The Last Frontier

Over dinner the other night, a good friend was gushing with excitement about her upcoming Alaska trip. I'll admit, it made me jealous and got me reminiscing. In 2007, Andy and I took a fabulous, ten day, just-us tour through our far northern last frontier, driving approximately 1000 miles in our Anchorage-Denali-Fairbanks-Glennallen-Seward tour. It was a fantastic, jaw-dropping/impromptu sampling of a phenomenally beautiful and wild state. We saw grizzly, almost wrecked the car staring at moose and bald eagles, stayed in tiny bush cabins (I cannot even imagine the fortitude it takes to use an outhouse at 40 below), hiked while singing songs to ward off the bears, got poured on, witnessed glaciers calving, wrote letters to Santa, visited three national parks, photographed Denali on clear day (apparently a very fortunate and not common occurrence), treated our taste buds to reindeer sausage and yak jerky (delish), drove by the snaking Alaska pipeline, and much more.

A sampling of some of our trip (taken before the days of a *good* camera, so please excuse the quality):

It's a long, winding road into the park to see Denali

Alaska Range from Polychrome Pass, Denali NP (photo by AJP)

Showing us the pearly whites

the mountains are big in Wrangell-St. Elias NP

(mountains everywhere) Chugach Range as seen from the Glenn Highway

Exit Glacier, Kenai Fjords NP (photo by AJP)

before we became intelligent about NOT hiking in jeans

stellar sea lions

Kenaji Fjords NP