Last weekend in Alaska

The last weekend in July, Kenai, Alaska

In the last weekend in July we went to the Kenai Peninsula to go mountain bike the Resurrection Trail. It was one of the best experiences in my life! It rained a little bit on Friday, but the rest of the time the weather was beautiful.

There was also a race the same weekend called the Soggy Bottom. It is a 119 mile mountain bike race on the Kenai. The guys that were racing are some of the best athletes in Alaska. We were on the same trail as them and got to see them at different stages of the race. You could see every time they passed us that they were getting more and more tired!

Friday night, we had wine and lots of steak and brats that we biked in! It was really entertaining to see how the bikes were all loaded up with charcoal and meat and wine. I thought it was funny that one of the best meals that I had in Alaska was on a mountain biking trip.

The scenery was outstanding. We didn't see much wildlife, probably because we were being really loud to keep the bears away. The last section was completely downhill, and it was so much fun to scream down the mountains!

Backpacking Denali with Travis

First off, this post is about things that happened WAY in the past. With working coming to a close and trying to get moved back to Austin, it was very hectic and most computer things, such as email, Facebook, and this blog, were neglected. Now that I'm back in Austin, its time to update! Yay! I wrote most things down on paper so that I could remember....

July 23-25
The weekend my family was in town, we decided to go to Denali National Park. It took about 4 hrs to drive up to the park, and we, in Day Family fashion, didn't get on the road until around 9:00 pm. As we drove up, dad was amazed at how long the sun stays out up here. He got excited about it, and it's always cool to see him excited about something. We drove in and found our campsite, which turned out to be the wrong one, but whatever.

The next day, we were promptly told we were in the wrong campsite and to move our stuff. After putting the tents away, we drove down to the visitor's center to get permits for the area that we were going to go backpacking in. I suppose because Alaska is just that hardcore (or for conservation) there are no trails in Denali. If you want to go backpacking, you sign up for an area and hike wherever you want within that area. The only rule is that you can't camp within site of the road. We took the bus out to our area, and then waved goodbye to our parents. Most passengers never leave the bus, so you could see that there were some that looked on with jealous envy.

Setting up camp out of sight of the road was harder then we originally thought. The area was gently sloping up from the road, which meant that you could see a lot from the road in this area. We ended up hiking over eight miles to just be out of sight of the road! We started out by hiking in a river basin, which is a broad flat area that has lots of river rocks in it. The rivers in this part of the park are braided, so they split up and meander around. This makes river crossings difficult but not dangerous. After a while, I realized that we had hiked up the wrong river, and need to be in the one directly to our west. This meant getting out of the river bed and hiking across thick willows. It was tough. The willows were about hip-high, and would crush under foot, producing a walking feeling similar to post-holing through snow.

We arrived at our camp about 10:30 pm (still a lot of light!) and had dinner. While having dinner, a huge herd of caribou came across our path! When on the buses, you could stop for 15 minutes so that passengers can get pictures of caribou. Now we had about 40 not 20 yards from us while we were eating. I've decided that if you want to see wildlife in the park, you should definitely get off the road!

The next morning we hiked back to the road and caught a bus back to the visitors center. For the rest of the day, we did 'regular' tourist stuff, and had a lot of fun.

Oh and the mountain is really big.

Welcome to Alaska, Family!

My family got into town two days ago, and it has been non-stop sight seeing since they got here.

I picked them up from the airport on Monday at about 8:45 pm. Right out of the gate, my dad got out his notebook and directed us to the first destination. On Day Family vacations, there is no waiting or resting. We go from one tourism spot to the other, not worrying about sleep or food, until we have seen all that we can.

From the airport we went to Ship Creek, a local favorite for salmon fishing. Even though it was almost 9:30, there were hundreds of people out trying to catch a fish or two. We watched them fish from a bridge that goes over the river. I thought this was pretty funny because my dad usually says that fishing is boring, but now he wanted to WATCH fishing. Maybe he has been watching OLN. Actually it was interesting because you could see the fish in the water and could watch the fishermans' attempts to catch them. There was one huge King (which you have to throw back right now) that kept getting caught multiple times. He was probably 2-3 ft long!

The next day I went to work to go visit the LNG plant down in the Cook Inlet. This plant takes natural gas, cools it to -556 deg F, and then ships it on large barges to Japan, where people use it to fry their eggs. If the Japanese eat fried eggs.... Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) boils at room temperature, so it is a pretty interesting thing to see.

That afternoon, I met back up with my parents to eat dinner. I took them to Moose's Tooth, which is the best pizza place I have ever been to. Although we had to wait for over an hour, it was good to sit and talk. Not to mention when we finally did eat, the Halibut Pizza was delicious. We didn't end up leaving until after 10 pm, so I went home and went to bed soon after.

This weekend, we are driving up to Denali to camp in the park and tour around until Sunday. Then, I am taking them to Seward so they can catch a cruise back to Seattle. Should be fun!

Hammerman Triathalon

This last weekend I did a tri! But, I'm lazy so I did it as a team. My friend Libby swam, I biked, and Megan ran. This was an xTerra tri, so instead of road biking and running, you have mountain biking and trail running, which makes it much more hardcore. The swimming leg is still swimming, they haven't found a way to make that out of water yet.

Libby swims for Colorado School of Mines, and totally rocked the swim. She is usually a sprinter, but made it out of the water near the front. She gave it her all, and was definitely delirious coming out of the water. I yelled for her to come tag up, and she stumbled over and tagged me.

I started running to the mount zone, where I could get on my bike. A this point, we were second in the team category from what I could tell. The biking was a hard course! Half of it is on cross-country ski trails and half is on pretty technical singletrack. I hadnt done a mountain bike race since last fall, so I was excited to see how I did. I got passed by a couple of really good bikers, one of which ended up winning the whole thing. I was wishing a had a full suspension bike because Anchorage singletrack has a lot of roots due to how shallow the root system of trees here is. I fell on some really quick and blind corners, but had a serious amount of fun on the trails! I finished the 13 mile courses in just over an hour, and tagged up with Megan.

Megan did well on the 4 mile trail run course, but there were some serious runners in our field. We ended up 6th (I think)! I was really pleased with our result and had a lot of fun doing it. If I move to Anchorage, I think I will have to get into Tri's even though my Texas Cycling buddies will make fun of me.......

I forgot my camera, so no pictures!

Blackstone Bay Kayak Trip

Last weekend I went another of one of the best trips that I have ever been on. I keep saying this on almost every trip that I have been on in Alaska. This one, I planned and invited all the interns to go for a two day kayaking trip to Prince William Sound out of Whittier, Alaska. The plan was to take a water taxi out to Blackstone Bay, paddle around and then camp, and then paddle back into Whittier on Sunday. Blackstone Bay is famous for its huge tidewater glaciers. Tidewater glaciers are glaciers that empty straight into the ocean. They are quite magnificent when the ice calves, or breaks off, into the water.

We were blessed with excellent weather, which is suprising in Prince William Sound because it is actually considered a rainforest because it rains so much there. It didn't rain on us and there were blue skies each day, which made the trip and paddling more agreeable. Kayaking is fun, except when the wind picks up and you are soaked due to rain.

I was worried about people being immature and trying to flip kayaks or accidentally falling in the water. This can be potentially dangerous, because the water is around 40 degrees. At that temperature, it would not take you very long to get hypothermia and die if you fell in, so you have to be carefull. We taught everybody what to do if they did flip, and told them about how serious it could be if they fell in, and I think this sobered them up. This did not stop us from having water fights with the bildge pumps!

Saturday night we had hot dogs and sat around the fire and talked until the sun set (probably 1:00 am?). The setting sun made the water look like a grey-blue glass. As we sat pondering how pretty the scenery was, I said, "You know, I think Alaska is where desktop wallpapers are born." Even though it was a nerdy comment, I think that comment definitely verbalized what everyone was thinking.

Sunday morning we got up around 8:00 and broke camp really quickly for a group of 14. We had oatmeal for breakfast and then got to paddling. We had 13 miles to go, which equates to around 5 hours. The weather was really warm on the water, probably close to 80 deg. I quickly stripped to shorts and a t-shirt. There was no wind, which made paddling easy, but the sun bouncing off the water and our kayaks made it pretty hot. People started to get a little cranky near the end of the day, but I understood because we were doing a lot of paddling. During the paddle we stopped multiple times to take strech breaks and eat food. On one beach the water was crystal clear, so four or five people, including myself, decided to go for a swim. The water was chilly, but it felt amazing after being hot all day. It felt great to have the sun on me after a long summer of pants and long t-shirts.


Adam called Sunday a sucker day. A lot of times, the weather in Alaska is terrible, and just when you're about fed up and ready to leave, mother nature will send you a beautiful day that will "sucker" you back in to Alaska. This whole summer has been full of sucker days.

Billy and Staphane. That cliff to the right of the picture is over 500 ft tall.

Yum Yum, glacier........

Wolverine Peak: Running Down Hills From Bears

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.

Kachemak Bay Kayaking Part 2

On day three of the kayak adventure, we explored a different bay in another part of the park. It was more difficult that the day before because the wind was a bit stronger. The waves in most parts of the bay were about 2 ft tall. You can't kayak in more than about 4 ft without the danger of tipping over. Tipping over is very serious because of how fast you can get hypothermia. If you do tip over they advise you to try to get back on top of your kayak, head straight to shore and get out of your wet clothes, and make a fire.

Today was Fourth of July, and it was a beautiful Independence Day. In one area we went, there were tons of bald eagles, and I could not contain my amusement of how surreal it was to see bald eagles soaring overhead on July 4th. They are actually quite an annoying bird, and squawk in a tone that sounds like an old lady dying. Adam says it was their mating call. I guess they are into old ladies.....

We also saw some cool star fish. I got to touch one and I was surprised at how hard they are. They feel like rocks. Unfortunately, I didn't get any good pictures of them.

On the way back, we got a good taste of Alaska weekend traffic. Alaskans, for whatever reason, love campers/RVs. They take them everywhere, and tend to drive no more than 50 mph. The tourists on the other hand will only drive 40, so with the combination, you don't get anywhere fast. It was as bad as traffic in Austin! The good thing was is instead of staring at buildings, you are staring at huge mountains in every direction. I think all of Anchorage had been on the Kenai Peninsula for Fourth of July.

Our water source. Mark was brave and made the climb up the slippery slope.

Oyster Farm. The balls hold up trays that the things grow on. They were everywhere in this bay.

Crystal clear water! Not sure what the underwater shrub things were: some type of seaweed that was everywhere at low tide.