Vacation from Fairbanks

What follows is a seven day road-trip through Alaska. There are a lot of pictures and this is a long post. You will want to come visit Alaska afterward. Of course, the nice thing about living in Alaska is that it's really easy to vacation in Alaska. I'm not posting all the pictures on the blog because there are too many (although I'm posting a lot). With about a thousand still to edit I won't have them all up right away anyway. I have a dedicated set on flickr here.

Denali National Park in the summer

*I will be adding to the flickr set over the course of the summer. Check it out later. There are still a few hundred more pictures to go through at least!

Kate's parents, Dave and Sandi are in town and we took a little trip and tour in Denali National Park the other day. I'm not sure what I think the highlight of the trip was. We started at a little before 4 in the morning. Kate and I were at the hotel a little after 4:30 and just a few minutes later we were on the road. The Sun was already up and we saw a moose within a minute of getting on the Parks Highway. We saw another moose a few miles down the road. At 6:45 we were at the park and right after 7:30 we were on the bus into the park.

Our first stop was at the Teklanika rest area on the Park Road. This is where Jason, Kate and I drove to during the Spring opening. It's closed to public vehicles in the summer. We saw a bear from really far away; just a little dot down in the river bed. It wasn't that exciting, but we had no idea if we would see anything else so I tried to soak it in as good as I could. Then a mile down the road we saw our second bear of the day:


Brown bear in the Teklanika riverbed.
So now we were all pretty happy to have seen a grizzly pretty close up. Then we saw another. Then another, and another with cubs.

So, rounding a corner we see some stuff on the hill to the south of us. It looks like wolves. We get excited about wolves. It is a wolf pack eating a caribou that they killed earlier in the day. The alpha male was working pretty hard on the rib cage while a couple of others fought over the head and antlers. We watched them for about 15 minutes before we had to move on.







A little ways down the road there were some Dall Sheep sitting on a little ridge.


At this point I think we were all feeling a little overwhelmed with all the animals we had seen. It was hard to even notice sometimes that we were in a place that looked like this:
On the Toklat River looking back at the Park Road and the Alaska Range.

And this:


There were also a lot of sleeping bears on the hills.


There was a willow ptarmigan family crossing the road. I hadn't seen any this summer yet, only in the winter when they are all white.


Willow Ptarmigan waiting for its chicks to cross the road. It's the state bird of Alaska.

Coming around a corner and some dips in the road there was a bus stopped in front of us by a pond. There were some ducks in a pond. Mallards. We were stopped for a while. No one could figure out why they had stopped for ducks. The other driver made an 'L' sign with her hand and our driver shouted lynx. Sure enough, stalking the ducks on the other side of the pond was a good sized cat. It walked around in the bushes and I really wished I had a 500mm lens:
Lynx are truly better to watch than ducks.

The summit of Denali was covered in clouds, but we still saw quite a bit of it:
The Park Road winds around the rolling hills surrounding the tallest mountain in North America, Denali ('The High One' in Athabascan). We couldn't see the summit this day because it was a little too cloudy and hazy. Denali towers over the park at 20,320 ft (6,198 meters).

There was a pretty good sight of a moose in a pond:


After getting to mile 92.6, we got to walk around a bit near wonder lake and Kantishna. A park ranger gave us a history tour of the old gold mining town and people from the area and then it was time to head back. On the way back there was a little more Sun poking through the clouds so the scenery was even cooler.





There were more sheep,


caribou,


and there was still one wolf left on the kill.


Right when it seemed like it couldn't possibly get any better, out pops a grizzly bear on the side of the road eating soapberries.



After 12 hours it was all over and we were heading back home. Our driver said that he has been doing this for 17 years and this was by far the best day he has ever had in the park. I think we were pretty lucky. Kate and I were definitely smiling the whole time.

Been a while . . .

The trees are enjoying the Sun and the blue sky, again. I love walking out the front door to this sight.

Wow, it's been almost 15 days since my last post. I haven't been busy, I haven't been working, I haven't been chasing down screaming kids or arguing grades with college students, I haven't been driving all over the state . . . I've been mostly sitting, staring, reading about glaciers, cooking, and taking some pictures. It's been hard remembering how to relax, but after about a week and a half I have it down pretty good. I'll be posting the huge backlog of photos below.

The Sun is under the horizon a full 6 1/2 minutes more every day. Kate noticed the other night that it was actually almost dark at 3 am. We keep hearing about heat waves in the lower 48, but here we've been having highs of 70, maybe. Sometimes its a little hotter, we had a week were it almost never got up to 60 and the nights are around 40-45. When I wake up in the morning I can sometimes see my breath when I go outside. In July.

Kate and I bought a canoe last week and went out on it for the first time on Chena Lake. There are so many different kinds of duck up here it's really pretty amazing. They all had babies except for a common loon that was splashing like a fiend back in one of the slough-like parts of the lake. Other than that there aren't really any other updates. We've been planning future canoeing adventures and getting ready for Kate's parents to visit in a few days.


American wigeon at Chena Lakes. We got too close and it flew back and forth a few times before we could get some distance away.

Common Loon at Chena Lake

Common Goldeneye with chicks

We've spent some time at Creamer's Field and also took another trip out to Angel Rocks. Both are really different than we've become accustomed to with the summer greenery.


A few Sandhill cranes have stuck around this summer. Here are a couple just chilling at Creamer's Field on College Road in Fairbanks. They have a really cool distinctive call that really distinguish them from other kinds of cranes. They are also fun to watch dance in the fields.

The old Creamer's Dairy Farm. Now part of the migratory bird refuge and connected to the Alaska Bird Observatory. Great for walking in the summer and skiing for the other 8-9 months of the year. The farmhouse in front is now the visitor's center.

Out at Creamer's Field on College Road.

Wildflowers bloom everywhere in July. Just another shot from the trails at Creamer's Field in Fairbanks.

Angel Rocks near Fairbanks, Alaska out off of Chena Hot Springs Road. A nice little 3 mile loop to the rocks and back from the north fork of the Chena River. The rocks offer a fantastic view of the Chena River valley that you don't normally get to see when you're just driving out to the hot springs.

Little yellow flowers precariously growing out of one of the granite summits of Angel Rocks off Chena Hot Springs Road in the interior of Alaska.

After hiking up about a mile you come to the first granite outcroppings of Angel Rocks and you get the first nice panorama of the area. We had nice blue skies with fluffy white clouds until we arrived at the top. Then we got thunder and hail.

Otis protests going inside by stubbornly sitting in the road. He's been getting pretty adventurous in the yard lately.

Otis hunts mice and butterflies in the thick of the backyard. Not at all a successful endeavor, but fun anyway.

An afternoon drive down the Richardson Highway

Kate and I decided to head out for our first anniversary and drove south down the Richardson. We stopped to have a brief picnic by the Clearwater River, a spring-fed river that flows into the Tanana near Delta Junction. Thunder was rumbling to our north.

For some reason we haven't made the drive south of Delta yet, until yesterday. Every time we think of it we head the western route to Denali National Park instead. Even on Saturday we almost didn't go because we were worried there wouldn't be much to see since it was overcast and the forecast was for rain. We went anyway and below are some of the things that we saw, or you can view the full set in the flickr lightbox here.

Donnelly Dome, with its head in the clouds can even be seen from Delta Junction and it kind of sticks out of the lower hills like a sore thumb. A really pretty sore thumb.
The landscape here always seems endless despite the fact that it changes every 15 minutes of driving. Today the clouds seemed to rise out of the open green Taiga.
Looking east near Donnelly Dome.
Another view of Donnelly Dome, this time from the southeast. Its head came out of the clouds for a few minutes before once again being overtaken.
The highway quickly descends into the Delta River valley. Even through the clouds and haze the tall peaks of the Alaska Range were visible.
White, green, grey and purple were the colors of the day.
Just because it's cloudy and raining doesn't mean it is not a gorgeous summer day. Peaks galore surround you on the Richardson Highway in the Alaska Range.
The mountains were holding back the clouds to the west of the oil pipeline. Flowers were in full bloom all over the place in Castner Creek.
More of the Castner Creek valley. I wished there was a little more Sun hitting the valley floor to really make the flowers in the foreground pop, but I'll make do with what I have.
Ok.

Do you have a better way to keep Russians out of your top secret military training facilities?

Kate and I saw this gem on the side of the Richardson Highway.

Do you have a better way to keep Russians out of your top secret military training facilities?, a photo by Lee Petersen on Flickr.

"Every morning, when Alaskans wake up, one of the first things they do, is look outside to see if there are any Russians hanging around. And if there are, you gotta go up to them and ask, 'What are you doing here?' and if they can't give you a good reason, it's our responsibility to say, you know, 'Shoo! Get back over there!"

-Tina Fey as Sarah Palin

Nighttime storms

The clouds building to the east, light from the Midnight Sun, rain in the lower right corner, blue-darkened sky to the north, all around incredible lighting situation.
Rumbles of thunder shook the house for a while last night as some big storms moved to our south and east. It was about 10 minutes until midnight when I went outside to take some pictures of the giant clouds. The sunlight was strong on the tops of the clouds making for some interesting photographs.

It's been kind of nice having it so overcast the last few days. With sunset times still at 12:40 am and sunrise at 3:10 am the gloomy clouds cast a bit of darkness over us. I am getting pretty good at falling asleep when the Sun is still out though. The light is going to end quickly; we will lose just under 3.5 hours of sunlight in the month of July.

Tomorrow is our one-year anniversary! We haven't really decided what we will be doing yet with our super-tight summer budget, but it will most likely involve some sort of a day-outing and picnic. Whatever we do it will be a great. My wife deserves it - mostly because she has lived in a cabin with no running water in the middle of Alaska with me for almost a year. Possibly mountains will be involved. I will take pictures.

Some more pictures of our midnight storm:
It makes for a really dynamic lighting situation to have such strong, dense, layered clouds when the Sun is low on the horizon at midnight. I used three exposures: +2 0 -2 stops for this image. Some of the other HDR images from this night came out overdone, but I loved this one.