Alaska is one of the truly wild places left on earth. It met my expectations and more. I would like to share with you the experience in words and pictures to give you just an inkling of what I have experienced.
The trip to Alaska was not my idea. It wasn't Heidi's idea either. It was Dr. Davis who mentioned it. Heidi needed a project for her Masters/Doctorate research and this was the one Dr. Davis had readily available for a graduate student to work on. Looking back on it now, I am glad that Heidi took Dr. Davis up on this wonderful opportunity to work with the Sea Otters of Alaska.
We were scheduled to be on the project on the 26th of June. The project would limit us to only one part of Alaska, the area of Prince William Sound. This is why we decided to go up a week early; so we could look around the interior of Alaska. We spoke to others that had been to Alaska and every one of them said that we should go to Denali National Park. We couldn't leave this park off of our itinerary now. We had to go since it was so highly recommended.
We had made reservations for a few nights in Anchorage. We called to reserve a car. We also packed our tent and a few of our camping items. That is about all we did before hand. We tried to get a good feel for the camping situation in Denali but didn't get a feeling that made us comfortable enough to go backwoods camping in the park.
When we arrived in Anchorage it was about 4:30 pm. We were about 30 minutes late. We quickly jumped on the phone to call on our reserved car. We called for about 10 minutes and couldn't get an answer. We later found out that this time of year was the busiest part of the tourist season. It leads right into the summer solsticeand there was a popular marathon in Anchorage. Well, it is a little known fact that the car rental companies in Anchorage overbook by about 50%. This was shocking to find out. So, we were now calling all the rental companies in search for any rental car. After talking to about ten different rentals, we found a Dodge Intrepid. It was a relief. We never did get a hold of the other guy that originally took our reservation. We figured he was probably one of the hundreds of guy on the Ship Creek fishing for Salmon, since he didn't have anymore cars to rent out, he had probably gone fishing.
We got our car, looked around Anchorage, and did a little shopping for the camping items we couldn't bring along. We stayed in a bed and breakfast the first 2 nights. We jumped in our Intrepid and then trekked up to the Denali area. We couldn't get reservations in the campsites inside the National Park so we stayed in the Denali State Park. It was a nice campsite nestled in the forest. The State Park had a few nice hiking trails that we explored in the rain. We drove to Denali National Park on the Summer Solstice and hiked up Mount Healy. It was bright and sunny at 11:00 pm. It was an awesome view of the longest day of the year from the top of Mount Healy. We got in our car and went back to our campsite in the State Park about 90 miles away. We didn't get home until about 2:30 am and it was still light, kind of like dusk.
