Alaska – At home and abroad

Is Alaskan travel “domestic”?

June 15, 2025jdewyzeLeave a comment

Before we started this trip, I asked whether it would seem like we were visiting another country. In short order the question felt silly. For Alaska to feel foreign, it would have to be filled with something other than Americans. It is not. We met lots of folks who were either born in Alaska or had lived there for many years. To me they often seemed different, maybe even better, than residents of the other 49 states. But never did I feel like I was outside the US.

Steve commented that the locals made him think of the folks who would sign up to settle one of the exoplanets he invented in his science fictional Handbook for Space Pioneers, people happy to make a new life in a wild place filled with potential. To me it felt like time travel -– as if the locals (or I) had landed in another dimension, rather than just one hour off Pacific Standard Time.

I’ve been trying to untangle this impression because, to my surprise, what both Steve and I loved most about Alaska where the people we met.

Not that other aspects of the state don’t live up to their billing. The landscapes are iconic.

The woods and waters and mountains team with charismatic wildlife.

But over and over, friendly encounters with local humans left us shaking our heads in amazement. One example: strolling around Sitka we ran into a woman I recognized from the previous night’s plane ride from Anchorage. She and I hadn’t spoken to one another on the plane, but she greeted me and told us all about the summer camp to which she was delivering her two youngsters. Somehow her little boy had forgotten to pack any extra pants for the week, so they were heading to the local white elephant store to do some shopping.

This is Zack, 31, originally from Florida, who’s working for the summer as a food server at the Glacier Bay Lodge. Zach shared so much about his life with us, I could tell you a LOT more. But I’ll refrain.

Of course Zack‘s not an Alaskan. He’s part of the legion of young people who flood in to work every summer, thrilled to be having such a big adventure. Some will return over and over. Some will wind up staying. Our home-exchange host in Juneau, Andy, did that. Now he and his wife have kids who grew up in Alaska and have already graduated from college. Andy’s had multiple careers over the years. The competition for jobs is low, he points out. If you want to find work and you can learn as you go, there are plenty of ways to make a living.

The ferry system is looking for some extra hands!

People seem to appreciate all that economic opportunity. Those who stay also have (or develop) a tolerance for a nasty weather and months of darkness.

At any moment, an earthquake can wreck monstrous damage. Or it can trigger a dreadful tsunami. Volcanoes explode. Mountainsides or the snow piled up on them collapse and kill whatever’s in their paths. Go out for a run and you might meet up with an irritable mother bear. Because so much can go wrong, locals rely on helping out each other. They leaven that trust with humor.

It’s tempting to think about joining their ranks. If like Steve and me, you love growing baskets of fruits in your backyard year-round, that’s a bridge too far to cross. Still, it’s been fun to stand on the bridge for several happy weeks before returning to the sandals weather and sunny skies.

Ferryland

June 13, 2025June 13, 2025jdewyzeLeave a comment

Almost 45 years ago, I rode a train I will never forget. Steve and I boarded it at night in London and settled into a sleeping car that was hauled to somewhere on the British coast. I remember waking up to a lot of clanging and banging as our car was uncoupled from the British engine and loaded on the vessel that would carry it across the English Channel. On the other side, the French hooked it up to another engine that pulled us all the way to Paris, where we disembarked. Although once an emblem of the glory days of rail, the “boat train” was being discontinued; I no longer remember how we managed to get tickets on its final run. But I’ve thought of it as we’ve ridden on an Alaskan ferry these last two and a half days.

No plans have been announced to end the the 62-year-old Alaska Marine Highway System — yet. But I had to wonder how much longer it will survive. Annual ridership reportedly has declined from 400,000 passengers (in the early ‘90s) to 185,000 (last year). The fleet has shrunk from 11 vessels to just 7, and many are rusting their way toward unseaworthiness. The state struggles to staff them and at times has had to cancel scheduled sailings for lack of officers and crew. The routes that do manage to operate are complex, and the boats don’t run often. I first became aware of all this when I was planning our trip six months ago. Trying to figure out a way to use the ferries to get where I wanted to go (and when) was one of the biggest touristic challenges I’ve tackled.

Alaskan politicians have been squabbling over funding for the system for ages. Some folks have argued the ferries should pay for more of their costs, while others retort that roads aren’t expected to do that (mostly). Yet the ferries do fill the role of roads here, sometimes the only connection to the outside world (besides planes or small water craft) for many communities.

I’m not sure what could or should save the ferries. But I can — now — say IF Alaska’s ferries disappear I’ll be sad. Steve and I rode for 5 hours on the MV Hubbard from Juneau to Gustavus, then we wrapped up our Alaska adventure by spending almost 60 hours on the MV Columbia as it bore us almost 1000 miles from Sitka to Bellingham in Washington. Both rides were extraordinarily soothing.

We boarded shortly after 2 p.m. Tuesday afternoon at the Sitka ferry depot.

Around 6 the next morning, we made a brief stop in Wrangell, where Steve and I strolled briefly through town.

We’d booked one of the Columbia’s 75 cabins, a plain, utilitarian space containing two sets of bunk beds and a private bathroom. Roomier than any train compartment, the lighting was decent, augmented by a big window. I slept well in my lower berth.

We used the upper bunks as clothing shelves.

In the ship’s pretty, old-fashioned dining room, uniformed waiters served breakfast and dinner daily, and the prices were startling — roughly half what we’d seen anywhere else in Alaska.

A more informal snack bar provided basic options: grab-and-go sandwiches; fish and chips and burgers served up by a burly old-school fry cook.

Budget travelers could also save money by forgoing a cabin and sleeping in a tent outside. Or you could put your sleeping bag on one of the Solarium’s lounge chairs where overhead heaters tempered the cold.

The only outdoor lover on our trip. Tents reportedly fill the space on some trips.

I learned we were sharing the boat with 170 other passengers, only a third of the Columbia’s capacity. It does fill up occasionally, the purser told me. “But,” she grimaced, “that gets ugly.”

Other quirks enlivened the ride. At regular intervals, announcements informed us the car deck would be opening soon, so if you’d brought your dog and stowed it in your car or kennel, you could descend to walk (and clean up) after it for 20 minutes.

Between Deck 7’s forward lounge and the snack car, we found a bar that at first glance looked grand, filled with lights and mirrors; a real piano; a giant chess set. But the bartender only stocked canned cocktails, five-ounce bottles of bad wine, and beer. Behind her, a sign cautioned she could only sell each patron one drink per hour. Other onboard signs prohibited tipping.

Despite that, the large restaurant staff somehow exuded good spirits.They botched our orders and made mistakes on the checks. But they couldn’t have been more friendly or hospitable.

Most important: we tied up in Bellingham minutes before 8 am Friday, just as scheduled. If the occasional swells made anyone seasick, I wasn’t aware of it. I enjoyed hour after hour of views of the Inside Passage, a waterway that had intrigued me as long as I can remember. In my mind, it’s real now, a gift no flyover can bestow. If the Alaska ferries cease to exist, this ride will rank right up there with the boat train.

The wilderness casino

June 9, 2025jdewyze2 Comments

This trip has reminded me that going out in search of famous natural wonders can resemble playing poker in Vegas. You may be able to shift the odds of hitting travel targets in your favor: study weather patterns. Pick reputable guides. But for all the time and effort and money you put in, bad luck still can strike; you can bust or hit gold.

Our biggest, most challenging target here was Alaska’s great glaciers — those moving rivers of ice that are melting all over the planet. We aimed to see them in two places: Kenai Fjords and Glacier Bay national parks. Because of our train disaster, our arrival in Seward (Gateway to the Fjords!) was a bit frazzled, but our first afternoon there lifted my spirits. The sun broke through as Steve and I strolled around the town’s little core and a browsed an art fair in front of the Alaska SeaLife Center. Giant dandelions glowed in the sunshine along the waterfront.

Ebullient fishermen weighed their catches.

From our table at dinner, we watched a massive Stellars sea lion diving for his dinner among the boat slips.

The world looked darker and colder when we got up the next day (Sunday). I checked in for our 8.5-hour-long cruise to the glaciers, and the girls behind the counter wore pained expressions. They warned that if the sea got much rougher, our captain might have to cut our trip short. Things could possibly improve a bit the next day, they suggested, so we switched Sunday’s glacier tour for the four-hour orca cruise we’d been scheduled to take Monday.

The whale-watching wasn’t a complete disaster. In short order, we found a pod of killer whales, their black and white coloring unmistakable. But the park rules dictated we stay so far away even the longest telephoto lenses couldn’t capture much. For anyone like Steve and me who at one point in our lives spent many hours at SeaWorld with our Shamu-besotted kids, it was underwhelming.

More entertaining were the Dall’s porpoises who surfed our bow wave for at least ten minutes.

Our cheery captain found a few other things to show us: a sprawling sea lion colony; legions of birds.

But the rain never stopped, and icy winds stabbed us every time someone opened one of the doors leading into the enclosed second deck.

After four hours, I was chilled to the bone, despite all the layers I was wearing. Two pairs of gloves and chemical hand warmers kept me from losing all circulation in my fingers, but they still felt like ice.

The next day the Great Dealer in the Sky dealt us an even worse hand. At first the rain was light; the skies brighter. Our glacier-cruise captain reported that the winds seemed to be dropping. But it would take us a few hours to motor out of Resurrection Bay and through the stretch of the Gulf of Alaska that would take us to the fjord containing some of state’s most famous tidewater glaciers. By the time we reached the decision point at Pilot Rock, the sea was heaving; 15-foot swells made our boat tilt to unnerving angles. The folks who had started feeling queasy an hour before looked awful. (Happily, neither Steve nor I were among them.) But the wind was building, the captain reported, so prudence dictated he turn back.

That’s how we missed seeing Discovery Glacier (or anything glacial other than smears of distant white glimpsed through the rain.) I felt philosophical. At least I’d learned what the Gulf of Alaska feels like on a nasty day (without suffering a whiff of seasickness). And we could still hope for better luck in Glacier Bay.

Glacier Bay’s “gateway” is the tiny town of Gustavus, which we reached by taking a mellow, uneventful five-hour ferry from Juneau. We checked into the national park lodge and strolled a bit under sullen gray skies.

Once again, I had booked an all-day outing on a high-speed catamaran for the next day (last Friday, 6/6). About 30 passengers had boarded it by 7 am. We shoved off. Wavelets covered the water, but overhead the clouds dispersed enough to show us promising patches of blue.

It wasn’t too cold to stand outside on the deck and admire the wildlife…

We glimpsed many humpback whales (who are protected in the national park). All these guys all rank among the world’s most charming animals, but soon I was feeling at least as awestruck by the vistas.

A bit after 9:30, someone shouted and pointed to two dots in the distance: two moose swimming across the fjord!

The boat’s crew members told us how rare this sight was. And mysterious! Moose lack heavy insulating coats or significant body fat. What would motivate them to cross the freezing channel? Even our onboard park ranger (Hailey) seemed mystified. The sight would have enthralled most boatloads of tourists for some time. But a new cry shifted our focus to the other side of the catamaran. On the cliffside ahead, the form of a brown (aka grizzly) bear was moving.

The captain maneuvered us closer and we watched the bear climb a remarkably steep rock face.

He seemed to think better of that and descended.

He stood just 25-30 yards from the boat. That’s just a quarter of the minimal distance humans are warned to keep between themselves and grizzlies. He seemed to be pondering the situation.

Again he seemed to change his mind. He stood there dripping.

When we finally moved on after almost 15 minutes, we rounded a bend and got a likely explanation of what the bear had been seeking.

Dall sheep! With tender little newborn kids.

After all that drama, glaciers might have felt anticlimactic. But they weren’t.

We entered the Tarr Inlet as a National Geographic tourist vessel was steaming out.

Moments later we started seeing chunks of ice, floating on the water.

In any other place, the geology would have been riveting. We could literally see where the Pacific tectonic plate butted up against the North American plate.

This collision helps explain why Alaska has so many earthquakes.

But the icy wonderland grabs most of the attention here. Over the next hour or so, moving slowly through it, I learned a lot about glaciers. The six we saw demonstrated how varied they can look.

Some, like the Marjorie Glacier, are classically beautiful.

The closer we got to it, the bluer it looked.

Some, such as the Grand Pacific and Ferris glaciers don’t look like glaciers at all.

The Reid Glacier no longer falls into the “tidewater glacier” category, having retreated from the water.

The beautiful nearby John’s Hopkins Glacier is currently growing.

We spent the most time hovering in front of the Majorie Glacier. Ranger Hailey said it “calves” almost daily: huge chunks of ice can break off and smash into the water.

For us that didn’t happen. That would have like getting a royal straight flush. You can’t win ‘em all.

Not exactly bullet trains

June 4, 2025jdewyze2 Comments

When Steve and I walked into the Fairbanks train depot (11 days ago) for the first leg of our Great Alaskan Railway adventure, we exclaimed almost in the same breath: this can’t be Amtrak. The depot was pretty and clean. The ticket sellers cheerful and efficient. To entertain waiting passengers, an elaborate model-train track had been set up in a side chamber. I wouldn’t say it all exceeded anything we saw in Japan last fall. But it wasn’t disgraceful.

We soon learned that Amtrak does NOT run it; the Alaska state government does. Built 100 years ago to serve early gold miners, it’s now popular with travelers. Planning this trip, I wanted to ride almost all of it, from Fairbanks to Denali, then continuing on to Anchorage, stopping there, then taking the line that runs down to Seward (on the southern coast of the main Alaskan peninsula) and back. Because the scenery promised to be so beautiful, I splurged and got us “Gold Star” seats in double-decker cars with wrap-around views through the glass dome and meals (included) in the dining room below.

On the first two legs there was good news and bad. The good: our seats were not bad, and every time we were led down the winding brass-railed stairway…

… we ate well (breakfast on the four-hour Fairbanks to Denali run; lunch and dinner on the seven and a half hours from Denali to Anchorage.)

The bar, located upstairs. Our ticket included two alcohol drinks per meal. (We abstained at breakfast and lunch.)

The scenery lived up to its billing.

We spotted some wildlife. Both those first two trains arrived on time. But how could this fill a blog post? Wallowing in middle-class comfort as you pass eye-catching wilderness is fun to experience but boring to read (or write). I wasn’t sure I was up to it.

Our third ride — from Anchorage to Seward — took a different turn, however. We boarded, went to the dining room, and shortly after Steve and I had ordered breakfast the train stopped. For a long while, nothing happened. Then very, very slowly, we began moving backward. Uh-oh.

An hour passed and we finished breakfast. Gossip about what had happened began percolating throughout the cars. We learned that 40 miles or so down the track, near Girdwood, a motorist had lost control of his car and flipped (four times, we later heard). In the course of this thrill ride he bounced off the track before smashing to a halt and dying.

We glimpsed the scene when we later passed it.

Authorities were worried the disaster might have damaged the rails. It would take at least six hours for someone to inspect it, they finally announced.

Steve and I weighed our options. We could get off, return to our home-exchange house, and drive the Tundra to Seward and back (hoping to extract refunds from the train company.) Or we could get on a bus that we were told would arrive momentarily. We chose the bus.

As we waited for it to show up, I chatted with our car’s bartender, a thin young blonde who had worked for the railroad for more than a half-dozen years. She said it was the first time she’d known a car crash to block or interrupt a section of the line. But other things had done so: wildfires and avalanches and rock slides among them.

She was perky and earnest. She said every time one of these bad things had happened, something wonderful had compensated for it. Once the train had been scheduled to arrive at 10:15 pm but didn’t get in until two in the morning. In the midst of the delays, a magnificent display of the aurora borealis began lighting up the sky, thrilling everyone on board. Or, on this run, the bartender pointed out, as we’d waited just outside the Anchorage depot, we’d been treated to the sight of a nearby foraging black bear. (I saw him but didn’t manage to capture the sighting with my phone.)

For me another unexpected compensation was the chance to ride to Seward on a bus driven by a guy named Steve who claimed to have logged three million miles on the road. His bus did arrive fairly promptly at the depot, and since the train goes so slowly (roughly 25 miles an hour), we arrived in Seward on the bus less than an hour after we would have via a punctual train.

The views were similar. But the commentary was much more eccentric than we would have gotten on the train.

Bus Driver Steve started talking just a minute after leaving the Anchorage depot and paused for breath only rarely the whole way to Seward. We learned he was born in Miami, studied for the ministry, and visited Alaska almost 40 years ago en route to work in Indonesia. But then he married a local Alaskan girl and lived what sounded like a happy life: raising kids, white-water tubing, fishing for monster trout. He’d been a world-class weight-lifting champion, the co-owner of multiple car dealerships, a masseuse. He’d worked as Sarah Palin’s personal driver. He explained how rescuers extract those foolish enough to get trapped by the quicksand in the Turnagain Sound mud flats at low tide. He shared with us the secret of his happy 38-year marriage. Also his father’s foolproof business philosophy. Also the name of the best Texas barbecue joint in Seward.

My Steve and I decided to try it. Bus Driver Steve showed up as we were mopping up the remains of our brisket. He ordered ribs and a pile of pulled pork and sat down on the picnic-table bench next to us.

We talked about the way Alaska could obliterate plans in the blink of an eye. At 8:30 that morning, he’d been sitting on his couch at home savoring the start of three days off work. The phone had rung and someone from the office had told him they needed him. There’d been an emergency. When that happens here, you don’t hesitate, he said. You do what you can to help out. “That’s just Alaska.”

Happy trails

June 1, 2025June 1, 2025jdewyze3 Comments

There came a moment Tuesday afternoon, our first full day in Anchorage, when the Huskies were being readied to tow an ATV and they could not contain themselves. The furry brindle-colored dog in the lead position let out a yip, and then a full-throated scream. His tail was wagging, as were those of his canine teammates. A cream-colored dog with a short coat keep leaping up, straining against his line to move forward. I wouldn’t say they were barking. It was more like yodeling with joy.

Spending some time at the Happy Trails kennels with these sled dogs and their humans was so much fun, I could have joined in the chorus. It was not a pleasure we’d anticipated. Steve and I had missed an opportunity to visit the sled dog kennels at Denali (the only national park in the United. States to maintain a dog team.) But we did watch a short film in the visitor’s center about them, and it inspired me to go online first thing Tuesday morning to see if we could visit a kennel in greater Anchorage. I saw that the Happy Trails staff would be giving a tour that afternoon, and we could still get tickets.

The kennels are located about an hour outside the city. Happily, our Anchorage house-trading partners also let us use their bright red Toyota Tundra. We climbed into it and drove north, stopping at an agricultural office in the Matanuska Valley. The friendly receptionist said it was too early to see any of the giant vegetables for which this region is famous. Nor were any farm tours being given. So we continued on to Wasilla (birthplace of Sarah Palin’s political career) and ate our picnic sandwiches on a pretty lake.

Summer beach season (at one of Wasilla’s lakes) was just beginning.

One of the folks who greeted us in the reception hall was a fit older guy with a roguish grin, who introduced himself as Martin Buser. Within minutes it was clear Martin is the charismatic heart of Happy Trails. He’s a 39-time finisher and four-time winner of the legendary Iditarod dogsled competition, that hellish 1,000-mile-long endurance race across some of the most difficult terrain on the planet.

Martin’s staff also includes Sue Allen, who entered and completed the race in 2004 and 2008 (while also holding down her full-time job as a schoolteacher). Another staffer, Chad Stoddard, did the race in 2021 and 2022 and hopes to compete again.

Martin, 67, completed his last race three years ago; he told us that after 39 runs he didn’t want to subject his body to more extreme ordeals. But he’s still very much at the center of the sport. He ran his first two races (in 1980 and ‘81) with purebred Siberian huskies — that super-furry dog with upright ears and (often) blue eyes. Then he began crossing them with other breeds known for their speed, e.g. Salukis and short-haired pointers. His cross-breeds proved so much faster that within short order, all the other leading dog-mushers were following suit. These “Alaskan Huskies” are a motley crew but Sue told us no one uses anything else for racing any more.

Martin doesn’t sell the puppies he breeds. Sue said one of Martin’s sons may compete with them again, as may Chad, plus Martin has developed his operation into a major showcase and tourist attraction, offering dog-powered sled rides to visitors in the winter and summer tours to folks like us (and big buses full of cruise ship passengers).

Happily, one of those buses had just departed so it was only Steve and me and two couples with their kids learning about dog-sledding Tuesday afternoon. We watched a film, then Chad connected five dogs to their pulling rig; that’s when they started yodeling with excitement.

Chad raced them around a gravel track…

… and Sue explained that in the summer, when there’s no snow, Martin and his assistants train the dogs on the ATV. Unlike the service dogs Steve and I raise (who learn 35-40 verbal commands from us before they move on to the professional trainers), these canine athletes basically must master just two: Gee (meaning go to the right) and Haw (left). They do most of the serious preparation in the winter, working with bigger teams and connected to sleds. In the summers, they mostly get their exercise by romping with their fellows in nearby meadows.

We meandered out to the Happy Trails housing tract, an array of something like 70 dog houses. I admired all the dogs but had mixed success petting them. Some basked in the attention, while others were more aloof.

Sue led us to an amphitheater where she used a dark female named Arabica to demonstrate the gear that Iditarod competitors commonly wear.

Leggings and a shirt and coat to protect against the cold.

Racing with teams of 12-16 dogs, the Iditarod competitors spend a great deal of time dressing and undressing their dogs.

The grand finale, back in the entry hall, came when Sue brought out a basket of two-week-old puppies. We took turns cuddling them.

Over the next few days, Steve and I spent a lot of time at the Alaska Native Heritage Cultural Center and the Anchorage Museum. We drove to the an animal preserve where we took many pictures of Alaskan beasts that included…

Moose (shedding the last of their winter coats)

We visited another operation dedicated to bringing back musk oxen (who produce fabulous undercoats that can be turned into beautiful knitted goods.) We ate some terrific seafood.

Scarves and headbands made from the famous musk-ox hair.

For me, however, nothing compared with those sunny hours immersed in a culture of strong and heroic dogs. We’re now in Seward, where we’re about to move on to the next phase of this amazing adventure: glaciers!

I just wish we could see them by dogsled.

Hunting for the Big Five in the taiga and the tundra

May 29, 2025jdewyze3 Comments

First things first: Trump’s changing of the name from Denali to Mt. McKinley. I can report with confidence you’d never know it in the national park. The park entrance, the visitor’s center, and countless other signs all still say Denali, deriving from the native (Athabaskan) word for “high one.”

The mountain got dubbed “Mt. McKinley” by an East Coast gold-hunter in 1896, but according to my Fodor’s, the vast majority of Alaskans always continued to call it by its original name (which Barack Obama made official in 2015.) I finally found the name Mt. McKinley in one place: the giant relief map in the visitor’s center.

I wouldn’t hold my breath until the rest of the park catches up.

Besides my fruitless search for any sign of the name change, Steve and I spent a big chunk of our time in the national park on safari, scanning for big game. Beavers aren’t among the very biggest, but they’ve made a mark on the landscape. We hiked for three miles near the visitor’s center Sunday morning, and on Horseshoe Lake the rodents’ handiwork was dramatic.

That afternoon we took a bus tour. I can’t say it showed us the park because this park is the size of Massachusetts. Only one road runs through it, actually half a road since 2021 when a worsening landslide section made the road impassible about 43 miles in. Access beyond that point has been blocked ever since, though a bridge to span the missing bit is nearing completion. It took our bus driver about 6 hours to take us close to the avalanche site and back.

We drove through two kinds of terrain that neither Steve nor I had ever before laid eyes on, even though both rank among the largest biomes on earth. Taiga is a type of forest that has long cold winters and short mild summers. Tundra is similar but treeless. Vast areas of Canada, Russia, Northern Europe, and Alaska consist of the two.

Now that I’ve seen it, I have to say taiga (for me) ranks among the sorriest woods on the planet. Only 5 species of trees grow below the tree line, the vast majority white spruce. They look scrawny and sad and tipsy. (When the ground thaws, the trees tend to lean.)

Some of the 5-foot-tall specimens are hundreds of years old, our guide told us. Only a few kinds of shrubs grow beneath the trees. It’s a half-planet away from the lush life-choked equatorial jungles I’ve seen and loved.

From the bus, the tundra looked equally moribund, though that was illusory, In a month or two, we heard, the thin, thawed topsoil will be carpeted with hundreds of species of tiny wildflowers, woody plants, berries, mosses, lichens and fungi. Still, even in the best of times, Denali’s plant life isn’t enough to sustain many animals, with a few striking exceptions. The Big Five in the park consist of:

Wolves — They blend in with the landscape and run in packs that cover large areas so they’re notoriously hard to spot. Sunday afternoon we didn’t get lucky.

Grizzly (brown) bears — Next to a grassy hillside, someone noticed a tiny dark form up near the ridge line. For a few excited minutes, our driver/guide thought it might be a bear, but then it flew away. Score for the day: one golden eagle; zero bears.

Dall sheep — They’re striking animals up close, but they usually hang out on steep, high slopes. We spotted several, but I have to confess, the teensy white specks looked nothing like the stuffed Dall sheep in the visitor’s center.

What I saw on the hillside — using my telephoto lens.

What we would have seen had we gotten closer.

Caribou — We had a great day finding these North American reindeer.

Everyone on the bus got very excited about this, our first caribou sighting.

But we saw more and more until we all started getting blasé.

Moose — My moose score remained pathetic for most of the day, then after our bus had dropped off most of the passengers at the visitor’s center and were being ferried back to our hotel, we came upon a local police car stopped with its lights flashing. Our driver hit the brakes. Just off the road in front of us, a female moose was foraging. She glanced up but kept on munching. I was thrilled.

I haven’t mentioned the biggest score for anyone visiting Denali National Park: seeing the famous mountain. I knew Denali was the tallest mountain in North America, topping out at 20,310 feet. What I did not know is that a good case can be made it’s actually the biggest mountain on earth if you’re considering the vertical rise — the distance between the base and the peak. Mt. Everest is 29,035 feet, but its base lies on a 17,000-foot-high plateau. So its vertical rise is about 12,000 feet. Denali’s base is only about 2000 feet above sea level, and it looms 18,000 more feet above that. That’s actually more impressive to gaze upon.

IF you can see it! That’s the rub. The “High One” is so high rangers say it creates its own weather system, usually obscuring the views with clouds and fog. When Steve and I went out Saturday afternoon to a point on the road where Denali should have been visible, all we saw was what 70 to 75% of the park’s visitors see: impenetrable gray.

The next day began clear and sunny, but at the start of our bus ride shortly after noon, the same mysterious clouds obscured the mountain. To my delight, however, they soon began to clear.

At first, we could barely make it out, but that distant form was unmistakably the High One.

Like a stripper removing her veils, the mountain revealed more and more.

Denali has two peaks. The one on the left in the photo above is the true summit. For just a few seconds, we were able to glimpse it.

We left the park the next afternoon on the Alaska Railways train to Anchorage, and the mountain’s fantastic visibility improved.

Not only that, but we saw several more moose running in nearby meadows. I wasn’t quick enough to photograph them, so you have to take my word for it.

The land of the midnight sunlight

May 27, 2025jdewyze3 Comments

Fairbanks is roughly 140 miles south of the Arctic Circle, so even on the summer solstice, the sun still sets. During our two nights there, it dipped below the horizon at 11:38 pm and dawned again just before 4 am. What I didn’t realize is how this would throw my sense of time out of whack. At 5:30 pm the first afternoon, I felt like it was noon. When we were heading to bed around 10, the sky outside our window looked like it does around the time I’m making dinner in the summer back home.

This was the Airbnb in which we stayed. It’s one of many log houses scattered around Fairbanks. I took this picture at 5:38 pm.

Even at 1:30 in the morning, when I got up to pee, the world outside was still bright.

It would have looked even brighter, were it not for the cloud cover.

It unnerved me, but the weird novelty was one of several things that made Fairbanks more interesting than it had appeared on our way from the airport to our Airbnb Thursday morning. “It kind of makes Cincinnati look like Paris,” Steve marveled, gazing out on the strip malls; the seedy bungalows; the scattered, unattractive commercial buildings. The thought of the 40- to 50-degree-below zero temperatures common in the winter did not increase its attractiveness.

Three great museum experiences helped change my opinion. The Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center, where we headed first thing Friday morning, quickly impressed me with the clarity of its exhibits. Some described life in Fairbanks throughout the seasons. Others shared fascinating history, both social and natural. One example: local chickadees cache tens of thousands of seeds through the summer, and in the fall their hippocampuses (the part of the brain responsible for spatial memory) increase in size by 30% as they grow new nerve cells. Toward the end of winter, their brains return to their normal size. Another: the hibernating arctic ground squirrels get so cold, sleep is impossible. But every few weeks they start shivering and warm themselves back to a body temperature that enables dreaming. After about 24 hours, they drop back into hibernation again; they use up about 80% of their winter fat reserves repeating this cycle.

In the afternoon, we got a Lyft to the University of Fairbanks’ Museum of the North. There what most impressed me were the magnificent stuffed animals — not just the requisite towering grizzly (Otto) but most of the other mammalian stars of this part of the world.

Not the whole animal, but a wonderful moose head.

A bison that was frozen in the tundra about 36,000 years ago

Steve and I also watched an excellent film about the Aurora Borealis and learned that Fairbanks is the place to see it.

For dinner, we walked to the first Thai restaurant to open in Fairbanks. The food was tasty; the waitresses friendly and welcoming, but most extraordinary (to me) was what this place spawned. Since it opened in 1989, Thai House employees left the mother ship and opened their own sub-arctic eateries. Many were drive-throughs, which the Alaskans loved. Friends and relatives back in Thailand heard about their success and followed in their footsteps. Today Fairbanks reportedly has one of the highest concentration of Thai restaurants in North America, even though the year-round Thai population remains tiny.

We got another peek into Fairbanks in the winter after dinner, when we strolled to the Fairbanks Ice Museum. It’s housed in a former movie theater…

…where the ticket taker told us business would be picking up in June, as the summer season unfolded in earnest. For this night, we were the only customers. Beyond the former movie screen we found a rack holding heavy parkas. We each donned one, entered the freezing inner quarters, and strolled by a life-size dog sled team carved from ice.

Beyond them, we took pictures of some of the other creations.

Then I rode down a solid ice slide so fast I was afraid I would smash into Steve, who was photographing this spectacle from the bottom.

I learned that every February and March, ice carvers from around the world stream into Fairbanks to participate in a big competition. At that time of year, the Northern Lights dance in the heavens almost every night. Dog-mushing teams are racing. To my surprise, I feel tempted to come back.

There were wonderful photos of creations from past competitions. I loved this ice maze.

Trains and planes and a few more fauna

May 23, 2025jdewyze6 Comments

When you hear the word “seaplane,” what comes to mind? Like me, do you think of a small aircraft that takes off and lands on the water? That’s what I envisioned when I booked our flights between Juneau and Skagway on Alaska Seaplanes. I’ve never flown in one and I expected it to be one of the highlights of this trip. But Steve, looking at the Alaska Seaplanes website the other day, noted that the company uses both actual hydroplanes and other small aircraft, and that the ones going to Skagway were the land-launched ones. I felt crushed.

I need not have. Our single-engine 8-passenger Cessna may have lacked flotation pontoons, but other aspects of the trip made up for it.

I loved the anarchic check-in at Juneau’s airport Tuesday morning. When I gave my name to the cheery lady behind the counter, she asked for no identification, nor did she hand us any boarding passes. We could have been Boris Badenov and Natasha masquerading as Jeannette De Wyze and Steve Wolfe; no one would have been the wiser. She wanted to weigh our minimal baggage (just our backpacks; we’d left our carry-ons in our home-exchange partner’s garage), but she said we could keep the backpacks with us until boarding. Then we’d have to hand them over to be stowed in the plane’s belly. I eavesdropped as the passenger at the next counter was telling his clerk about the 9mm handgun in the suitcase he was checking. She had no problem with the weapon, but when he told her about the loose bullets, she said he’d have to somehow pack them in their original cartons.

That constituted the security screening. No metal detectors. No interrogation about the size of our toiletries, or attention to our drinking bottles, empty or full. I could have carried on a fifth of Jim Beam, undetected.

We thus had plenty of time to read and write on our iPads. Finally a plump young guy appeared and read off 8 names (our two among them) He checked us off a paper roster, then told us to follow him out onto the rainy airfield.

He turned out to be our pilot. Actually, he was the entire crew. He mentioned where the life vests were but I instantly forgot, transfixed by the thought of how quickly I would die if my body were plunged into the water anywhere in the region. He continued, pointing out how to operate the fire extinguisher and where the GPS button and the emergency locator transmitter were, instructing us that if we had to land unexpectedly and he was unconscious, one of us should activate them and help would be on the way. Aye-aye captain.

He turned on the engine, drove us to the end of the runway, and we started to move forward. Seconds later, we lifted up into the gray clouds and driving rain.

The skies never cleared completely during the 35 minutes we were in the air, but the rain stopped and I drank in the staggering views from the Cessna’s big windows.

About 30 minutes in, I spotted a little town with several gigantic cruise ships parked at its waterfront. It had to be Skagway, I figured. I could see a runway, but our pilot flew over it and up the valley and for a moment, it looked like he might be planning to slam into the mountainside. Then he banked, turned us around, and descended steeply. Our wheels jounced as they touched the ground, and we rolled toward the terminal.

Seventy-five minutes later, Steve and I were chugging up to the Canadian border on the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad, usually cited as Skagway’s top touristic experience.

Cruise-ship passengers and other package tour-goers filled the seats (along with us) for Wednesday afternoon’s summit excursion. Inaugurated in 1900 in the wake of the hellacious Klondike Gold Rush, the train takes a little over an hour and a half to ascend almost 3000 feet in about 10 miles, passing brutally vertiginous mountains and scary drop-offs (and the obvious evidence of an avalanche that had occurred just three days before).

I enjoyed it, though frankly, the scenery couldn’t compare with the views we’d just enjoyed from 2500 feet aloft. More than anything, the ride made me appreciate what the gold-seekers who slogged up this route before the line was built had endured: inadequately dressed, making the climb over and over as they hauled up load after load to cache the food and other supplies required by the Mounties at the top of the pass. (The Canadian government supposedly worried that without 2000 pounds per person of such provisions the wannabe miners would die of starvation as they made their way to the gold fields near Dawson, another 550 miles further into Canada.)

Before this trip, I knew almost nothing about the Klondike gold rush. Our short time in Skagway fixed that. The whole town is a National Historical Park and the visitor center and several museums do a wonderful job of bringing to life that brief (less than 2-year) period in which a wild, violent, frenzied society sprang into life. We learned that of the 100,000 gold-seekers who came from all over the world, only 400 actually collected a significant amount of the shiny yellow stuff.

At first glance, the town’s Main Street made both Steve and me think of Disneyland — those throngs of tourists shuffling along, clutching bags filled with their gift shop purchases, those colorful olde time buildings. But in Skagway, almost 100 of the buildings are authentic antiques.

Members of the town’s Arctic Brotherhood fraternal society decorated the entire facade of their hall with almost 9000 pieces of flotsam and driftwood.

The cruise-ship passengers were the main fauna (some 10,000 of them on the day of our visit.) But I forgot to mention three other cool creatures we saw during our time in Juneau — and one welcome no-show.

— Bald eagles! I failed to get a good photo of them, but it was startling to see them frolicking in the skies all over town. Kind of like the parrots in my neighborhood back home.

— Ravens! As common as the eagles. I had fun tossing bits of my sandwich to this cheeky guy on our beach hike the other day.

The views from that beach were also pretty diverting.

— A live King Crab! The one below was in a little tank at the dazzling salmon hatchery we visited after our beach hike. We were blown away by the hatchery’s mission (for the last 50 years): raising millions of embryonic salmon every year till they’re big enough for release into the ocean. That TLC gives them a vastly better chance for survival than salmon who aren’t thus protected. After release, the fish swim the seas for several years and then return to the hatchery to spawn and die.

What we did NOT see were the hordes of mosquitoes and “white feet” bugs and flies and no see ‘ums and other annoying summer pests for which Alaska is famous. Apparently they’ll appear in Juneau a bit later this summer. We may meet them yet. We’ve just arrived in Fairbanks for a whirlwind (two-night) stay here. Then we’re on to Denali National Park and Anchorage, the next stops on our grand tour of Seward’s Folly.

Local fauna

May 19, 2025jdewyze3 Comments

Thursday I saw a porcupine for the first time in the wild. This guy was outside the Mendenhall Glacier visitor’s center, nibbling like crazy on the greenery surrounding him. He looked like he was trying to ignore all the tourists taking pictures. But they were making him nervous.

That night we encountered another stellar denizen of this part of the world: the Alaskan king crab. We didn’t see one of the actual crustaceans (which can have a leg span five feet wide). But their parts are on multiple restaurant menus, priced at $75 to $85 a pound.

Steve and I shared a single leg for dinner Thursday, along with crab bisque and a couple of crab cakes, all extraordinarily delicious.

All around us people had ponied up for bucketloads of legs and were digging in with gusto.

The two of us almost stumbled over another porcupine Saturday morning, when we hiked on what’s left of Alaska’s first road. Known today as the Perseverance Trail, it was built in the late 1880s to serve early miners.

Today parts of the trail retain remnants of those impressive early days.

The path leads through some of the most beautiful forest I’ve ever hiked in.

Salmon berries were only just beginning to flower, which may partly explain why we didn’t see any black bears. God knows there were plenty of signs warning of their presence — and other dangers Sunday when we climbed up Mt. Roberts to the top of the cable car that carries cruise-ship passengers up the almost-vertical mountainside.

Wolves live in those woods, too. But I was told moose prefer other parts of Alaska. It struck me I’ve never seen a live moose anywhere, in neither zoo nor the wild, so I would be most excited to see one of them.

We did eat in downtown Juneau at Bullwinkle’s Pizza Saturday night. Juneauites have been devouring pizza there under images of the cartoon moose for more than 50 years.

The pizza was good, but the restaurant interior was pretty forlorn. We chose it only because Bullwinkle’s is just around the corner from the Elizabeth Peratrovich Hall, where the Lionel Hampton Big Band was performing that night. I’d heard that Juneau organizes a music festival every May, and the big band would be performing for the finale that Saturday night. I’d gotten tickets, and Steve and I had decided to take the free pre-concert dance lesson at 6 pm (hence the need for an easy, close dinner.)

We walked in to the hall to find at least a dozen folks already gathered around the teacher, a pretty blonde with a bear paw tattooed on her left shoulder blade. Gamely, she and her assistant demonstrated Lindy and jitterbug moves to the “class.” To me it seemed a wildly ambitious effort; the instructors were racing through a repertoire that Steve and I once learned (sort of) over the course of a couple of years. But soon enough it was time for the dance students to clear the floor so the performance could begin.

Lionel himself has been dead for more than 40 years, but the band is still playing his arrangements; indeed some of the 10 members were in the group when the great vibraphonist was still leading it. The ensemble proved energetic and accomplished, and more-confident dancers soon filled the dance floor.

Steve and I joined them for one number, but it reminded us how far out of practice we are, so mostly we watched. I found myself wondering if the scene would look very different were the band playing at some Kiwanis hall in San Diego. I spotted way more boots on the feet in the Juneau crowd. But mostly they just looked like ordinary American Homo sapiens, having fun.