Monday, June 19, 2023 - Seward to Denali

I woke up at 3:00 a.m. to see a bright red orange sunrise through the window. Another beautiful morning, just a few light clouds. 
A Norwegian cruise ship has just pulled in so it is pretty busy at the cruise terminal.
Departing at 9:51
The bus ride to Anchorage was about 3 hours alongside steep mountains on one side and very shallow bays on the other. 
We had an hour and a half for lunch and then got on another bus at 3:00 p.m.
We passed through Wasilla, now famous as the former home of Sarah Palin.
Most of the first hundred miles of travel was very flat with bogs stretching out long distances on both sides. 
After Talkeetna, there are mountain ranges on both sides of a high plain. Almost all the spruce trees as far as you can see are dead from an invasive beetle.
There was considerable road construction both from Seward to Anchorage and from Anchorage North where we had to stop and had to wait. We finally arrived at the Denali bluffs hotel around 9:30.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tuesday, June 20 - Denali

Image
A gray and drizzly morning with temperatures in the '50s. Fortunately the rain stopped and the clouds lifted enough to see the countryside but they never lifted enough to actually see Denali. We had a 4 and 1/2 hour tour that went about 40 mi into the park. It is colder here so the spruce trees are still surviving and not attacked by the spruce bark beetle.  We saw Caribou and sheep in the distance but they were mostly just little dots. On the way back we did see a grizzly bear on a patch of snow that was only a few hundred yards away which was pretty exciting. Alongside the road there were many beautiful tundra flowers. We saw a cute actic squirrel that almost scurried up to us.
Read more

Thursday, June 22, - Anchorage and travel home

Image
We are staying at the Hotel Captain Cook overlooking the bay. The bay is very shallow so there is no port here. Goods are brought here by train from the deep water port in Seward. Our guide for the one hour Anchorage trolley tour was quite good. We stopped at earthquake park where it was amazing to see that the ground it just dropped 30 ft destroying all of the houses in the neighborhood. The houses were all demolished and this is all reverted to woodland. We spent an interesting afternoon at the Anchorage museum before heading to the airport around 6:00 p.m.
Read more

Sunday, June 18, 2023 - Seward

Image
We arrived at Seward at the end of redemption Bay to a morning of perfectly clear skies the first time during this trip. The locals we spoke to said this is the best day of the year so far. 😊 Our first visit this morning was to the Alaska sea life center the only public aquarium in Alaska. It was fun to watch the seals sea lions and seabirds as well as touch various creatures in the touch tanks. It is a very nicely set up aquarium.  In the afternoon we went on a hike to view the Exit Glacier which is about a mile hike in from the visitor center in the national Park entrance. There are markers to show where the end of the glacier was at different years in the past 200 years. The end of the glacier was about a mile away from the viewpoint which is where the glacier extended in 2005 and the ice was about 200 ft or more deep at that point. Before dinner we were able to relax on our veranda with a bottle of champagne. We then had a nice farewell dinner with Scott and Jean in the restaurant
Read more