I took a trip with Kira to Alaska. She drove up with a friend and we met near Denali on the 2nd. We spent a week with her parents in the Kenai peninsula and then did hiking and backpacking for another two weeks on our own.
Check out the photos
In the week with Kira’s parents we did mostly water activities. We took a one day tour of Prince William Sound out of Whitter, and then a three day kayaking trip out of Seward. On our last day together we did a hike. Her dad had originally planned to join us, but we ended up going solo.
Both the Prince William Sound tour and the kayaking were very pretty. The Kenai peninsula gets a lot of rain and has abundant fjords and glaciers making for great scenery.
The boat tour was mostly about animals, and we saw puffin, seals, humpback whales, orcas, otters, eagles, porpoise, and a black bear. Most of the sightings were at ‘known’ locations. There is an island with a large colony of puffin, and another island where the seals like to rest. We went to a salmon hatchery where salmon were returning to breed and it was a feeding frenzy for eagles, seals, seagulls and a bear. The tour guides were excited about the orca sighting, but I thought that the humpback were cooler.
The tour also took us to some impressive scenery
The kayaking trip was a guided tour. They provided the tents, food, and kayaks. It also included transport from Seward to the Northwestern Fjord. On the first day we saw orca and there were a few otters and a lot of seals, but the highlights were the glaciers and scenery.
In the time without Kira’s parents, we did several hikes: Kesugi ridge, Lost lake, Crow pass, Lion head, Fairangel lakes, Lane basin, and Reed lakes. While doing these hikes we were camping in the car that we rented for the trip. We found a Prius on Turo that ended up being a great arrangement. Most car rentals in Alaska aren’t allowed to travel on some of the gravel roads, and getting a car that would let us go where we wanted from a big company would have been quite expensive.
We had mixed weather in Alaska (which is typical). It was cloudy for most of our first week and we did not get to see Denali on the Kesugi ridge hike. That hike also got cut short because rain was moving in. The Crow pass hike was also rainy and had the worst weather of the trip. We made it to the pass, but it was so windy that we were having trouble making forward progress. We also had a fog day near Hatcher pass and we did the Fairangel and Lane basin hikes in dense fog. We didn’t get to see some of the scenery, but what we did see in the fog was pretty:
Reed lakes and Lost lake were both very nice hikes and the Lion head hike was steep but had great views of Matanuska glacier.
We also did two longer off-trail backpacking trips. The first on the glaciers near McCarthy in Wrangell St Elias, and the other at Thompson pass near Valdez. The glacier hike was four days and Thompson pass was two.
The Thompson pass hike had great scenery. We were mostly walking above tree line on the side of a long ridge that had a view of a long valley and the next line of mountains. The part of the hike above tree line was very nice and we were totally alone the whole time. But getting from the “trailhead” to above the trees was some ridiculous bush-whacking. We had a brief and inaccurate description for how to ascend from the guide book and spent several hours going 1/4 of a mile and gaining 1000 ft. Part of the problem was the steepness and mud, but the main issue was getting through all the bushes. I’ve done very little cutting through vegetation off trail, so I don’t really have much to compare it to, but Kira has done much more and she said it was the worst she’s seen. Here is a photo of the flat easy part before hitting the bushes:
It’s hard to pick a highlight on such a long and varied trip, but exploring the Root and Gates glaciers in Wrangell is the first thing that comes to mind when I think about the trip. This was another difficult hike. The same guide book gave some bad directions about how to get onto and around the glaciers and we were basically on our own to pick a path through the glaciers and moraines. It was not dangerous, but there was a lot of unsteady footing and backtracking when we’d crest a ridge only to find our path forward was blocked by a crevasse or cliff. We also had rain and some very wet ground to cover in a lake region between glaciers. But it was a lot of fun to walk on the glacier and explore the different terrains and features.
Kira’s trip was a couple weeks longer since she did a bunch of sightseeing on the drive north. This was also her first attempt to fly since the accident. We were very well prepared to keep the sound exposure to a minimum. TSA was still a problem but the rest was pretty good. We learned some lessons that would make it easier next time, but we’re still hoping for improvement before trying it again.
