1,157 Miles in 120 Hours

And we’re back with a new installment of Adam and Ashley’s Alaskan Adventure! This week’s episode is graced with the presence of our guest stars Kelsey Straub and Nicole Wood! Our first visitors from home this summer came up to see just how cool Alaska can be with tour guides like ourselves. Between Friday night and Saturday afternoon the girls arrived and we headed north towards Denali National Park. The weather was beautiful and we were lucky enough to see the peak of Denali all the way from Anchorage. We kept our eyes peeled for wildlife during the drive as the group exchanged stories from the past few months. As we got closer to the park the clouds rolled in and kept the vast mountains hidden from sight. We arrived at our campsite and got the tent set up and started making dinner. Ashley and Nicole worked on the finishing touches of the tent while Adam and Kelsey worked on starting the fire. Flint and steel seemed like a more impressive way to start a fire than matches. Unfortunately, our technique needed some work so matches may have been used…you win this round fire. We made grilled sandwiches for dinner and turned in for the night. The girls got a first-hand look at how bright the Alaskan night can be so sleep was evasive but we managed.

 

The next morning, we got up early to do a little hiking before our first big adventure; whitewater rafting! The hike was gorgeous but unfortunately no wildlife yet. We headed to the area of the park that we like to call the Denali Dells; tons of gift shops and hotels made it feel strangely similar to the Wisconsin Dells. We looked through some of the shops before checking in for rafting. The rafting company was pretty fun and gave off a really California-surfer vibe. We were given wetsuits to keep us dry and warm from the ice cold glacial river. The four of us were in a raft with 5 other people and our guide, Wookie. He looked very similar to his Star Wars namesake but fortunately spoke English a lot better. Adam sat in front to keep the rest of the crew paddling on time. The lady opposite him was supposed to be leading but she didn’t do very well. Another lady was incredibly enthusiastic about how much fun we were having; even yelling her battle cry of “get it!” and “spank that!” as we went through the tiniest of rapids. The water was rough and cold but we made it through without going overboard, but we did have a dozen or so close calls. After the rafting we got back in the car to continue our journey south. Did we mention the girls were only staying for 4 days?! And we’re just getting started!

We left the Denali Dells around 2:00 in the afternoon headed towards our next campsite near the Matanuska Glacier outside of Palmer. To get to the site we took a more scenic route through the mountains known as Hatcher Pass. Kelsey and Nicole got to experience their very first pilot car here! The Pass had a little construction that was apparently treacherous enough to require a guide, but we survived. We stopped at several places to take a few pictures and give the old Jeep a break from driving. The Sound of Music soundtrack played in the background as we made our way through the mountains. We even saw a few people parasailing from the top of the peaks. The mountains finally gave way to a beautiful valley and we continued toward our campsite. The campground was much less busy than the previous night at Denali. We wasted no time setting up the tent as a team before pairing off again to finish the other tasks. Ashley and Nicole worked on the air mattresses and dinner preparations while Adam and Kelsey set off to make a fire again. The flint and steel was much more effective when used right way. The fire took a while to start but the team was successful this time! We made our signature quesadillas and roasted marshmallows for dessert. Kelsey was very determined to cut and split every log we could find in the area but with another big day ahead of us we decided to call it a night.

Breakfast the next morning consisted of slightly burnt cinnamon rolls over the fire with a side of spectacular eggs. We packed up camp and headed up the road to Matanuska Glacier for a guided glacier hike. Adam and Ashley were eager to compare this hike to the one they had in Kennicott a few weeks before and boy was there a lot to compare! The group was fitted for crampons and helmets (no helmets required for the last hike) and headed onto the toe of the glacier. The scenery could not have been more different. Matanuska Glacier was much more jagged and treacherous than the Root Glacier in Kennicott had been. Our guide was very nice and showed us some incredibly deep crevasses and even let us act like we were ice climbing with her ice pick! We had lunch by a large lake on top of the glacier and jumped a few times as we heard loud pops and cracks from the glacier melting and moving. After the hike we hit the road again, headed back to Eagle River for the night. Shortly after we started our drive we saw our first big wildlife for the trip! A young moose bounded into the road and narrowly missed us as we flew past. Heads jerked back to see the calf still alive and walking across the road as hearts raced and a few choice words may have echoed in the car. Easily the most exhilarating part of the trip!

Now as fun as camping was, we weren’t about to let Kelsey and Nicole head back home without spending a night right in our backyard. We teased them with subtle hints as we prepared dinner and had them still guessing as we packed our bags and headed down the trail. Campgrounds are nice and convenient but noise from the highway gets old pretty quick; so we spent the night at one of the cabins the Nature Center rents out. A mile and a half back into the woods we found our camp for the night; the quaint little cabin sat tucked amongst the trees and overlooked a small stream. The scenery was spectacular but sleep after a long 2 days soon won the battle for our minds. We played cards for a bit and then called it a night.

Tuesday morning was our last day together and we were going to make the most of it. We woke up early and hiked back to the kitchen for breakfast and crawled sleepily back into the car for a drive down to Seward. Normally a short two-and-a-half-hour drive, our time was a little slow due to a wildfire right near the only highway heading south. We made it to Seward in time for our first excursion; sea kayaking. We were fitted for personal floatation devices and rubber skirts to help keep us dry on the water. Our guides were telling us about the kayaks when they suddenly spotted a harbor seal. The little guy was swimming near the shore and even took time to show off the salmon it caught for lunch. The sun was shining brightly as we got settled into the tandem kayaks and headed out into Resurrection Bay, part of the Pacific Ocean. It was a beautiful but hot day so the cool ocean water felt wonderful as it splashed against the sides. The tandem kayaks were awesome but controlling that small of a boat with a rudder system was more difficult than expected. Adam and Nicole were in charge of steering the small vessels and despite a few minor collisions they did an awesome job. Plans may have been formed to sabotage the other kayaks by flipping their rudders out of the water…but it was all talk, for the most part. We had a brief stop on a beach where we were able to walk over a bridge and see our first salmon of the season! The Sockeye or Redd salmon were spawning just feet from the banks and we saw the occasional tail flip out of the murky glacier water. We even got to sample the local salmon berries while we watched the salmon! After that it was back in the kayaks and friendly race back to shore (Adam and Ashley obviously won and didn’t even cheat that bad). We had a quick lunch in the car while we drove back through town to our next adventure; zip lining!

We hadn’t planned or even thought about zip lining before the girls arrived but after some discussion we realized it would be foolish not to go. We found a company that offered a package of 6 zips, 3 suspension bridges and 2 repels and decided to take the plunge. Our two guides fitted us for harnesses and safety gear and showed us some of the basics of zip lining at ground school. We practiced a little and then piled into a modified pickup truck which took us up the mountain to the start of our adventure. Nerves were unsettled as we drove higher and higher but luckily the first zip line wasn’t too long or too high. Ashley was the most nervous going into this so naturally she wanted to go first. The zips got progressively longer until we reached the longest line of over 1200 feet. The guides showed us how to lean back and go even faster than we had been, almost 40 miles an hour! The next few platforms were repelling and rope bridges. The bridges will definitely be at our house someday because they’re the coolest. The repelling was pretty scary at first but we handled it like pros. The last zip led us back to the parking lot and a short repel later the fun was over. We were exhausted and took a few final looks around town before heading back towards home. Shortly after we left however we had to stop for pictures of a moose just along the road. After that it was smooth sailing all the way back to town; almost.

The wildfire we passed on the way to Seward had shifted a little with the wind and was dangerously close to the highway. We were about 10 miles from the actual fire when we hit stand-still traffic. There were brake lights as far as the eye could see and no traffic coming from the other direction. The only cars that passed us were people who decided the traffic wasn’t worth waiting in so they headed back towards Seward. The highway we were on was the only road to Anchorage and we only had a few hours to get Kelsey to the airport; so we sat and waited. We had plenty of snacks to eat and cards to keep our minds occupied. Fortunately, we only spent about 50 minutes sitting in the car before we were able to creep closer to town. It took us almost 2 hours to drive about 25 miles, which was great considering people earlier that day had waited for 3 to 4 hours without moving! We finally made it to town for a quick pizza dinner before dropping Kelsey at the airport. It was too soon to say goodbye but it was an awesome couple of days!

Wednesday morning was an early start for Adam who went into work so Ashley and Nicole could enjoy some hiking on Nicole’s last day. But did they hike all that much? No-they slept until 11! They eventually got a short 3-mile hike in (yeah, that’s short up here) before heading to town for ice cream. Meanwhile, Adam was running around the Nature Center like a mad-man with people pouring inside throughout the day. Literally the busiest Wednesday of the year but he handled it like a pro. Nicole and Ashley were sweet enough to have dinner ready when Adam finished work so that was nice. We had dinner and packed Nicole’s bags in the car to head for the airport. Too many trips to the airport in one weekend but those ladies were worth every second.

Adam and Ashley, alone again, headed back towards home. The drive was a little sad but also a joyous celebration of how well the weekend went. The group traveled over 1,157 miles in only 120 hours! The weather was fantastic and everyone got along really well. We wished the girls could have stayed longer but you can’t avoid work forever. The only thing we didn’t get to see was a bear over the whole trip. But those bears clearly knew what they were doing. Not half an hour after dropping Nicole at the airport and less than 5 miles from home, Ashley and Adam saw a black bear right next to the road. It wasn’t there on the way to the airport, but it was happily waiting to greet them just after they spent an entire weekend looking for bears. The lesson to be learned from this is don’t go home until you’ve seen a bear!

We slept hard the next two nights trying to catch up on sleep. Traveling is fun but it sure is exhausting. We’ll stay close to home this week before Adam’s family arrives next week to take an even longer trip. Will the bears hide until everyone leaves again? Find out next time on Adam and Ashley’s Alaskan Adventure!

-the A-Team

 

Horseshoe Lake at Denali National Park




Before.

After.

People parasailing at Summit Lake in Hatcher Pass

 

Flint & Steel was a success!

Matanuska Glacier

Ashley was not paying attention during the demonstration...

Adam knew what to do...

 

So did Kelsey...

And Nicole.

Second time is the charm.

The McHugh Creek Wildfire

Sea Otter just hanging out

Moose hanging out on the side of the road.

Harbor Seal checking up on us.



First Zip Line! They only got bigger from there!

 

 

 

 

 

 Repelling down 65feet.

 2nd Repel at 50feet

 

Rust Red, Snow White and Glacier Blue

This week on Adam and Ashley's Alaskan Adventure...we decided to take our longest and biggest trip yet for the 4th of July weekend. This past weekend we went all the way southeast to Valdez and drove into the remote town of McCarthy, AK. We decided to tent camp for the weekend seeing as some of the roads would not be Sweaty Yeti friendly.

We left early Sunday morning and made our way west and along the journey we saw at least 3 massive glaciers off in the distance as they made their way down from the mountains. We traveled along the Matanuska River and passed so many beautiful mountains. This drive quickly became one of our most favorite in all of Alaska. The route to Valdez was roughly 6-7 hours but boy was it worth it. Near Valdez we passed Worthington Glacier, a glacier off the main road that you can actually hike up to and explore. We easily spent over an hour exploring the glacier and hiking around. For those of you who do not know, one of Ashley's favorite things are glaciers so she was having a ball exploring the glacier up close.  Adam even managed to get into one of the ice cracks only to get ice cold water dripping down the back of his shirt.

Ashley was just a little bit excited.

As surprising as it sounds, that ice was super cold.

Adam just realized that cold water was dripping on him!

 As we continued on we drove through what was called Keystone Canyon, with massive rock walls that rose easily 200 feet above the road. Around every corner would be waterfalls and a beautiful new rock face for us to check out. There was even a unfinished railway tunnel that was built in the canyon. It was supposed to be used for the railroad network in the early 1900's but there was so much dispute over which rail company could use it that it lead to a gunfight in the actual tunnel and ended up that no company ever got to use it.

Valdez sure was packed for the 4th of July weekend. The town was fun to explore, all the little shops, restaurants and ironically named bars such as "The Fat Mermaid". We had dinner at a place called The Roadside Potato and it was delicious! Just outside of town we came upon a park called Glacier View so of course we had to check it out. The glaciers themselves had receded too far to see but they left huge icebergs floating in the lake that were close enough to touch. We even managed to climb out onto one only to realize that is was really slippery and very hard to walk on. We both know that this should have been obvious but for some reason it had slipped our minds in all the excitement. We only managed to take a few steps onto the iceberg before it got too slippery and steep to continue. After all that excitement we were ready to hit the hay so we drove to a remote campsite in Thompson Pass, only 20 miles away, up in the mountains and tucked in for the night.

The next day we ventured onward toward Wrangell St. Elias National Park-the largest national park in the United States. This park is so large that it is roughly the size of six Yellowstone, and is larger than the country of Switzerland with larger and taller mountains too. This park is unique in that it only has two roads that access the park; on the northern side there is a dirt road that leads 30 miles into the park and to the south there is a 60 mile road into the town of McCarthy. We chose to take the 60 mile road. From the main highway it was 30 miles to the east to a small town called Chitna. From there the road turned to gravel for the next 60 miles as it wound through the forested park. This road had potholes, and some steep up and down sections that we treated like a roller coaster and would throw our hands in the air and hoot and holler! The poor Jeep caught some air on some of those bumps and potholes even with us driving slow. We even had to drive over a massive old railroad bridge that was 528 feet across and over 200 feet above a deep river valley. After roughly 3 hours of driving we finally made it to the end of the road where there was a parking lot waiting for us. Once we parked we made our way to the footbridge and took the shuttle into the town of Kennicott which was an additional 5 miles from the footbridge. In Kennicott was a large abandoned mine-the largest and most profitable copper mine in US History. We got to take a tour of the mine and various buildings in the vicinity. This mine profited over 100 million dollars off of 600,000 tons of copper. The copper was discovered in 1900 and was mined until 1938 when the copper vein ran out and the mine was abandoned. The founders of the mine needed a railway established to transport all of this copper so they hired a man to build a railway that went 196 miles all the way to Valdez where they could send the copper to Tacoma, WA to be smelted. This railway crossed such a vast and changing landscape that every year they needed to rebuild bridges that had been washed out due to river floods. It was cheaper to rebuild bridges every year from wood than haul steel that far back into the back country. So for roughly 30 years every spring they would need to rebuild bridges to transport the copper. It was really was an amazing experience to walk through the old buildings and see the mining equipment. We even got to walk down 11 of the 14 stories of the old mill.The stairs were steep and narrow making us wonder how the burly Scandinavian works of the time were able to navigate the massive mill. After the tour we headed back across the footbridge to our camp for the night.

The end of pavement and beginning of dirt road to McCarthy

 

 

 

The large bridge we had to cross

This was of course a one lane bridge.

This was the 14 story Kennicott mill that processed and sorted all the Copper.

Adam having a blast exploring all the nooks and cranny's of the old buildings. We also had to wear hard hats during the tour.

This was the dynamite shack for the mine, luckily it was far away enough from town that it wouldn't have destroyed the mine had it gone off.

We started the mill tour  entering in on the 11 floor, there were great views!

 Now to probably the best part of our entire trip thus far...the glacier hike. On July 5th we did a full day glacier hike in Kennicott. The guiding company picked us up at 8:30 and from there were were fitted with crampons and hiked 2 miles to Root Glacier. We were on the glacier by 10am! Our guide was awesome and incredibly knowledgeable. There was only one other couple on the tour so we made excellent time compared to the larger groups that only did half-a-day trips. With the crampons strapped to our feet that added an additional 1-2 inches so we had to pick up our legs higher than we normally would walking and we had to forcefully put our foot down so that they would grab onto the ice. We felt like we were little kids throwing a tantrum as we stomped our way across the glacier. Walking on a glacier has been on Ashley's bucket list forever so it was truly an unreal and amazing experience for us. Hiking around made us really hot but the cool breeze blowing down and across the glacier felt wonderful. Soon we were hiking around in t-shirts enjoying the breeze. With only 5 people were were able to cruise along the glacier looking at many different features! Our guide took us to these glacier features which are called Moulin's; basically melt-water boars a hole deep into the ice, very similar to how water on land makes a sinkhole. They could go all the way to the bottom of the glacier and you could see water gushing into this deep blue hole. All along the glacier melt-water flowed in and around on the surface creating beautiful streams that meandered through the ice. We would also come across these pools of water with such a beautiful blue color that there is no name for such a color that could do it justice. These pools could be as deep as 150 feet! We would walk across deep crevasses that had luckily been pushed back together as the glacier made its way further down the valley. Around noon we picked a spot with a great view and our guide laid down a mat for us to have lunch on. A nice added bonus was that he scooped up some glacier water and used a jet boil to heat it up and we all got to have a hot chocolate on the glacier with our lunch! After lunch we continued exploring and we found these areas that used to be small lakes on the glacier but just had roughly an inch or two of water sitting in the basin. All this glacier water of course brings with it a fine grain silt and that often coated the bottom of these lakes. With the crampons on we would walk out into these lakes and it felt like walking on water. As our guide liked to say this is where you can get your "Jesus" pictures of you walking on water. Soon we came across this area that we like to call "The field of Toupees". There was some form of lichen/moss that was growing on the rocks and ice in only one spot on the glacier. They looked like little toupees for the chucks of ice sticking up! The nice thing about the hike was that we had endless amounts of ice cold glacier water to fill up our water bottles with and boy did that taste good! (Do not worry, the guide said it was ok to drink). For a fun surprise our guide gave us all a Twizzlers and we bit off each end and used the Twizzlers as a straw to drink glacier water out of one of the beautiful blue pools. It was the coolest thing! Unfortunately Adam got a little too excited and forgot to remove his backpack before drinking; luckily Ashley's water bottle floats! We hiked about 6 miles on the glacier that day and were back to our car by 5pm that night. It was such an incredible experience and one we will remember for the rest of our lives!

Adam putting on his crampons before we head onto the glacier!

Our guide showing us a Moulin!

Ashley standing over a crevasse.

Our walking on water pictures!

The Field of Toupees

Using Twizzlers as drinking straws, notice the water bottle about to fall!

After the glacier hike we were exhausted and sore but it was totally worth it.  We headed back towards the main highway just to break up the long drive we had to go home. We even came across a cafe that had the best carrot cake we have ever had! Even after a fun filled weekend it was nice to come home to an actual bed and kitchen. 

Until next time...

-The A-Team