Hello from the Sunshine state! We had quite a few fun adventures this past weekend! We started off the weekend with a Summer Solstice party at our coworker Ute's house. She is an incredible woman who has lived all over the world but is originally from Germany. We got to meet her family and her husband works for the state climate office which Ashley thought was pretty neat. Dinner conversation revolved around snowfall, precipitation, and weather patterns so Ashley was happy. The food was delicious and around 7pm we headed out to Denali National Park. As we drove up the clouds parted and the evening sun glistened on the mountains. We couldn't have asked for a prettier drive. Pulling into the campground around 11pm we had some late night pizza and camped in the National Park. The following morning we hiked near the entrance of the park.
Funny story...we hiked the Savage Creek trail and as we hiked around we found some social trails (not maintained by the park) and decided to check them out. The trail was beautiful and we even saw a marmot! When we reached the end of the trail we decided to make a quick bathroom break behind some bushes and continued on with our hike. Further down the trail we took another social trail and as Ashley reached for her phone to take a picture she realized it was missing. It's never a good feeling to lose your phone, especially in Alaska and not even on a well traveled trail! So we looked for it as we retraced our steps. It finally dawned on Ashley that it probably fell out where we went to the bathroom seeing as her phone had been in her back pocket. Low and behold the phone had been right where we had gone to the bathroom and for an added bonus the phone was not lying in a puddle of pee. You can see in the photo below that Ashley was a bit excited to find her phone safe and dry!
After hiking we hit the visitor center and gift shop (one of our favorite stores) for a few souvenirs to add to our collections. We stopped at a few shops in what we like to call the Denali Dells since it felt just like the Wisconsin Dells; just without the ducks. We had lunch at a place called the Salmon Bake which had a crazy tilted floor and a fun staff. It doesn't seem like the building would pass inspection but at least the food was good. We started heading south again and ended up discovering Hurricane Gulch (the bridge picture below). We wish we could have gotten a picture to capture the magnitude of the gulch but we were too close; also it was terrifying to drive over.
We wound up at Nancy Lake State Recreation Area and tucked the Sweaty Yeti in for the night. The campsite was awesome; nestled back in the woods where we could have a campfire, play cards and listen to the radio. The next morning we rented a canoe and had so much fun out on the water. It was sunny with a nice breeze and we practically had the lake to ourselves. This lake was so pristine you could see easily 15-20 feet to the bottom. We paddled around the entire shore of the lake and had fun looking for fish and we even saw a loon up close. The loons up here are huge! They make Wisconsin loons look like miniature play toys. We stumbled upon a huge school of young rainbow trout. They were roughly 7-9 inches long with some big northern pike hanging out on the lake bottom. We let our canoe drift towards them and all the sudden one jumped out of the water! Then another one did, and another. It was so cool! They jumped in and out of the water all around our canoe trying to catch flies or mosquitoes to eat. Twice they almost jumped into the canoe! We probably floated around those fish for a good 20 minutes when we saw something big and shiny swim by in the water. As it swam by again we were able to see that it was a loon swimming under the water! It was so cool to see the loon swim around our canoe corralling the fish and trying to catch a meal. When it would surface it would be roughly 10-15 feet from the boat! We are already making plans to come back here. On the drive out of Nancy Lake we saw a ptarmigan (Alaska's State Bird) and a moose with her calf. They moved fast so unfortunately no pictures.
We made it home, unpacked and decided to take an evening stroll to enjoy the longest day of the year. On June 22 we had roughly 19.5 hours of sunlight. We saw some small birds wading in the water and a mother Yellowlegs roosting in a spruce tree nearby. Adam had fun exploring the insides of a big hollow tree but it wasn't long before the mosquitoes drove us back to our cabin. The very next morning we had a mama moose and calf outside our cabin which was exciting and a little unnerving at the same time. That day at the nature center we had some Buddhist monks come into the Nature Center and for some reason they wanted a picture with Ashley. She was happy to be in the picture but was warned not to touch the monks because it's not ok for them to touch a woman. It was definitely a new experience for both of us but fun to learn about other cultures.
We are not quite sure what the weekend brings but we know it will be fun...and most likely wet; they are predicting rain.
Shout out to my big sister Roxanne and my brother-in-law Scott! Good luck and we cannot wait to meet our new niece or nephew!
-The A-Team
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