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Sunday, August 28, 2011

My Reindeer Friends Part II

Latest changes taken about a week ago. All of the velvet is gone from his antlers, they now look and feel like wood.
Note how his feet spread out. That allows him to walk on top of the snow instead of sinking. Works like a snowshoe.
Lastly, he is getting his winter coat back. He has the light tan look, like he had when I first saw him.
He will let me scratch under his chin and touch his antlers.
Hope Carol has the back yard ready!



A Beautiful Day for Mountain Sightings

Drove a group of people to Whittier on Aug 27 so they could get on the Cruise Ship.
On the 28th we drove back to the Mount McKinley Princess Lodge. It was a beautiful, clear day after we got away from Whittier. It was so clear that we could see Denali (the mountain) as we were driving through downtown Anchorage, but could not get a picture. We also saw it almost the entire way from Anchorage to McKinley Princess.
Here are some pictures.

From just north of Wasilla.

Along the road north of Willow

From the deck at the McKinley Princess Lodge. It had started to get a little cloudy around the mountain

Mount Foraker (Denali's wife 17,000+ feet)on the left and Mount Hunter on the right(Denali's Child 14,500+ feet). Foraker is farther away so looks shorter.

A final view of the mountain.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

On the Way Back from Kantishna

After flying out to Kantishna in about 45 minutes, it took just over five hours to get back by bus. Here are some pictures of what we saw on the way back. We saw a bear and a couple caribou but they were too far to get good pictures.





A red fox with a squirrel in it's mouth. It was just walking along the side of the road and could have cared less that this bus full of people was right beside it.

The fox again.

Very hard to see but this is a young bull moose, first one I have seen. There was a female in the bushes, they  may have been brother/sister.
To give you an idea of the relative size of the animals, the first is the grizzly bear, comes up to about my waist. The second is the Dall Sheep. The third is the moose whose back is at least as tall as me.

Behind the moose is the Wolf, and last is the Caribou. These are the five large animals found in the Park.

Flying High

Just about the final tour I wanted to go on in the Denali area was a flightseeing tour to the mountain, Denali. Yesterday I finally was able to get a seat on a plane and go. It was great.
We flew from the National Park air strip out to Kantishna, the end of the park road and about 90 miles from the lodge. On the way we got up above the clouds that almost always obscure Denali when looking from the ground and saw the top of the mountain.
There are glaciers everywhere and they all have names but I have no idea what the names of the ones we saw are.
Anyway, here are pictures of the trip.

The runway, only one, covered in gravel.

The plane and me. Plane seats five plus the pilot. Every seat is a window and an aisle seat.

Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge from the air.


Some lakes along the way. Beautiful green color.

A ridge way up there.

Some of the scenery on the way to Denali.

A glacier.

No that is not a road. It is some phenomenon that occurs when two glaciers are side by side

Along the way to Denali. Looks like there may have been an avalanche, snow is all piled up on itself.

The mountain above the clouds. Amazing.

Another view of the mountain. People actually climb this all the way to the summit (the round peak on the left is actually taller than the pointy peak)

Monday, August 15, 2011

My Reindeer Friends

We take tourists down to the Jetboat Safari tour four times a day and sometimes I drive them down there. The jetboat folks have two reindeer in a pen there for the tourists to see.
I am going to bring them home and put them in the backyard for Snickers to play with. They are my friends.

This is how they looked in May. Still have their winter coat but it was shedding. Note the size of their antlers.

They eat right out of my hand.

This is how they look now. Their antlers have grown. This one still has all the velvet on the antlers

This is the male. Note the size of his antlers. Part of the velvet has worn off of this one's antlers.


Another pic of the same one.

Sunday, August 7, 2011

August 5th and 7th...Good Days for Snow

Taken August 5
Mountain I see when sitting in my motor coach while in bus parking at the lodge

Another view taken on August 7.
The mountain I see while sitting in my motor coach in bus parking at the lodge.

Sugarloaf Mountain. This is what we see while waiting for trains at the depot.

We got some snow on the mountain tops both days. Down where we were the temperature was 39 today. It must be August!

Bill Went Up....There??

The buildings up above are the Denali Grand Hotel. It doesn't look very high up but there are about 10-12 hairpin turns to maneuver to drive up there.
I drove a motor coach up there twice (and drove down also) in the past two days to pick up tourists for tours only to find that they weren't there in both cases. But it was a bit of a challenge ( I had driven it once before with one of our supervisors along with me) and there is a great view from up there as you can see below

The Nenana River running more or less left to right, part of one of the hairpin turns.

The Nenana River, The Parks Highway going up and down in the middle, highway bridge and the walking bridge in the center, one of the hairpin turns with part of another in the lower right.

The buildings in the center are the National Park Wilderness Access Center. Somewhere out there is the National Park Visitor's Center and the rail depot.

All the little red roofed buildings are the Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge, Nenana River in back, Parks Highway in front, some of our buses in the right center.

The Denali Grande Hotel just above the roof of one of the building at the railroad. The rest of Sugarloaf Mountain in the background.