Into the park!

Jake and I finally have coordinated it so that we have days off together! We really wanted to get out into the national park and spend the day exploring together. So, we hopped on a Tundra Wilderness Tour that had extra space for us and spent 8 hours driving around the park and spotting wildlife!

This is Jake enjoying the fresh air at our Teklanika river rest stop.

Jake again, he wanders off the trail to inspect a bit of dall sheep fur at Polychrome Pass.

Polychrome Pass and Sable Pass were 2 super scary mountain passes that our bus drove through. They were way up a mountain side, the terrain going straight up on one side of the bus and straight down on the other side. The road was really really windy up there and we even had to pass other busses on those narrow stretches.

Me with a set of caribou antlers. They weighed about 36lbs!! The caribou grows them in three months and sheds them each year. Talk about a constant headache!

Jake Models a huge ram horn that was on display at the Toklat River ranger station.

He thinks it would make an awesome mug!

We had a lot of fun out there and really cant wait to get back out into the park. This country is so beautiful, I'm so lucky to live and work here!

Denali Flightsee Photos

I got the chance to ride along on a flight-seeing tour around the Alaska mountain range and we were gifted with awesome views of Mount Mckinley or Denali. Denali is actually the tallest mountain in North America and is the largest in the world. It is taller from the base to top then Mount Everest, but Mount Everest has the highest elevation peak on earth. It was originally named Denali (athabaskan for "the great one"). Then, the federal government named the mountain Mt. Mckinley. The Alaskan government, climbers, Alaskans, and natives all call the mountain Denali and have been fighting to get the official name changed for years. Whichever you want to call it, its beautiful!

The path of gray and white leading to the mountain is actually a massive glacier!

The wind was pretty bad and our tiny plane (8 passenger navajo) was getting bumped around a bit, but it was very worth the tummy ache!

Lately Jake and I have been working different schedules. We have different days off and i've been working mostly mornings, while he's working evening shifts.

This is a picture that Jake took on his hike to Horseshoe Lake. Its a flower that was growing on the side of the trail.

I had some time off to try an ATV tour with Morgan. It was pretty fun, they took us to Rock Creek it was once very popular for gold digging. Then they led us to a cabin where they made us some yummy dinner. :D

Rock Creek, world's 2nd largest natural gravel deposit... YAYA! lol

Once we got back to the resort there was a gorgeous sunset!! I had to take a photo.

V-tour

So here's a tour of our room :D

I know, I know, just ignore the gum chomping, its annoying!

Husky Homestead

So first off, Here's the picture of jake and carlos up on the wall at Rose's cafe. Jake is in the middle and Carlos is the top middle picture. They are pretty proud of their accomplishments. The guy on the top right cracks me up!

We got to go on a tour of Jeff King's dog kennel the other day. He's won the Iditarod race a few times apparently. It was pretty interesting to learn all about the Iditarod and how the race works. When we got there the first thing they did was hand out these 8 day old puppies.

Cute!

Shortly after they handed them out mine started leaking.

>.<

They did a neat presentation of the ways they exercise their dogs in the racing off season. Here is one, a giant hamster type wheel that the dogs jump into and run really fast!

It was really fun and being there reminded me how much I loved dog sledding when I went. I really want to try it again and learn more about it!

Stuck

The summer -- no sweeter was ever;

The sunshiny woods all athrill;

The grayling aleap in the river,

The bighorn asleep on the hill.

The strong life that never knows harness;

The wilds where the caribou call;

The freshness, the freedom, the farness --

O God! how I'm stuck on it all.

-Robert Service, The Spell of The Yukon

I'm sorry the blog entrees have been lagging lately, Uploading pictures here is like moving mountains!

The Grizzly Burger

Jake and I have been working for about a week now and we are really having a great time! It is still early spring here so its quite cold and the weather is very unpredictable, snowing one minute and sunny the next. We've met some great people and we've been having a good time learning about the resort. The picture posted is jake on the road in front of the resort. We live down the hill by a river that is nestled at the base of the mountains behind jake. The mountain pictured is called Mt. Healy.

On our second day here our friend's Jessica and Carlos came down from Fairbanks to visit us. They stayed the night in our room and we had a great time catching up! The next day we went to dinner at a local diner called Rose's. They consider themselves "world famous" for their Grizzly Burger. The Grizzly Burger is a huge burger with a 1 pound beef patty, fried egg, and ham slices in addition to the normal veggies and condiments you find on a burger. If you eat the whole burger and the large side of fries that it comes with you get your picture up on the wall of the diner. Jake and Carlos BOTH finished the Grizzly Burger!! Rose said that the next time we came their photo would be up on the wall. They said that the burger tasted awesome but they both looked a little sick by the time they finished their fries!

Unbelievably there are photos up on her wall of people that have eaten a 5 layer Grizzly Burger.... That's 5, 1 pound patties!!! Yuck!!

Home Sweet... Denali!

Today we completed the last leg of our journey! It was a quick 2 hour drive from Fairbanks to Denali, Jake's manager, Joe was kind enough to come to Fairbanks and pick us up. We got here, did some paperwork and got a nice little tour of the place. It is HUGE! The food is great and so far the people are nice too. They gave us these really cool water bottles when we checked in and I choose green and then added some bling:

Tonight we went down to the River to

check out the huge ice damn that was causing flood warnings for the resort. Pretty awesome! I took some pictures and we waited for a while, hoping that we would be able to witness the damn breaking. But alas, it did not. Damn.

Fairbanks At Last!

The past two days have passed in a sort of haze but I am very happy to say that we are finally in Fairbanks!

We hung out in Watson Lake all day on Saturday. Cleaned out our car, added our license plate to the sign forest, and did some laundry.

At about 10:30 that night we hopped on a greyhound to Whitehorse.

We got there at about 3 a.m. and hung out at a coffee shop called Tom Horton's till 6:30 a.m. when the shuttle van to Fairbanks came to pick us up. After being on the bus ALL DAY we finally arrived in Fairbanks at 7 p.m.

This is what Alaska looked like this morning when we first drove in:

I guess we wont be missing our camping equipment that we had to leave behind for some time!

We drove through the storm and by the time we got to Fairbanks, we left winter and were into spring time again!

Oh yeah, and remember the picture of food that jake said was "gross" and he called it "gruel"? Well I just have to post this photo of him finishing it off because he apparently really enjoyed it!

Some random trip pictures

Here's just some random pictures from our trip:

This is quite the find, we kept seeing these restaurants called Tom Horton's all over Canada and decided to stop in one day. It is basically a donut shop on steroids! We got some sandwiches and a few of these delicious whole-wheat raspberry muffins for the road. They were so awesome, with crunchy bits of oats and wheat and loaded with sweet raspberries too!

I took this picture of us as we were walking to the Air Force Lodge in Watson Lake, Yukon Territories.

Jake says that this looks like gross gruel.... SAD! Its just some cheap, healthy, stew made on the road is all! 2 meals worth for about 3$ and I thought it was delicious!

A mountain goat calf and momma! Cute!