Weather Forecast For Today: Smoke
After work, about 6:00 pm, I decided to go on a hike with one of my buddies, Josh, from work. We had originally planned to do about two hours of hiking and then gorge ourselves on pizza buffet. Halfway through, Josh decided he wanted us to be more adventurous and climb Wolverine Peak, and I grudgingly agreed. I had found a nice little "access trail" that the locals use that cut 30 minutes of driving time by using a different trailhead than the traditional one. The problem was that this trail was getting quite overgrown, which commonly happens when trails in Alaska aren't used. The trail was not so overgrown that you couldn't find your way though.
It was over 80 degrees, which is burning up in Anchorage, so after about 10 minutes of hiking, I was soaked with sweat. There is also lots of smoke in the air right now because of wildfires on the Kenai Peninsula. It wasn't so bad that I had trouble breathing, but you could definitely smell the burning campfire smell all around you. Evidently, they don't do much about wildfires here, so it will be like this until it eventually rains. Another consequence of the smoke is that it makes it extremely humid. More sweating.
Once we got out above the tree line (1hour) the scenery was quite good. As we got higher there seemed to be less smoke, but this could be me just being optimistic. It took us about 2 hours to get to the top. We took a short break and headed back down.
On the way back, we encountered two infamous things of Alaska hiking: bear poop and mosquitoes. The mostquitoes were out in force and could keep up with us if we just walked, so we decided to jog just fast enough so that they could not keep up. It was all downhill so it wasn't that bad. The bear poop was everywhere. With no bear spray, it would not be good to walk through some brush face to face with a grizzly. So as we ran down the trail, I would yell "HEY BEAR!" every couple of seconds so that the bears would hear us coming. They are actually pretty afraid of humans and will avoid us if they can. Because we ran the whole time, we got back pretty quickly. The 10 mile trail took us just over four hours, which is pretty quick, considering we climbed around 2500 vertical ft. Exhausted, I skipped the pizza buffet and went home. After talking to Ally, I microwaved some green peas and went to bed. I was tired.
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