It's left to your best guess how it all ended; the caribou looked healthy, but Peter tells us that the wolves have pups to feed. We never saw the end. I was cheering for the caribou. Tim was cheering for the wolves. Such is nature, carried out every day in the park.

We continued on our journey and soon got another fantastic view of the mountain before it started to cloud up. Then we also saw a grizzly mom with two young cubs, a golden eagle on the ground not 10 feet from the bus that picked up and took flight in front of us, some snowshoe hare, ground squirrels, ptarmigan, and beaver dens. By the time we got to Wonder lake and beyond, the clouds had moved in around the mountain, so we didn't get a really close up view. Our tour finished about 200 yards from the end of the park road (about 90 miles into the park), where we had lunch and a little nature hike at a lodge. Then we headed back. On the way back, we saw some more grizzlies, a moose, some more caribou, some more Dall sheep, and beautiful mountainscapes. And Mt. Denali came out for one last peek before we headed out of the park, to arrive back out at the highway right around 7pm.

Our last day there, Tim climbed a mountain (Mt. Healy, at 1700 feet or so), while Larissa and I took a slightly less strenous hike through the forest and saw a demonstration of the sled dogs that are still used to patrol the park in the wintertime.

I can say with a fair bit of confidence that we'll be back to Denali some day.

We had to go back to Fairbanks to catch our planes, and, with some extra time to kill, we drove to North Pole, Alaska, which is, in fact, slightly south of Fairbanks. (As an aside for those of you Extreme Makeover: Home Edition fans, they were doing a house in North Pole while we were in Alaska, and we happened to run into Ty Pennington on the streets of Fairbanks.) In any case, North Pole was pretty cheesy with Christmas decorations up apparently year round, but we did the tourist route and took some goofy photos.

We're back now, we're tired, but it seemed apropos to share some photos and stories. More later.