Alaska2018

The fog was extremely thick this morning until close to noon, then it burned off for a beautiful day.  The wind has been as strong as the sun, however and several of us are sporting sunburns.   Ken and the children hiked Mt. Marathon.  Only Ken and Zeke made the summit.  The rest stopped and waited near "the bowl".   Mt. Marathon from our campsite. I stayed behind and accomplished much with regard to reorganizing, repacking, and cleaning the camper.  It needs a good reorganization about once a week in order to keep everything in its place. This was especially important since we switched from hiking to boating to hiking and thus all the backpack "stuff" had been dumped out and repacked a couple times.  Thanks to my parents solar set up and careful water conservation, I also got in a load of laundry.  The portable washing machine has been a good investment.  At $9/load or more, for the size of our family, the washing machine has earned its keep...

The fog lifted with perfect timing.  Today, we took a discovery tour with Kenai Fjords Tours into the northwest glacier area of Kenai Fjords National Park.  It was a beautiful day for a 9 hour tour.  The seas were calm and none of our family struggled with any nausea or sea sickness, thankfully! We saw incredible scenery - waterfalls, alpine and sea glaciers, a bald eagle, seals, sea lions, otters, Dall sheep, Dall porpoises, puffins, and humpback whales.  We saw the baleen of one humpback up close - it had accidentally tried to swallow a bird, and as it released the bird from itself, we got quite the show of humpback oral anatomy!  The crew all cam to see as they had never seen anything like it.  Yes, there will be photos at a later date. At the northwest glacier, the captain anchored us for about 30 minutes,mourned off the engine and we experienced all the sights and -sounds- of an actively calving glacier!  Amazing! My parents, our son, and their ca...

After an interesting night consisting of very loud neighbors until almost 1am followed by a big cruise ship coming into port around 5a and a 6:30am wake up, we ended up having a fun filled day.  The loud neighhbors did quiet down significantly after I asked them nicely to hold it down and pointed out that we have canvas tent beds only a few feet away.  They were very gracious about it, thankfully.  We had an 8:30am reservation at the Seavey's Ididarod Dog Sled Wilderness Tour.  It was fantastic.  We learned about the dogs, the race itself, how the Seavey family builds their sleds, and so much more. The introduction was given by Danny Seavey, who has competed in the Ididarod, as have two of his brothers, and his dad.  His brothers and dad have won many times. All of the 60 dogs at the facility either have or will run the Iditarod.  We rode a two mile course with a team of 14 dogs pulling our family in a cart, mushed by our guide, Taryn. The children wer...