After landing, we took pictures of the plane and entered the park to start hiking. On one of the hikes, we crested a ridge and saw this caribou grazing the bushes, looking for berries. I switched my wide-angle to a telephoto lens and took this image. It is not something I would typically post, but I figured this was an exception. The piece screams Alaska, and I feel it is obligatory to post it.
Back on the Denali flight, it was fascinating to see how fast the landscapes changed over the flight. We started in a lush area with a dense forest, but it quickly transformed into jagged, snow-peaked mountains. There are over 100,000 glaciers in Alaska, which I thought was an overstatement, but throughout the trip, it felt like we constantly saw one glacier after another. This glacier comes off of Mt. Pendleton. I forget its name, but it is one of hundreds near Denali.
While McCarthy was my favorite town that we adventured through, Seward was my favorite campsite. We stayed at Millers Landing, about a ten-minute drive south of town and on Resurrection Bay. Some locals told us that sunsets like this are incredibly rare. With Seward right on the bay, it is constantly surrounded by a fog that blocks these mountains. For us, this was our first-night camping in Alaska. It set the mood for the rest of the trip, and the weather rarely disappointed.
This plane flight might have been my favorite activity we completed in Alaska. The previous day and morning of the flight were rainy, but for the seventy minutes we were in the air, the clouds broke just enough that we could fly. The plane is small, as only ten individuals could fit at once, which meant the flight was incredibly bumpy. However, for those seventy minutes, I took almost seven hundred images. My shutter rapidly opened and closed the entire flight as I tried to capture every landscape we passed. This piece is a composition of eight pictures stitched together in Lightroom. It looks south, towards Denali, but still many miles to the east of it.
Our camp in McCarthy was right at the toe of the Kennicott and Exit Glaciers. It overlooked a glacial lake filled with icebergs and the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. This image comes from another campsite less than a quarter mile from ours. Between our campsite and McCarthy is a footbridge that crosses the Copper River. While on the bridge, I looked north and saw this composition.
Of all the hikes in Alaska, this was easily the best. Granted, it was also the hardest hike, covering over ten miles with almost four thousand feet of elevation gain, but seeing the old mining equipment and the town of McCarthy was worth it. Of all the towns I have traveled to, McCarthy is the one I want to return to the most. It is deep out of cell coverage, with the only connection from one hotel, but the views are endless, and it is truly rural Alaska.
When determining the order of the images, I did not intend to have three pictures from Denali in a row. However, I like how the colors and composition of the pieces complete each other in the sequence. Regardless, this image also comes from the Teklanika River. One of the facts about Denali National Park is they request that visitors not follow trails. Their theory is that trails ruin the landscape, and the growing season is too short for the vegetation to regrow. By requesting that people not follow trails, they will not form, and the landscape will stay as pristine as possible. That fact was confusing, but after thinking about their logic, I think all parks should encourage that.
Further down the road in Denali, we reached the Teklanika Rest Stop, overlooking the Teklanika River. I took this image on August 18th. As someone from Texas, I thought this would be incredibly early for fall colors. Maybe it is from the filter I added, or maybe the leaves were already starting to change, but I love seeing the green and yellow leaves in the foreground. After thinking about fall in Alaska, we realized that winter would quickly follow. It is now mid-September, and only four weeks after we hiked through, and snow is already on the ground. It would be magical to see the same landscape in the snow.
