John and I left Talkeetna today to fly around Denali National Park and to even land on a glacier there. We took a little one-engine De Havilland DHC-3 Otter aircraft with a pilot and seven other passengers. All of us had window seats offering incredible views, and I even had the co-pilot’s seat for half of the trip.

Before we got so high where we saw nothing but snow, ice, rock, and mountains, the tundra was already showing its fall colors.

Fall in Denali National Park

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John and I made a 120 mile drive yesterday from his condo in Anchorage to Talkeetna, a base station for visits to Denali National Park. En route we made three fascinating stops.

In the northern outskirts of Anchorage we visited the Alaska Native Heritage Center where we saw how the 11 native peoples lived and what they made and how they danced. Here is the totem pool at the center.

Totem Poll

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About lunch time today I looked out the kitchen window of John’s condo. Just across the road I saw a mother moose and her two calves feeding on the neighbor’s trees. Of course, I went right out to shoot them.

Neighboring Moose

I am beginning to understand why people here in Anchorage aren’t as fond of moose as I am. Except for dinner. John cooked moose steaks for us last night. Delicious and low fat.

John and I went back to Whittier, Alaska. A friend of his invited us to spend last night at her “Sound View Bed and Breakfast.” Until we got to our room I didn’t understand “sound view.”

After all, we hear sounds, but don’t view them. Except in this case. Our room had a great view of Price William Sound in the Gulf of Alaska.

Whittier is a funky little town and port. Except by sea and a one-lane 2.5 mile combined rail-highway tunnel (the longest such in North America) that’s open only once an hour, Whittier is cut off from the rest of the world. Just 181 people lived there at the latest census, but thousands come through on the ferry from Washington and cruises.

We went there for a cruise to view some of the many glaciers in the sound. This is the largest concentration of tidewater glaciers in Alaska.

The rain got harder the longer we were in Whittier. We weren’t surprised because this tiny town in the rainforest gets almost 200 inches of rain per year.

Then the sea got so rough that we noticed whitecaps. Finally, shortly before the cruise ship was scheduled to leave at 1:30 this afternoon, they cancelled on us.

No problem. In fact, two wrongs in this case make a right. The cruise that we really wanted to go on was full this morning. We will come back for it.

Meanwhile, we picked up another one of the prospective cruise ship passengers, a woman from Houston named Lisa. She had come down on the train after leaving her rental car in Anchorage. After a good lunch in the only classy restaurant in Whittier, the three of us drove back to Anchorage.

But first we stopped at the wonderful Potter Marsh at the southern end of the Anchorage Coastal Wildlife Refuge. We walked the 1,550-foot boardwalk, which provides access to the northern part of the marsh. Here I spotted a great example of what Alaskans calls the fireweed flower — quite different from Colorado’s fireweed.

Alaska's Fireweed

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Yesterday’s rain cleared the atmosphere in Anchorage so much today that we had a rare view of Denali. At 20,320 feet, Denali or Mount McKinley is the highest mountain in North America. It is 158 miles from Anchorage.

John heard from a friend that we could get a great view of the mountain from a hilltop park at the edge of the city. So we dropped our other plans and drove right there, getting this special view:

Denali After the Rain

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On my first day in Alaska to visit my friend John it rained all day. So we hiked in the rainforest. Nothing could have been more fitting.

We drove 34 miles southeast from John’s condo in Anchorage to Girdwood, where we hiked the Winner Creek Trail, a five-mile roundtrip in the Chugach National Forest. This is the northern tip of the North American coastal rainforest. It’s lush and lovely.

Devil's Club Flowers in the Rainforest

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As I wrote in my previous photo essay, my sojourn this week to Yellowstone National Park met my three expectations. And a lot more.

The two waterfalls that I saw along the Snake River in Idaho couldn’t compare with three in Yellowstone. Even the 30 drop of Lewis Falls exceeds that of Idaho Falls.

Lewis Falls, Named for Meriwether Lewis of Lewis and Clark Fame

Here is 132 foot Tower Falls. It’s name comes from the rock turrets above the falls:

Tower Falls and its Rocky Towers

Most famous of all is Lower Yellowstone Falls, which plunges 308 feet in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River. “Note the beautiful green stripe in the water that forms the falls,” says my Yellowstone guide book. [Read more →]

Late last night after a 14-hour drive I returned home from Yellowstone National Park, which I had never experienced before. The world’s first national park, Yellowstone is in the northwest corner of Wyoming and a couple of strips of Montana and Idaho.

My month-long trip took me 3,600 miles to experience three wilderness areas and three national parks. On my way back from my High Sierra trek I stopped once in each of the four states en route, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming.

My stop in Wyoming was the greatest en route back from California. It fulfilled the three wishes for experiences I hoped to have in Yellowstone.

The easiest wish to fulfill was to be able to stay and eat at Old Faithful Inn, a historic rustic-style lodge right next to the world famous Old Faithful Geyser. Completed in 1904, the Inn is either the largest or second largest log building in the world and uses lodgepole pine and rhyolite stone. Architect Robert Reamer designed the hotel asymmetrically to reflect the chaos of nature.

Main Entrance to Old Faithful Inn

Ever since I saw the 2002 PBS series on the “Great Lodges of the National Parks” and bought the companion book of the same name, I wanted to experience the Inn. The book shows Old Faithful Inn on its cover and opens with an extensive description of it. [Read more →]

To find the low but wide and picturesque Idaho Falls on the Snake River I had to ask directions twice, even though the waterfalls are only half a mile from the center of city of the same name. The falls are 1,200 feet wide, something that I couldn’t capture completely even with my ultra-wide angle lens:

Idaho Falls on the Snake River

I had just as much difficulty getting to Shoshone Falls on the Snake River, just five miles from Twin Falls, Idaho. The problem this time was that my usual good sense of direction failed me and I went south when I should have gone north and then west when I should have gone east. On one of those wrong roads I came the closest to an accident of the whole trip, when a truck driver ran through a stop sign right in front of me and I had to slam on the brakes. [Read more →]

We came out of the wilderness from our two-week High Sierra trek on Saturday, August 15. Actually, we came out of three designated Wilderness areas, Emigrant, Yosemite, and Hoover. We came out at the Green Creek Trailhead, down at 7,995 feet, just 13 miles from Bridgeport, California.

When we got up at 5:45 a.m. the temperature was 23.8 degrees. We left at 7 a.m., early, because two of our party had a long drive that we accommodated. In fact, because we left the wilderness at 1 p.m., I made a 250 mile drive to Winnemucca, Nevada, instead of staying overnight at Bridgeport as planned.

Hoover Lake is in the Hoover Wilderness, Both Named in Honor of President Herbert Hoover

The Sierra Nevada has stunning beauty that is quite different from the beauty of the Rockies that I know. That was the best part of the trek. But the group I traveled with was one of the best reasons to spend two weeks in close company. It surely one of the nicest, most positive, appreciative, helpful, sharing group that I have ever know. I intend to keep in touch with them. [Read more →]