We got into Anchorage at about 1 a.m. Saturday, bought groceries and messed around on some rented bikes, then started driving to Denali National Park on Saturday afternoon. As we were cruising up the 2-lane Parks Highway (Highway 3, that is — Alaska has less than 10 actual highways, numbered 1 through 9), I caught a glimpse of the actual mountain, Denali (or “Mount McKinley,” if you’re a total rube). Quote: “HOLY SHIT! LOOK AT THAT MOUNTAIN!” I actually spoke in all capitals. The highway is at about 1,500 feet elevation, and the first time you can see Denali, it’s about 50 miles away. And it’s 20,320 goddamn feet tall. Everything above about 10,000 feet is pure snow. This photo is from the Denali South Viewpoint, just off the highway.
They said if you want to see Denali National Park, take the bus. The 94-mile road that cuts through the park is off-limits to private vehicles, so you have to take the bus to do pretty much anything in the park. Emily and I ponied up $40 each for a bumpy, dusty 11-hour ride in an old school bus, painted green, and it was worth every penny.
Here’s a bunch of fellow tourists taking snapshots at Polychrome Pass, about a fourth of the way through the day.
The best view we got of the northwest side of Denali. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever seen. You can’t really do much except try to take photos and try not to piss your pants when you look at it. Apparently, it’s so huge, it creates its own weather, and the weather is usually crap. They said we had about a 1 in 5 chance of actually seeing the mountain — it’s typically covered in clouds all day. Well, we got lucky.
Emily in front of Denali.
All the way out at the end of the dirt road, at Wonder Lake, hundreds of miles from anywhere in Alaska, there’s a water pump from Des Moines, Iowa. Pretty great. We also met a guy from Lincoln, Nebraska, but I didn’t get his photo.
On the bus ride back, near the Toklat River.
For nine days in Alaska, we bought a 3 1/4-pound bag of Peanut M&Ms. I finished the last of them on the way home from the Denver airport at the end of the trip.
We got really lucky with this sunset over our campground at Denali National Park. (photo by Emily)
The next day, driving back down the Parks Highway, we got more normal Alaska weather: clouds and rain.
A shot of Mt. Foraker, next to Denali, during typical weather conditions. Denali was invisible.
We were plenty warned to look out for moose, on the highways and on the trails. Apparently hundreds of them are killed on Alaskan highways every year. And they’re ornery as shit when you surprise them on a trail.
Along the Seward Highway south of Anchorage, the mountains literally drop right into the ocean in the Turnagain Arm. We shot about 10 out-the-car-window photos before we stopped at this pullout to pack our stuff for an overnight hike about 40 miles south of Anchorage in the Chugach National Forest. We came out here looking for beluga whales twice later in the trip, but got stood up both times.
We picked a pretty easy trail up to a Forest Service cabin near Crow Pass, outside of Girdwood, Alaska, home of the Alyeska ski resort. It took us forever to get up the pass because of all the oohing and aahing I was doing and all the photos I took. There were several waterfalls visible from the trail.
Here’s our cabin, a little A-frame job near the top of the pass.
Our view was out over Crystal Lake, a gray-green lake filled with glacier water.
Here’s Cookie Monster enjoying the view out the cabin door. He was not eaten by a bear.
Three mountain goats bounded down the ridge right behind the cabin that evening right after we ate dinner, but the low light and my amateur camera skills made them all blurry. Here’s Emily crossing a waterfall on the way back down the next morning.
Here’s a shot of the waterfall. It would be bad to drop the camera at this point.
Another shot of Emily hiking out.
We had already seen moose, Alaskan brown bears, Dall sheep, and caribou in Denali National Park, but of course, none of our photos were worth a shit. Fortunately, a guy riding the bus told us about the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, a nonprofit that rescues injured and orphaned moose, caribou, bears and other animals and gives them a place to live. This moose was behind a pretty sturdy fence.
I think this is Hugo, a female grizzly. She seemed pretty used to posing for the camera.
If you were wondering where the home of the Halibut Quesadillas was, we found it. Moose Pass, Alaska.
I told Emily the Safeway parking lot in Seward was the most beautiful Safeway parking lot in America, if not the most beautiful grocery store parking lot in America. Twice on our trip, we stopped at grocery stores to gorge ourselves on potato salad. This was instance No. 2. Not a bad place to have a little picnic on the bumper of your car.
Here’s the view out of the other side of the parking lot.
In Seward, we got one of the prettiest campsites I’ve ever stayed at, with a view of the mountains surrounding Resurrection Bay. We slept in the back of our rental car, a Dodge Caliber, because …
… we had to park it in the RV campground to get the view of the ocean (the tent sites were set back a ways from the water). It was pretty obvious we had the smallest RV in the lot. I think this guy’s camper was as big as our apartment, but they did say they’d been living in it for three months.
Of course, I was just standing around smelling my armpits next to the “RV”one day when I heard some lady going bananas about something. Which was a bald eagle flying around right over the beach. This was the only one of my photos that came out at all. Also, it was the third bald eagle I’d seen that day.
Here’s Wolfy, our sea kayaking guide, from Kayak Adventures Worldwide. This guy knows what he’s doing: He guides sea kayaking trips all summer in Seward, Alaska, then heads back to Cedar City, Utah, to do wilderness therapy trips the rest of the year. Wolfy’s bosses, Dave and Wendy, live in Seward for the summer running the Kayak business, then live in their cabin near Bozeman, Mont., the rest of the year. I am wasting my life working in a cubicle. 
I’ve never paid for a guide for anything before, and I think we’d be lucky to get anybody as good as Wolfy if we ever paid for a guide again. He took us out about 5 1/2 miles into Resurrection Bay to Caines Head Recreation Area, where we hiked 2 miles up to the remains of Fort McGilvray, a lookout the U.S. built before World War II to guard Seward against a Japanese invasion. The guns on Fort McGilvray were never fired on an enemy. The Japanese decided instead to invade Attu Island way out in the Aleutians, and were fought off by the boys from the 10th Mountain Division, legendary for their role in later developing the Colorado ski industry. Wolfy’s grandfather served in the 10th Mountain Division.
Here’s the view across Resurrection Bay from one of the old gun turrets.
We didn’t get to see the Northern Lights in Alaska, but we did get a full moon while camping in Seward.
These two marmots spent most of the day, I think, hanging out on a boulder right next to the trail to the Harding Icefield, in Kenai Fjords National Park just north of Seward.
The icefield is the largest contained completely inside the U.S. — it’s more than 300 square miles. Let me tell you, the trail up there is a real ass-kicker. About 20 people in a row asked us as we were heading back down, “How much farther is it?” One lady even asked, “Can you touch ice?” Yeah, lady, go for it. It’s about like touching the bottom of Pikes Peak to get a sense of it.
We ended up in the town of Homer, the “Land’s End,” which we decided would have been more interesting had we been fisherman and fisherwoman instead of a couple of vegetarians. We camped out on the Homer Spit, a skinny finger of land that sticks out into Katchemak Bay. You couldn’t swing a dead dog without hitting a fish and chips joint or a charter fishing operation. We didn’t last long.
Here’s the sun setting over Katchemak Bay.
We also spent part of an afternoon hiking at the Anchorage Mall. We were unable to climb to the actual summit in the fourth-story food court, but did make it to the top level of the JCPenney store on the third floor.
This is a tourist trap. 
Still, it was pretty cool. 3,400 pounds of liquefied chocolate.
Our last day, before our flight, we climbed Flattop Mountain just outside of Anchorage. On the actual summit, we were standing in a cloud and had a view of about 40 feet in every direction, but on the way down, we had a great view of downtown Anchorage. This guy was kind enough to hike around the ridge and appear in this photo for perspective.
