More pictures, captions, stories, and videos will be posted soon! Airline flights taken to make my June vacation possible: American Airlines SJU to ORD, American Eagle ORD to MSN (Madison), Northwest Airlines MSN to MSP, Northwest Airlines MSP to ANC (Anchorage), Continental Airlines ANC to SEA (Seattle), Northwest Airlines SEA to MSP, Northwest Airlines MSP to GFK (Grand Forks, ND), Northwest Airlines GFK to MSP, Northwest Airlines MSP to BOS, American Airlines BOS to SJU! 10 days of FUN!
These pictures pretty much go in chronological order of my trip.
Yes, mounted on the left wing is a gun case!
The license plate of my Nissan rental car...
My first Moose encounter! I was driving around getting acquainted with Anchorage with my friend Megan (from UND, lives in AK),waiting for Randall to arrive and we saw this!
>Just after this picture was taken, he started to "not like me anymore" and walked me down and into the car where he just stood and his eyes told me, "if you come out, I'm going to kill you"
He would just strip each branch of all the leaves with one big swoop of his lips.
My second Moose encounter...would you believe that this photo was taken around midnight!
Seaplane base adjacent to Ted Stevens International Airport, 1230am.
Highway 3, from Anchorage to Seward, AK
I saw many "Dall Sheep" on this trip, but these guys were by far the lowest in elevation...as far as I can tell these guys always rest.
The Alaska Railroad on the way to Seward, AK
"This will be more comfortable than laying in the dirt, huh?"
Seward, AK...in the past this entire town was destroyed by a tsunami after the great Alaska earthquake. The tides here are around 30 feet.
Seward is such a great fishing location that there is a three year waiting list for places to dock fishing boats.
The Seward Marine Wildlife Center.
Our ride for the glacier and wildlife day cruise, well worth the $79 cost!
We saw a pod of five Orcas! There was a large leader that was enormous, two average sized whales, and two cute baby Orcas! They were feeding on a Salmon run that was happening in this river inlet, the babies were being taught how to surround and trap the Salmon...so cool!
One of the babies, do you know that only 10% of Orcas are born with the instinct to hunt and eat seals like we see on the Discovery Channel? The other 90% eat mainly fish, including Salmon, and I don't blame them! It is great!
The beach at Fox Island.
Oh man, this meal was so good! I had already eaten a hunk of Salmon before I took a picture. It was all you could eat! I will never forget this meal at the halfway point of the cruise.
There are actually many "Fox Islands" in Alaska, what happened was in the early 1900s foxes became endangered from hunting, so smart hunters started to breed foxes on isolated islands and then get the fur that way!
Gulls and Seals, we were all educated many times that these birds are not just "Seagulls", each kind of "Seagull" is really a different kind of gull. What kind of gulls there were I do not have a clue!
A landbound glacier, I will look up the name sometime soon.
Evidently Randall and I were extremly fortunate to see Denali (Mt. McKinley) without cloud cover. Just a note, this picture was probably taken around 1am, just before I stared to swirve from being up for 30 hours and pulled over for our first nap on the road...
Absolutely Beautiful...the mountain is pretty awesome too! I think it is 20,320 feet tall.
Denali Air tours, thier own private gravel runway! They didn't accept jumpseaters, and we could think of more fun ways to spend $300 for an hour...
The first mooses found in Denali Park...they didn't care at all that I was there.
Savage Ranger Station in Denali, from here no private cars are allowed, but there is about 100 more miles of gravel roads that our bus took on the 12 hour tour.
Our ride in Denali Park...man I wish I had brought more than one bottle of Gatorade.
There were times when two buses would pass (with one at standstill), that I was so scared of dying by tumbling down thousand foot cliffs...it was really a rush!
At this point, I am out of clothes and started to buy local shirts.
Right before the bus almost left me alone.
The normal 2/3rds view of Mt. McKinley...we were so lucky to have seen it before!
These were the first three Grizzly Bears that we saw. There were asleep the first time up on a hillside, but on the return trip they were active and walking around...they were coming straight for us but after a half hour our bus had to move, we were four hours from home and way behind schedule.
The "big one" of the group.
Don't ever let batteries get to low! My camera missed this guy walk across the road right in front of us! By the time I got it working he was far up on the hill.
This is the lone ranger bear as I call him. He walked across the stream, up from right to left and right in front of us! He did not care at all about our existence.
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