Massive Alaska post

Sorry this is so late in coming!

Flying in...




The day after that, we had to get up at the crack of dawn to drive down to Prince William Sound, where we got on a boat and did an educational cruise-type thing over the day. It was beautiful weather, which they said was really unusual.




We saw otters.

And kittiwakes.


LOTS of kittiwakes.


The day after that, we went to the Alaska Zoo, just outside of Anchorage. We saw a lot of native animals there.
A bald eagle...

A yak...

A seal, LOL...

A wolf...

Some hilarious-looking alpaca things...


And a snow leopard, among others.

After we were in Anchorage, we drove two hours up into the Alaskan Interior to a tiny little town called Talkeetna. This is where most of the bush planes bringing climbers to Mt. McKinley (a.k.a. Denali) take off. It was a pretty cool little place; I liked it the best of all the places we stayed.


Mt. McKinley - or Denali, whichever you prefer, though Denali is the prettier name. That means "The High One", in case you didn't know. And it certainly is.


This is just a cool one I took on a hike. The water was so reflective, like glass.

While we were in Denali, we went on a bus tour into the park. We're talking no people for miles and miles around, except for the other ones on the bus. And we saw some pretty cool stuff.



Including a fox carrying around a snowshoe hare twice its own size.


And a great horned owl with the yellowest eyes I've ever seen on anything, except maybe the ones of that wolf.


There was also a REALLY fat little ground squirrel.


And bears. Now, the park ranger we'd talked to the day before made it sound like if we were lucky we might even see a ptarmigan and a hare - which made this even more amusing. She said she hadn't seen a grizzly yet that season. Well, we saw a total of four bears, but this was the one that came closest to the bus.


Such a gorgeous creature.


A caribou - one of a very small herd - drinking water from one of the little streams on a gravel bar.


And a moose, the last of the really interesting wildlife we saw.


On the last day in Denali, during the drive back to Anchorage, we stopped at an overlook - and from there, you could see Denali Mountain, clear as day. Usually it's bathed in clouds and fog, like it was in the Talkeetna post. But this was all of it, the whole thing. It was so big, I couldn't even believe it.