Here are some more shots of our fishing on Montana Creek. This is taken from a footbridge crossing the river, looking upstream. No, I don’t know who that is in the river.
Hey! Grandma is coming out of the woods!
Here I am, trying to take a picture of Jason holding a flipping and flopping pink salmon.
Jason performed his side cast. Notice how relaxed he is!
I have a fish on the line and Jason is patiently holding the net. I did manage to “catch” the log directly across from us, losing my lure.
We decided to take a walk in the evening, and managed to find the log that held my lure. Hmmm. We only had to walk about a mile through the underbrush. Go figure. Jason scrambled over the embankment, with me holding his arm and reached down and retrieved the lure. The sun was getting low and hitting him in the eyes at about 9:30pm.
We headed for Anchorage in the morning, arriving around noon. We went directly for the open air farmer’s market, held on weekends in the downtown area. Jason stopped at the Anchorage Police recruiting booth, but was a couple of years too young.
He managed to find a sled dog to pet. There are usually several at this market, with many of sledders selling books on the Iditarod.
Jason and Lauren took a walk over Ship Creek. The tide was out so the fishing was limited to the mouth, near Cook Inlet (notice the fishermen lined up beyond the bridge).
On the way back to the market from Ship Creek, we stopped by the Alaska Railroad headquarters to admire the beautiful blue flower baskets. These were on most of the light posts throughout the downtown area.
We passed these on the way to lunch in a local park. There are flowers everywhere one can plant them, making the entire downtown area very picturesque.
This is the Chester Creek Trail, right beside our camp near downtown. The creek has salmon in it, like almost every creek in Alaska. This trail leads to the famous 11 mile long Tony Knowles Coastal trail, which runs along Cook Inlet from downtown to Earthquake Park and the Ted Stevens Airport. This is the number one place in Anchorage to spot moose and brown bear.
We stopped at Anchorage Fire Station #1 so Lauren could pick up a AFD shirt and I went across the street to start the process of getting our steering realigned after our Dalton Highway run. I returned just after Cathy, Jason and Lauren finished their Fire Museum tour and rejoined them entering the actual fire station. We received a very thorough tour, including the hose drying tower and hose storage room. There was a section for special fire hose used in fighting the many forest and brush fires.
These two firemen/EMTs gave us the royal treatment. The taller one on the left, J. Crabb is a former NHL player who played one season in Atlanta. It really is a small world.
Lauren, Jason, Cathy, me and firefighter/EMT Karlberg.
We stopped at the Anchorage Zoo for a visit and managed to get pretty close to an eagle. Jason was fascinated with the snow leopard and I kinda liked the brown bears. The Anchorage Zoo has a concentration of native/local animals in natural habitats.
That evening, we drove out to the flats of Potter Marsh, south of town to try to see a moose. They have constructed an extensive series of raised boardwalks leading to the geese, arctic terns and other birds. Spawning salmon and browsing moose make occasional appearances here as well. These walkways are elevated to about twenty feet off the ground. We did view a lot of wildlife in the form of birds but no Bullwinkle.
On the way back, I decided to take Lauren and Jason to the Lake Hood Seaplane Base / Lake Spenard, which is a water landing facility adjacent to Ted Stevens International Airport. We hit rush hour as many of these floatplanes were either landing or departing. They are very interesting to watch, as we were able to get pretty close.
In the morning we headed down the Seward highway to . . . Seward. We took a short six hour ride from Resurrection Bay via the Gulf of Alaska into the Kenai Fjords National Park to see some glaciers up close and maybe, just maybe some whales. Jason and Lauren, on deck, keeping an eye out for wildlife. We did glide right past a bald eagle sitting on a dock post leaving Seward, one of 191 species of birds in the Fjords.
This is the mountain that dominates the town of Seward. It is Mt. Marathon and they hold the world’s toughest 5k race here annually on the 4th of July. You can barely make out the trial leading to the top, straight up the mountain (thin, light line leading up the left side). The top half is scree (very loose rock) and the area hidden in the trees below is the “waterfall ” section. Twenty foot + cliffs and of course waterfalls that you have to ascend and descend through. There are multiple runners airlifted off this mountain yearly. There is actually a racer that went missing several years ago here and his remains have yet to be found. They suspect a brown bear may have had lunch.
I hope to ascend this mountain in a couple of weeks. The park ranger (and race participant for the past several years) told me to plan for a 4-5 hour round trip. The record for the race is 41 minutes. There are no published maps of the “race trail”.
Leaving the harbor at Seward, Mt. Marathon looms as the backdrop.
This is about the last part of civilization as we leave the port and enter the National Park.
Our first sighting was that of a humpback whale. He was flapping his fin repeatedly as some sort of warning, but failed to actually surface enough to allow us to see him. These guys spend the summer feeding in Alaska then return to the Hawaiian Islands or California where they breed. They eat small schooling fish and animals by filtering them using their baleen from the water
Next, we ran into several pods of Orca or killer whales which actually belong to the porpoise family. We managed to navigate relatively close to these guys and they seemed to be surfacing all around the boat, chasing and feasting on salmon
Then, of course we had the Tufted puffins swimming about. While these a pretty neat looking, I have heard they are very tasty fried in butter . . . Michelle.
We also saw hordes of Steller sea lions basking in the sun on a navigation island near No Name Island. I did not take pictures as these massive buggers were stalking us in Valdez when we were fishing. In addition, we passed a sea otter, floating on his back and totally at ease with the passing boat.
The scenery in the National Park is incredible, with many small islands, wildlife, ice fields, glaciers and snow everywhere. The only thing missing is civilization. We managed to come across a small group of kayak tourists who have been camping out for several days. Below is a series of photographs taken from the boat as we wound through a series of small, uninhabited and spectacular islands near Resurrection and the Aialik Peninsulas.
Theses are two, unnamed (or not remembered by me) glaciers on the Resurrection Peninsula leaving the port. These are examples of Alpine Glaciers which form on mountainsides and push slowly down through the valleys.
This is the Bear Glacier, the largest in the Fjords, descending from the Aialik Peninsula and the vast harding Ice Field above. The Bear is an example of a Valley Glacier, which often terminate in large, freshwater lagoons.
Many small waterfalls descending from the Addison Glacier are visible here.
The Aialik Glacier descends from the Harding Ice Field, which is about 50 miles long and terminates at Exit Glacier, which we visited three years ago. This ice field is up to a mile thick at some points and crevices open in the spring as the snow bridges melt, making it very hazardous to trek on. The Aialik is an example of a Tidewater Glacier, which flow directly into the ocean, resulting in calving: massive chunks of glacier breaking off and crashing into the water.
Lauren and Jason, on deck at the Aialik. We saw this glacier calve twice during our stop.
We arrived back in Anchorage at about 9:30 pm.
In the morning, we decided to take a walk on the Chester Creek trail. Cathy, Lauren and Jason stopped at a park about two miles into the walk and I ran from there, around a small lake on a side trail (the Ridgecrest Trail) and wound up on the Tony Knowles Trail. This is the small lake that I ran around to add some distance.
The trail system in Anchorage is very user-friendly with seating available for rest stops, playgrounds and restrooms located every several miles.
This is a small, trailside pond that is perfect moose habitat. There was plenty of evidence of very recent moose activity.
This was my destination, Westchester Lagoon and the terminus of the Chester Creek Trail, where it intersects the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail. There is a swift flowing creek exiting this lake into the Knik Arm of Cook Inlet with a salmon viewing area.
After our morning walk, we took a drive out to the Eagle River Nature Center (it was raining) and then on to the Ektlutna Tailrace to watch the salmon fisherman. One of the men allowed Jason to reel in his line several times, but he failed to hook on to the big one.
In the morning, we woke and departed early to catch the Alaska Railroad “flag train” out of Talkeetna. Arriving a little early, we had the town almost to ourselves. A lot of the shops were still closed and just beginning to open. These two buildings are originals and date from the early 1900s.
We started out in the standard car and stayed there until we reached our destination of Hurricane. It was nice accommodations with a table between the seats so we had our lunch on the rails.
Being a flag train, we made several stops to pick up fishermen, backpackers and off-grid types. At this stop we let off a group of white-water rafters, who were headed down this river, the Sustitna back into town.
Once reaching the Hurricane stop, we went upstairs to ride back in the observation car.
We stopped at twin bridges to take a look at the salmon in a pool formed by a bend in the river below. We sawa lot of pink salmon with one, rather large King salmon.
Jason on “bear watch”. The train spotted a black bear sow and two cubs but they were only seen by the first car as the engineer sounded the whistle in the hopes of driving them up a tree so they could be seen by all, but they foiled his attempt and they scampered into the woods. We managed to see a single black bear on our side of the train a little lather though.
We picked up a book illustrator, Shannon Cartwright, at Hurricane and she invited the group to her studio next to her off-grid home, deep in country. Her groceries are being delivered to her home by 4-wheeler from the train. There is no road access here.
Cathy and Jason are deciding on which book to bring home.
Jason took it to Miss Shannon, who is signing his book.
The train stopped at this bridge, 296 feet above the river below to allow some picture taking. Jason showed no fear and had to be held as he took his pictures from the open door of the boxcar.
On the way back to Anchorage from Talkeetna, we stopped at this little airfield beside the road.
Lauren and Jason took a late flight in the evening to head back to Georgia. We got to bed rather late, slept in and did some shopping the next day. After another night’s sleep, we headed to Alaska Pacific University to participate in the Distance Challenge Running event.
The weather was perfect and the trail was great, mostly buried in the woods surrounding the campus. We will be running this area again in a couple of weeks during the RunFest weekend.
Travelling with the Schinglers 