My Alaskan Adventure

Well folks, the summer is coming to an end and I am finally getting ready to come home. It is both my and Martin’s plan to drive home from Alaska in our ‘ol beater car. If you think it won’t make it, you are dead wrong. We are getting so prepared for this thing it’s ridiculous. So these are my final 2 weeks in Alaska. For my last weekend here I plan on doing one more awesome hike at a place called lost lake down near Seward, then I’m off to Denali one last time for 3 days and Friday we take off. This trip is going to be epic, it will be the longest road trip I’ve ever done roughly 5,000 miles.

I can hardly wait. See y’all soon! I will probably load a few more pictures soon so keep an eye out for them.

Cheers! 

Ok folks, it’s picture marathon time. I’m going to toss a bunch of pictures up that should keep you all busy for a while.

I hope you enjoy.

Cheers!

Hello everyone, I am finally ready to get something out there about the trip that I took to Lake Clark and Katmai National parks from June 20th to June 28th. I would like to share with you all of the pictures that I took. I have recently uploaded my photos to photo bucket which are available here:

http://s21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/nealjul18/LACL%20KATM%20620-628%20Part%201/

http://s21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/nealjul18/LACL%20KATM%20620-628%20Part%202/

I don’t really have time to do my usual narrative, so you will just have to enjoy the pictures. I still have a lot of things to post and tell you about so keep checking in, I’m hoping that by the end of this week I will be caught up with all of my shenanigans.

Cheers folks :-D

7.22.2010 I would like to apologise for not making any real posts in a long time. Alaska has kept be very busy with traveling and work and everything inbetween. A lot has happened in the month of June and July and I feel pretty bad for not keeping things up to date but it’s tough when I only have internet part of the time and when I do I don’t have much time to get things in order. I will make a promise though that when I get back in Anchorage in the beginning of next week I willl try my darndest to get this thing updated with my latest adventures.

I hope that whomever still reads this thing continues to do so.

P.S. - Happy birthday to me July 18th (details to come).

Well I suppose this is a bit overdue. I haven’t posted anything since earlier this month and I’m sure some of you are wondering if I’m still alive. Well, the short answer is yes and doing well. It has been a very hectic past 3 weeks between going back and forth from Denali, Anchorage, and my most recent trip of Lake Clark and Katmai national parks. My internet situation has been minimal, when I go to these remote places finding an internet connection to stay updated is rare.

So as I said, I just got back from another trip and it was pretty awesome until the end. To put it bluntly, I got stranded. I was on my way back from Brooks Camp in Katmai park and I had a very short layover in King Salmon where I would be catching a flight with Penn Air; as it turns out they won’t let you fly without an ID and as I may have mentioned in the past, I lost my wallet on top of a mountain so that ID was long gone. Some of you might be thinking, why wasn’t it an issue for you to get out there? Well, we flew out of a small airport called Merrell Airfield and took a little prop plane to Lake Clark where they didn’t give a crap if you had an ID or not. This clearly was not the case with Penn Air where they make you deal with TSA (I really hate those people), so that being the case I got stuck in King Salmon. So some of you might also be thinking, well that probably wasn’t all that bad right, I mean you’re in a new place to have new experiences. Well, I’ll put it to you this way, people have described KS to me as the butt crack of Alaska and they were 100% right. This place SUCKED! There is absolutely nothing there to see, the weather blows, and there are so many mosquitoes if you’re not careful they will suck you dry. So needless to say, I wasn’t happy about being stuck there. All in all it ended up not being to bad since the bugs weren’t out and I had a nice place to stay.

I’ll end my rant. So here I am now back in Denali after one LONG day of traveling, I was only in Anchorage for about 2 hours, it seems any more I don’t really have a place to call home since I’m never there. Anyways, I’ll make sure to post some pictures later and tell you a little more about the trip so keep an eye out, I should be able to get something up this week since I’m here until Friday and should have the internets.

Cheers!

Well here you go folks, this is where you get to see what my job consist of. This was a trip that we took for work to Wrangell St. Elias National Park, it was a week long and really was 2 trips combined into one. Keep in mind that this trip IMMEDIATELY followed the amazing weekend trip and I only got about 2 1/2 hours of sleep that night. It started off with us leaving the office Monday morning and driving about 3 hours to get to Copper Center which is where the park administration offices is located. There we took a little while to familiarize ourselves with the area so that the next day we could get down to business. We then made our way to the Caribou hotel where we stayed in the annex building, this is actually where the people that worked on the pipeline lived while building it. Let’s just say that I’m glad that I was only there for 2 nights, it wasn’t very pleasant. The building itself consisted of trailors that were connected and made into a makeshift hotel.

So here is where the real beauty begins, this mountain range can be seen on our way to the Copper Center offices. This picture was taken in our favorite spot to have lunch and take in this scenery.

On Wednesday morning Ed, Dan, and myself headed to Kennecott where we would begin our next inspections, the road to get there is about 90% gravel and is notorious for flat tires, luckily we did not get one. This place is on the top of my list of most interesting places that I’ve been. The absolute beauty of the area combined with the amazing engineering knowhow of the mining people put this place way up there. The pictures that I have posted of this place just can’t do it justice, it really is one of those places that you have to see for yourself. But here is a taste of what is there, in this picture is the largest structure built there, the mill. It is like 16 stories tall, the tallest wooden structure built at it’s time and maybe ever. I urge anyone who might even be sllightly interseted to do some research on this place and then see about visiting it.

Here is a picture that I took from the airport near Kennecott in it you can see the glacier that sits right next to this place. Now I’ve never ever even seen anthing like a glacier so you can imagine how impressed I was with the sight of one. Kennecott itself actually sits right next to the glacial moraine which is pretty much just the ice covered in the gravel that it has stripped from the mountains, in the link I am providing you can see just how high this moraine was not even a hundered years ago.

I could go on and on about this place, it is that amazing, but I’m not going to so I’ll wrap things up. You can check out all of the pictures that I took here: http://s21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/nealjul18/Wrangell%20may%2017%20to%20may%2021/

I took a lot and they are by no means self explanitory so if you are really curious I would suggest that you try and give me a call if you have my number, if not feel free to comment or send me an email so we can discuss. Otherwise I would once again suggest the research, wiki is probably a good bet. Here is a link to some really old panoramic photos that were taken when the mine was in full swing, you can clearly see how much higher that moraine is and how many structures really are at this place. 

http://photolab.elmer.uaf.edu/gallery/panoramas/panokennecott.html 

http://www.largestnationalpark.com/history.html

As always keep checking in. Cheers!

Ok guys, I figured it’s about time to finish up my weekend that we went clamming and fishing, so here we go.

So after waking up and packing up the camp site we headed out to meet our skipper and depart early in the morning. The idea would be that we would be catching the tides just right so we can troll for kings for about an hour then head on out to get them halibut. Trolling is basically where we send out one pole for each person that’s allowed to have a line out and then move the boat around in a serpentine path going about 5 knots. So when we get a bite, basically you hope it’s a king and fight it until it comes up.

Here I am pulling up what I’m hoping is a nice big king. It was quite a bit of work where I was initially learning how to properly real in a fish since I haven’t been fishing since I was about 10 years old.

This was my result, you can imagine my disappointment when I saw it was just some dumb halibut, maybe pushing 13 pounds, a baby in halibut terms. Unfortunately none of us caught a king salmon which is a real shame since we all had to pay for a king license which was an extra 10 bucks, in fact I was the only one during the trolling that even got a bite and they were both just some little halibut. :-(

After the frustration of not getting any king and wasting about 2 hours of our time we headed out to sea to get the big boys, and get them we did. Here I am holding up one of my 2 halibut I caught (for that area you are only allowed 2 halibut per trip according to the law). The biggest halibut that was caught was by Martin which was about a good 35-40 pounder followed by a close second by Ed who got about a 30-35 pounder.

So here was our catch for the day, they were all a pretty decent size none less than about 20 pounds. The three fish you see at the bottom are cod, I caught 2 of them and Martin caught one. It was actually really funny because we were out there for a good 4 hours and Sam caught his two halibut in about the first 20 minutes and Martin was the last to catch his and it was the biggest catch of the day, I guess it was worth the wait.

So this was the result of the meat for Martin and myself, we both had about 35 pounds of halibut and another 6 pounds of cod. All in all it was a great day for fishing and a very awesome first experience of fishing on the ocean.

You can see the full set of pictures from that day here:

http://s21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/nealjul18/Halibut%20Fishing%205-16/

As usual feel free to ask me any questions you might have about the pictures. Cheers!

Alright, so here we go. I want to give you a brief description on how this day went down. It started off with us arriving in Ninilchik around 10 AM when the tide was going to be at it’s lowest point of the month. We put on all our gear and headed out to the ocean. It was composed primarily of really sloppy mud, but was thicker and thinner in parts. We had absolutely no gear, only boots to keep our feet dry and our hands for digging, we didn’t even have a bucket to put our clams in, how’s that for forethought?

So here is how it begins, first you look for a small hole in the sand and you decide to dig. This one we decided to tag team.

And this is the reward, that little clam. So basically you just do that until the tide starts to come in. After a while some people lent us their “clam gun” which is basically a tube that you stick down and suction up the sand to expose the clam.

This is what we ended up with at the end of the day, between the 4 of us we got around 20 or so clams. Not bad considering we dug by hand for the majority of the time.

After the whole clam thing we decided to go to Homer to see what all the hub bub was all about since everyone says to go there. Well, we can see why.

While we were there we went all around to the shops and checked out where the Deadliest Catch guys hang out at this bar. It was a pretty neat place, you will see in the album the place that has all the dollar bills on the wall.

On the way back to camp, where we were clam digging, we decided to stop at this boat grave yard and it was pretty cool.

And this was where the day ended, on the beach with an amazingly beautiful sunset, which was around midnight by the way.

Feel free to visit the album of this day to get a better look on the events of the day. If you have any questions about the pictures or just want to hear a story about them feel free to use my ask page.

http://s21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/nealjul18/Clam%20Digging%205-15/