Wednesday, June 29 Travel to Talkeetna

After packing up the car we left Seward to make the drive to Talkeeta.  We had to backtrack a bit and return to Anchorage for part of the first leg of the trip.  A few miles out of Seward, traffic came to a halt and there was a police car stopped in the road.  Our first thought was “more road construction” then “oh, no, the road is closed and there’s no other way out of the area”.  It turned out that a fuel truck had crashed into a guard rail.  As soon as the police decided things were stable we were allowed to pass.

Jim insisted on making a photo stop at a place near where we had stopped several days earlier.  He liked today’s light better and got a nice panorama shot.

We made a stop in Girdwood at the Bake Shop and enjoyed another excellent lunch at that beautiful site.  The woman who manages the place is really impressive.  She remembered Jim from a week ago and managed to engage everyone who came to the counter to place an order.  Later we watched her gently guiding her employees.

We made a driver switching stop in Wasilla, home of Sarah Palin, but we didn’t go beyond the attractive city park.

The trip to our destination, Talkeeta, got us there before 5pm and since the weather was so great we decided to try to schedule our flight over Mt. McKinley for this evening.  We had planned to do that trip tomorrow but Alaskan weather is very variable.  The Talkeeta Air Taxi had space available on their 7pm flight so we signed up and then checked in to our motel – the Talkeeta Motel, also called the Tee Pee Motel by the locals.   It looked shabby from the outside, but our room was very nice.

While we were waiting for our flight, a little boy name Oliver who was going with us had fun on a different plane.  He repeated his trip after the big one returned.

We had an incredible hour and a half flight in a DeHaviland 8-passenger plane.  Jim sat in front in the copilot’s seat and Ardith sat in the back seat with windows on both sides of her.  Since she had such a great vantage point, she took 206 pictures from both sides of the plane and Jim took 129 pictures.  Ardith has never taken more pictures than Jim, in fact 206 is probably as many as she has taken in the last year.  We were both shocked. 

Soon after takeoff, we crossed the Parks Highway.  Our pilot remarked that the next paved road in our direction (West) was about 1,000 miles away in Russia.  

 

We flew through a wavy path among the clouds until we got to a place with good visibility of the range that includes Mt. McKinley, the highest peak in North America at 20,320 feet.  The sun was perfect for photos and the scenery was beyond our expectations.

We got to see numerous large glaciers, some that looked like highways in the snow.

We flew through a canyon whose walls were a mile high, but since the viewpoint was so much different than we normally experience, it was hard to understand that this was twice as high as the walls in the magnificent Yosemite National Park that we had visited a few years ago.

At one place, the walls looked as though someone was scrawling graffiti on them.

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There were patches of bright blue along some of the glaciers.  These were liquid ice (water) and there blue color came from natural bending of light through clear water, just like in a swimming pool.

We also saw several lovely valleys from a different perspective than we are used to.

After the flight we had a late dinner at Mile High Pizza Pie.  We ate outside and had their Main St. Gossip pizza – white pizza with chicken, spinach, bacon, cheddar and jack cheese topped with swirls of herb ranch dressing.  It was delicious.  We even had enough left for tomorrow’s lunch.

The town is filled with cottonwood trees and they are shedding big white puffs.  It looks like it is snowing, and it feels like being in one of those snow globes that you shake up.  It gets into everything including food when you eat outside.