Day 12

Day 12
Thursday - May 1, 2008

The sun was shining this morning! We arrived at Talkeetna Air Taxi at 8:29 am and got the great news that we were going to fly and that Tom, a pilot who had been recommended to us by a lady taxi (ground type) driver - artist - eccentric, was to take us up.

I would love to display my vast knowledge of glacier vocabulary but most of it evaporated shortly after I heard it this morning. Tom was very knowledgable and informative with a humerous and entertaining style. He was also an excellent pilot. He only frightened Hank once when flying through what he called 747 pass. From Hank's seat it appeared that he was going to take off the landing gear on a mountain ridge. Since we had a perfect landing, he obviously did not.

The following pictures were taken from the airplane and are among our favorites.












There is an airplane in this picture. Hint: it's in the lower right quandrant of the picture. See if you can find it. The importance of seeing the airplane is that it gives you perspective of the size of the mountain. We were flying above this plane -probably about 4000 feet above it.


The lenticular cloud over Denali is caused by winds of somewhere between 50 and 80 knots.


When we left Talkeetna I think our heads were still in the clouds from the sheer beauty of what we had seen in our one and a half hour flight. But there was more to come.

Carl reported in to the Chalet just to let them know he had arrived. He is due back tomorrow before 3:00.


After that, we drove into Denali National Park. The park is over 6,000,000 acres and there is only one 91 mile road. The first 15 miles are now open so we drove in hoping to see at least one of the ever elusive moose or even a grizzly bear. But alas there are still very few moose in our lives.

The rangers told us that there are only about 100 wolves in the 6,000,000 acre park and they are rarely seen. Take a look at these two lovelies.




After the wolves we saw this lovely ptarmigan all dressed out in her winter feathers.



There are more pictures taken from the plane but it is now almost midnight and it takes a while to load them. We promise to get more into the blog under day 13.