Tuesday, June 30, 2009

did i mention getting pee in my eye....

some more scenery from the road trip. the pee in my eye thing. well that occured in the wee hours of the night. not sure why it is that i always have to pee at 4 am when i'm camping. i never have to do this normally. anyway...there was splatter, i feared some horrid eye infection, but i am well. pretty gross though, i know. i'm sure that is one of those things one usually just takes to the grave, but i'm not afraid to share my embarrassing moments of life.. okay...well there are several embarrassing moments that i will not be sharing and will take to the grave....or crematoriom as hopefully will be the case for me. though that doesn't sound lovely either. once your dead there really are no good options for these bodies.
i love these puffy white wild flowers. so pretty.


above is one of two porcupines we saw. not the best pictures, but who wants to get too close to these prickly guys. loved to watch him move though. so cute in a funny sort of way.






we did most of the road on day 2. the first day we drove to the first official camp which is called brushkana. that was 29 miles in or really 29.2 according to the milepost. it was pretty full and had an old guy as the host. he loved to chat. poor guy...lonely...and difficult to understand. did get that he and his wife had been married for like 41 years before she died, they never had any kids, but she left him with a cat and a promise to take care of it. it was in his rv there at the camp.


the road went up past the bridge i posted yesterday and up to this hike we took on maclaren summit at 4,086 ft. there is a beautiful hike there along the summit. you could see forever. there was a huge storm coming in to the one side, the other side was blue skies with puffy clouds.

we saw 2 major rivers along the road. first the nenana which eventually drains into the bering sea and the susitna river that eventually drains to the cook inlet. both start from glaciers. they all start to look the same to me so i'm sure there are pictures of them. so many glaciers...who can keep them straight. i'm sure there are some scientists that could easily though. okay i'm looking at the alaska atlas(another favorite book)...glaciers seen... from cantwell
nenana glacier, westfork glacier, susitna glacier, maclaren glacier, eureka glacier...and lots of un-named arms of other more huge glaciers. mostly we followed the alaska range of mountains .


the maclaren trail was nice. most of the trails were wide and a bit muddy from all the orv (off road vehicle) use. much of the land there is very fragile, muskeg. it's spongy and once an orv rides over it, it's destroyed.

the second night we stayed at another official campground, tangle lakes. the first night had cost us $8...so we were excited that tangle lakes was free. how many things are free in this world. we saved $8 so we spent it on firewood. the wind was swirling around so the fire wasn't much more than a smoke out. blossom was already in bed and rio got freaked about the smoke.


esker....a winding, narrow ridge of sand or gravel, probably deposited by a stream flowing in or under glacial ice.

this word could be found often in our milepost and neither kelly nor i had any idea what the word meant. just had to look it up. now i'll have to go back to the highway. i'd really love to...maybe in the fall. i love fall colours in alaska. there was alot of snow on top of the mountains out there, and around anchorage as well. we've had a beautiful, mostly sunny summer. many are whispering that winter will come early.
so i believe that is an esker above...

3 comments:

  1. Just like a nurse to think about the infection factor. My husband is always thinking other people will infect our child if there's even a throat cleared in a room he looks around and assesses the situation. :)

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  2. Those are gorgeous! My favorites are the photos of the mountains that are all blue, like the 4th one down. Looks very peaceful.

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  3. luckily i always carry some sort of eye wash with me so i could rinse out my eye immediately. shannon..thanks..i was going for a little art look with those mountains. i feared that i would just have millions of pictures of snow covered mountains. hehe. the scenery was way more spectacular than any of my pictures can reveal sadly.

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