Goodbye Old Friend

Our time here in Alaska has run out and it is time to say goodbye. As unpleasant and sad as this is we are both excited for the journey home and seeing our family and friends again. Before we get to that fun part let us reflect on the past 5 months...

We realize that we have mentioned the Nature Center and our place of work numerous times but have yet to show you what it actually looks like. A couple days before we left we walked around the building and got some pictures to share with you folks at home.

This is our viewpoint from working behind the front desk at the Nature Center

This is our front desk and the gift shop

This is one of our hands-on educational displays

This is the seating area in the nature center. These chairs were the closest thing we had to a couch.

The front desk again, where we spent 4 days a week at.

This is the Nature Center!

The view as you walk around the building

The picnic area behind the nature center

Adam greeting you from the back door!

Our view from the Nature Center!

This is our kitchen, bathroom and trail maintenance garage!

Also it was recommended that we draw a map to show you the layout of our work/living quarters. Hopefully this will help you picture what our life was like out here. Also it highlights all the wildlife sightings near our home over the summer. :)

Working and living here has been such an amazing experience. We have both learned so much and had so much fun that it is hard to leave this place. Living out in the Alaskan wilderness also presents one with unique situations and stories that earlier in the season would not have been appropriate to share but now that we are leaving we figured why not tell them! (We decided not to share them because they would most likely scare grandmothers and mothers, but we are heading home now so everything is fine! We are still alive! Do not worry!)

After our first few weeks of living in Alaska we were anxious to see our first grizzly bear! On one beautiful Saturday morning our trail crew volunteer, David, came up to the Nature Center to tell us that there was a massive grizzly bear down by our overflow parking. David had been on the four-wheeler, seen the bear and surprisingly the bear was not scared or intimidated of the four-wheeler. In fact, David revved the engine to scare the bear and it walked towards him! This was a very large grizzly bear that was not afraid of humans or loud machinery such as an all-terrain vehicle. So we at the Nature Center heard this story and of course wanted to go see this massive grizzly! So what do we do? Of course we go looking for it. Naturally we were smart about it, we went with David who lived in Alaska for many years and Colin, our resident Nature Center volunteer and professional photographer. Before leaving all four of us loaded up with air-horns, bear spray, flares, and radios. We hiked down to the overflow parking which I should share is within 500 yards of our cabin no less and were being very quiet, looking for the bear. After a few minutes we found it munching on dandelions in a nearby patch of open grass. After walking through some thick brush we finally made it to a spot where we could see the bear clearly and man was it big. This thing was a beast! We were about 40 yards from the bear as it blissfully ignored us. We took our fair share of pictures and all of a sudden the bear looked directly at us! He gave us a warning look and all four of us got the heck out of there. No harm, no foul and one awesome experience. You can see why we neglected to tell you that story earlier in the summer, we did not want people worrying that we were sneaking around the woods looking for bears.

My camera did not have a good enough zoom...

Speaking of grizzly bears, in early June Adam had woken up early one morning and gone over to the kitchen/bathroom to shower to find that it was occupied. So he headed back to bed until it was open. This was around 7:30 in the morning. David had been the one in the shower and he came out about 10 minutes after Adam had been there. To his surprise he looked out the kitchen window to see a grizzly bear walking along the driveway right up to our Jeep! The grizzly bear then proceeded to rub up against the Jeep and continue up the road into the Nature Center parking lot! Had Adam slept in by 10 minutes he would have walked right into that grizzly bear!

Grizzly Bear just hanging out in front of the Jeep. NBD.

Another time we were hiking on the Albert Loop, a 3 mile trail at the Nature Center. We started on the lower half (which is actually very close to our cabin and the overflow parking) and were making quite a bit of noise as we were walking (to scare off any wildlife). The trail was pretty overgrown in this section so you could not see very far ahead. As we came around a corner we stopped in shock as a tall bull moose was standing in the middle of the trail 15 yards ahead of us. Now for those of you that do not know, moose are actually more dangerous than bears. Moose have no problem trampling you and that is basically like being run over by a car. This bull moose did not take notice that we were there, so we watched him for a few moments, taking pictures and such. Suddenly he looked up and noticed us, and what does he do? He does not retreat or run away...he starts stomping towards us! Man did we turn around and get out of there quickly. Luckily he did not follow but that really gave us a scare. We have actually heard stories over the summer of moose chasing people down so we were very excited that that was not one of those cases.

There was no zoom on this picture!

Last but not least is a story about the Albert Loop Trail, the trail that we mentioned previously. 20 years ago a man was attacked by a grizzly bear roughly 200 yards away from our cabin on this trail. He lived to tell the tail but he was the third person to be attacked on the trail in the fall so from then on once the salmon came up to spawn (which starts around the beginning of August) they close the Albert Loop Trail to keep people from walking into bear feeding grounds. It was a little unnerving to hear this story when we first got here and to know that we were living in such close proximity but luckily we made it through the summer unscathed!


Those were the stories that we neglected to tell you until we were leaving. Now that we are we have come to the sad realization that this wonderful experience must come to an end. We have had the best summer of our lives up here and it exceed our wildest expectations. Never in our wildest dreams did we ever think that we would be able to do and see so much. We have hiked on three glaciers, been on numerous glacier and wildlife cruises, ziplined through the mountainside, sea kayaked on the ocean, river rafted on two of Alaska's wild rivers, gold panned, relaxed in numerous hot springs, saw so much wildlife, went halibut fishing, rode on segways, and hiked so many of Alaska's beautiful trails, not to mention all the traveling from place to place which was utterly breathtaking. On top of all of this we worked at the most amazing nature center and met so many interesting people. The people we have worked with up here are so kind, generous and fun that work never really seemed like work.  We cannot believe how lucky we have been and we hope this luck continues on the drive home. Stay tuned on the blog to see where we stop along the way home.

Our first day at the Nature Center

Our last day.

-The A-Team