Alaska

	The first week of our trip was spent in a GMC Jimmy SUV exploring the area around Anchorage. Our first destination was the Kenai (pronounced "Keen-eye") peninsula to the southwest. This picture was taken about ten minutes outside of the city limits of Anchorage. I should probably say now that there are majestic snow-capped mountain ranges all over Alaska - I started referring to them as MSCMs in my journal. No matter how many you see, they are always magnificent.
	More MSCMs here, this time with a lake. I'll try to keep these shots to a minimum (along with those of far-away wildlife and flowers), but I've got more than 600 photos to chose from...
	This is the little Russian Orthodox church in the town of Kenai. The Russians were responsible for "Western" settlement of most of this area and there are several churches still in evidence here.
	This is a beach called Clam Gulch on the western coast of the Kenai Peninsula. Apparently it's a wonderful place to find razorback clams. What these four huge granite chunks were doing in the middle of an otherwise empty beach is beyond me. Check out the MSCMs across the bay. The one on the left is actually a volcano.
	Just before we reached the little town of Homer (a neat little town whose income is based mainly on fishing and has a large number of artists - kind of an Alaskan version of Provincetown) we saw our first two bald eagles. They flew very close to us, but I prefer this picture which shows the scale of the eagle to the surrounding landscape. (This is the first of many pictures where you'll have to "blow up" the thumbnail to see the things that I'm talking about.)
	This is Exit Glacier. This was the first of many glaciers we were to see, and was one of the most approachable. If you ignored the warning signs (which we of course didn't) you could go up and touch it. Yes, the ice really is that blue - the ice is so dense that it only reflects blue light. Doug (that's him in the foreground showing the scale of the place) and I did some climbing in the neighboring rocks.
	We visited the town of Seward where there is a wonderful marine life aquarium and research center mostly paid for by Exxon in the wake of the disastrous oil spill that affected this whole region ten years ago. On the way back to Anchorage we saw this moose we saw at a bird sanctuary(!) about five mile outside the town limits.
	My favorite "mirror" picture taken on the way to the abandoned copper-mining town of Kennicott in Wrangell-Elias National Park. Kennicott and its cute little neighboring community of McCarthy are located at the end of a 60-mile dirt (or "unsealed" as they say in the Antipodes) road, where we saw no less than 87 rabbits, some moose, a hawk, a porcupine and various other wildlife.
	This is the abandoned copper mine building at Kennicott. At 14 stories, it is the tallest wooden structure in North America. To date nothing has been done to reconstruct it, but rather they've just tried to keep it from falling down. They still offer tours ("Walk on the right side of that staircase!") and it was an exhilarating experience to finally get to the top and look out over the glacial valley below.
	This is the first of several pictures of Mount McKinley. The guide books all warn that McKinley is visible only on about one day in three, so the chance to take a picture of it is not to be ignored. We actually first saw the peak of the mountain from the train just out of Anchorage, more than 200 miles away. This is from a bit closer, and shows its two "sister" mountains, whose names escape me now.
	This view of the mountain is from the cabin of a Cessna which took us on a flight around the summit of the mountain. As you can see, the weather was perfect - again - for this. The pilot said it was one of the smoothest rides he'd ever taken. By the way, the claim is that McKinley is the "tallest" mountain in the world, that is when measured from base to tip. Everest is higher but it starts at 8,000 feet.
	That afternoon we got on a bus that would take us ninety miles down another "unsealed" road to the abandoned gold mining town of Kantishna. (There are lots of abandoned mining towns in Alaska, partially due to other more profitable finds in other parts of the world, and partially due to some very restrictive laws regarding use of national parks.) Along the way we stopped numerous times to view the local wildlife, including Dahl sheep, moose, caribou, an amazing grizzly bear mom with two tiny cubs, and a gyrfalcon. This picture shows two adolescent grizzlies who met up on a river bank about a mile from the road and decided to play with each other for a little while. Can you see them? Here's a scan of the very middle of the picture.
	This caribou very kindly was grazing within a couple hundred feet of the road and posed in several different angles for us photographers. FYI, a reindeer is a domesticated caribou.
	We spent a day in Kantishna, which will be remembered for the enormous swarms of mosquitoes everywhere. Doug and I took a guided hike on a nearby mountain ridge (up 2000 feet in the course of a mile) swatting the beasts constantly until we got above the tree line where the winds kept them pretty much at bay. Aside from more views of McKinley (partially obscured this day) the most amazing thing we saw was the profusion of wildflowers. This alpine rhododendron was about eight inches across and four inches high, with perfectly formed blooms that were about a centimeter across.
	All in all, probably a quarter of my pictures of this trip are of the luxuriant plant life we saw. Twenty hours of sunlight gives them all a chance to "catch" up during the relatively short warm season . It was amazingly varied and bustin' out just about everywhere we went. Mom started a collection of pressed flowers we found by the side of the road and Doug (who's a nursery manager) had fun challenging the locals for their Latin names. This example will have to do to represent all of the rest of the amazing plants and flowers we saw.
	On the way back out from Kantishna we stopped at Mirror Lake, where the famous "post card" shot of McKinley is made. For the fourth day in a row we had a good view of the mountain! It was a little windy, so the mirror effect is lost. Guess I'll just have to go back some day and get it right.
	Just as we were about to exit the park this Dahl sheep ram appeared on a ridge to bid us farewell. We hopped on the train to Fairbanks, which is located on a glacial plain and in all truth is not a terribly fascinating place, though they do have the only K-Mart in several hundred miles.
	We took a day to fly from Fairbanks to Juneau, the capital of the state, which can be reached only by air or by sea because it is completely surrounded by - you guessed it - MSCMs. Originally we had been scheduled to board a small cruise ship to explore the area around Glacier Bay, to the north of Juneau, but were informed while we at Kantishna that our ship had run aground on its first tour of the year! Do to the efforts of our travel agent we were able to take a day trip to Glacier Bay, and another small ship to the part of the Inner Passage to the south of Juneau. This area of  the country receives about thirteen feet of rain a year, so it was expected that our blue skies would finally abandon us. Thus the MSCMs gave way to MCCPs: Mysterious Cloud-Covered Peaks.
	The first major sea life that we spied was a small pod of orcas, or killer whales. Of course, they aren't whales, but dolphins, but don't let that worry you. The way to recognize an orca is by its huge dorsal fin and black-and-while coloring.
	One of the most fascinating places we visited was LeConte Glacier, which is receding at the rate of about forty feet a day. All of the ice goes into the fjord, and our ship was specially built to negotiate the spaces in between the icebergs, which ranged in size from floating basketballs to seaborne houses! Though you can't see it here, many of the 'bergs were home to seal mothers who give birth there. The proliferation of ice confuses the sonar of the orcas who are their main predators, thus protecting the young. Yes, the ice is blue, as it is "fresh" off the glacier. As it warms, the surface turns whiter.
	We was several herds of sea lions throughout the cruise, though I think this was the biggest.
	The high point of the cruise as far as I was concerned was this pod of about 50 Pacific white-sided dolphins, who actually swam toward the boat in order to frolic in the bow and stern wakes, breach and tail slap for us. One clever fellow even took to swimming under the boat. This is the only time that I wished I'd had a video camera.
	Just to round out our list of wildlife spotted, this black bear showed up, munching on mussels and barnacles around the low tide line. He probably had just come out of hibernation, and there are very few ripe berries at this time of year, and the salmon weren't running yet, so this is about the only type of food available to him.
	Humpback whales? We saw several: some breached and tail slapped several miles away, others merely approached the ship and "waved" their tails.