Anyway, after we got in to Anchorage at about 12:45 am, we rented a car and crashed at a hotel for just about three hours before leaving early in the morning to go see Mt McKinley. Why did we get up so early? To catch yet another plane, of course.
In Talkeetna, you can charter a small plane to take you on an aerial tour of Denali (apparently Mt McKinley is also called simply Denali), and that's what we did, courtesy of my parents (as a dual graduation present... yes, I know, I have not yet graduated). Anyway, they say that only about 30% of people who go to see Mt McKinley actually get to see it because of clouds and haze. I'll let you be the judge of how our weather was:
Anyway, in that picture you can see a humongous glacier coming down from Denali. That glacier is called Ruth Glacier, which is about 3800 feet thick and moves at the incredible rate of a meter per day. You can see a description of the flight we took at the website of K2 Aviation, which is the company that we flew with. Our tour was the green one, and we did not pay full price, just so you know. The flight circled around Mt McKinley and also went by the climbers' base camp. Our pilot spotted a few climbers, but even with our camera zoomed in all the way they just look like ants, so we didn't bother putting a picture up. Like I said, we went around McKinley, so here is a picture of a side of the mountain that you probably haven't seen before. This picture was taken from the west.
The back (north side) of the mountain was pretty cool, but none of the pictures we took were really worthy of inclusion, so if you want to see them, you'll have to wait until Julie does our scrapbook. The only thing you really need to know about the north face of Denali is that some lunatic Frenchman skied down it. Moving on... Everyone knows that Alaska has a lot of Moose, because Sarah Palin hunts them (we drove through Wasilla on our way to Talkeetna, and even ate lunch there on the way back, but didn't see her), but apparently they have some swans, too. Our pilot saw these out the window (apparently he had an eye transplant from an eagle), and I managed to take a picture of them, so here you go:
Now, if you know anything about flying, you know that a flight in a plane that small is bound to be really bumpy, but it was as smooth as can be. So, since our pilot was awesome, we thought we'd share a picture of him with you.
After our flight, we drove up towards Denali national park for a ways, but didn't have time to drive all the way to the visitor center. So, we stopped at a nice viewpoint and had our picture taken by a young man who was on vacation with his parents - something we saw a lot of on this trip. From the expression on my face, you can tell that the clouds people keep talking about never quite materialized. Something you should know about Mt McKinley is that it is big. So large, in fact, that you can see it from Anchorage, which is about 160 miles away.
From the viewpoint, we drove back to Anchorage, returned our car, got on a bus that took us to Whittier (I would tell you about the bus ride, but this post is getting long, and I have to leave something for the scrapbook, right?), and we boarded the cruise ship. I'm not sure what happened after we got on the ship, because we were really tired and all I wanted to do was sleep, which we eventually did do.
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