Landing on a glacier

About a month ago I was lucky enough to hop on a little 10 passenger plane and take a flight seeing tour through the mountains and land on a glacier in the middle of them all. It was probably one of the most beautiful things I have ever had the pleasure of witnessing in my entire life. If you ever end up coming to Alaska, you must take this flight and see it for yourself. Sure, I took about a million pictures, but they are only the tiniest taste of what it’s like to see it with your own eyes.

This is Mount McKinley from Talkeetna (about 60 miles away), the town where climbers who are going to take on the mountain check in with the park rangers and catch a flight out to the mountain. I took this picture from the park at the end of town that is right on the Talkeetna river right before I hopped on the plane.

Here we are taking off. I chatted with the couple that was sitting in front of me for a while before we took off. They were from Australia and had been traveling around the world for the last 4 months with 2 more months to go before they headed home. I hope I have the time (and money) when I’m their age to be able to do that. Actually, I wish I had that at my age now, I don’t want to wait 30 more years to travel like that.

We first flew over a ton of rivers that meandered though the wilderness. There were little cabin strewn about here and there that are only accessible by boat or ATV.

In the background you can see how suddenly the lush green trees give way to snow covered mountains.

And then, bam, mountains and snow galore.

There’s McKinley through the window, much closer now.

This is one of my favorite pictures that I took from the plane. All these pictures are straight from the camera by the way, although I really need to see what I can do in Photoshop to make it even cooler.

A glacier cutting through the mountains with McKinley up at the top. 20,320 feet! Our plane couldn’t even fly that high because it wasn’t pressurized.

One of the base camps for climbers. I think this one was at 11,000 ft.

Next we landed on the Ruth Glacier. Notice the skis on the plane.

Here we are walking around on the glacier in the middle of the mountains. It was breathtaking.

The pilot was nice enough to take my picture. Since I was by myself. Although it looks freezing, it was actually like 60 some degrees up there.

But, as you might know, I have to do the self portrait everywhere I go.

Ok, time to get going.

Flying back to Talkeetna along the glacier.

This is just a taste of all the pictures I took. You can see all 111 of them on Flickr.

Two months and counting

I can’t believe that I have been up in “the last frontier” for 2 whole months now! Isn’t that crazy? It’s amazing how fast time goes by when you are busy and having lot’s of fun. I’ve done so much lately and I haven’t shared much at all on here about it. It was so easy to find time to write on here when no one was here and there was 5 feet of snow on the ground, but now there is tons of awesome people to hang out with and way too much to do outside. Sitting in front of my computer writing on my blog has just been pushed way down the list as of late. I do want to start writing on here again on a regular basis though. I have tons of pictures that need to be posted, and even more stories to tell. It is coming, I promise.

For now though I thought I would share a few lists…

Five things that make Alaska awesome:

1. The weather – Who could argue with 70 during the day and 50 at night? I love not sweating!
2. The scenery- I get to see the highest point in North America as I walk to work in the morning.
3. The wildlife- Musk ox and moose and bears, oh my!
4. The people- I have had the pleasure of meeting all kinds of awesome people from different backgrounds and cultures.
5. The stuff to do- Flight tours, boat rides, hiking, kayaking, camping, and so much more.

Five things that makes Alaska not so awesome:

1. People- I miss my family and friends back in MD.
2. Mosquitoes- I loose about a pint of blood a day from those evil little creatures.
3. Isolation- I guess I’m just a city slicker at heart, and I have to drive 130 miles to get to a real city.
4. Instruments- I want to play a drum set so bad right now. I miss my piano dearly too. Luckily I did bring my guitar.
5. Food- I would kill to have a kitchen where I could make a delicious meal. I descent Mexican restaurant would also be nice.

Gotcha!

It was all a trick. I really didn’t move to Alaska for the summer. I actually decided to move to Florida and start my own photography business. Check out my website at www.goldenexposures.com.

Thursday’s random thoughts

Alaska is awesome. The list of things to do while I’m up here keeps growing and growing.

I’ve been listening to a lot of old Further Seems Forver lately and just loving it.

My first summer read is going to be Marilyn Manson’s autobiography. Yeah I know that’s kind of strange one, but it’s something I’ve always wanted to read and someone was nice enough to let me borrow it so we’ll see how it is.

I have a ton of pictures that I’m trying to get posted. Sorry it’s taking so long.

It’s pretty awesome having my buddy Stephen as a roommate yet again. We have a lot of fun together and there’s only more to come.

I have to wear company shirts to work every day but all the ones they gave me have either stains or holes in them. What’s with that? Not that I care really, but it doesn’t look very nice.

I have officially switched over to Windows 7 as my main operating system. I upgraded my laptop from Vista last night. There’s no turning back now.

Please stand by

I know, I know. I never write in here anymore. Why you may ask? Well I’ve been working a ton. One day I even worked from 8am to 3am the next day. Now the the season here is going full swing though, things should calm down a good bit. The few days I’ve been off, I’ve been exploring and seeing the sites. All this combined with unreliable internet in my room has resulted in little to no posting on here. So I apologize. I really do want to share so much. I have gigs and gigs of pictures and videos, and some good stories to go with them. It is all coming, I promise. Just hang in there.

I think I made a good choice

Hm… Where would I rather be living right now?

This came up on my Google homepage this morning and I thought it was pretty funny.

The first hike of the season

Just a quick post to share some pictures that I took last week when I went hiking. There is a trail that the boy scouts built on the back of the property that I live on. We only went a little ways because there was still too much snow.

That’s me hiking through the snow in shorts. It was around 70 degrees out but there was still a ton of snow.

Here is Stephen demonstrating how deep the snow was. It was probably around 2 feet at parts. You would be walking along fine with your feet only tracks a couple inches deep, then all of a sudden in one step you were up to knee in snow. It was pretty funny to watch the person in front who was blazing the trail (making the foot prints for everyone).

This was the creek that was running down into the river. It was flowing like crazy because there is so much snow melting.

This is our tracks on the trail running right next to some fresh moose tracks. You can’t tell, but the hoof marks were huge. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) we didn’t see the moose.

There was huge ice chunks all along the side of the river from when it had been frozen over. It was quite a site especially since it was so warm.

Here I am standing on a big chunk of ice that was sticking out by about 6 feet. It was think enough to support my weight all the way out on the edge. Probably not the safest thing to do, but it made for a cool picture. You can check out the rest of the picks on Flickr to the right.

What I don’t want to be

Time for part 3 of the story of my trip out to Alaska. This is really the part that I kept wanting to write, but every time I started writing, something else kept coming out and before I knew it I had an entire post about something completely different. You can read parts one and two if you missed them so you know what is going on.

After my guitar was safely put in the overhead I took my seat on the aisle. The other 2 people in my row were already there. The first one I noticed was the cute girl sitting in the window seat. She gave me a nice smile as she saw that I was sitting down in her row. Not a bad fellow passenger to have a long boring flight in the afternoon. I sat down and looked over to the guy that was sitting in the middle between us. We exchange a quick “hey” as I sat down and got settled in.

Next, we had the normal minute or two of slightly awkward silence that you always have when you first sit down on a plane. You and the person next to you are both deciding if it is worth the trouble of making small talk with the stranger next to you that you will never see again in your life. Do I want to go through the trouble of telling this person where I am from, what I do, my pets’ names, and why I am flying to Phoenix all at the same time having to pretend to be interested in their own answers to the same questions? Well I took a chance. Remember how I wanted to work on talking to more strangers? I found out that the guy next to me was named Terrance and the cute smiling girl was Rachel.

Terrance was 32 and worked for some kind of government contractor in DC doing security audits on computer networks or something like that. Rachel was a 19 year old student from CA who was on her way back from her first time leaving the state she lived in. When I told Terrance about how I also worked for the government doing IT work, but was now heading to Alaska to work for the summer he was excited to meet a fellow IT person. He instantly started telling me about all the stuff that he worked on and all the certifications he had, and most importantly the tons of money he was making. He seemed to really like to talk about the money part because he concentrated on that for a few minutes. He even got pretty specific in telling me how much he made (it was in the six figure range) even though I always thought that really isn’t something that you tell a stranger that you’ve only known for a few minutes.

He told me that his job really wasn’t that difficult and that I could be living the same kind of dream life that he had if I just got a couple network certifications. But then I told him that I really didn’t care too much for IT work, especially with the government, and that was the whole reason that I was moving to Alaska. I was taking a pretty big pay cut  to get away from the mundane of my job and experience new things. Terrance just looked confused as I tried to explain this to him. The whole idea that I really didn’t care about how much I was making at my job, but that I wanted to actually enjoy what I was doing no matter how much it payed didn’t seem to make sense to him. In his mind you do whatever it takes to get head  to buy the car/house/whatever that you want. The next thing that will fulfill you.

As I continued to talk to Terrance, it started to make me sad. Why are people so obsessed with things? Things that seem to satisfy, but in the end leave you wanting the newer model a month later. It’s a vicious cycle of desire and consumption that never ends if you can afford it or go into enough debt. I hope I never become like that. Not to say that I am perfect when it comes to the idea of wanting things I don’t need. I’m far from it, but I’m happy to say that it doesn’t consume my life. It isn’t the first thing that I tell the stranger next to me on the plane.

After a couple minutes of talking to me I think Terrance got a little bored with me because I didn’t seem that impressed with his fancy job and tales of traveling all over for work. So for the next 4 hours of the flight he decided to flirt with Rachel. Yes a 32 year old man hitting on a  19 year old girl on a plane. Kind of sketchy if you ask me. I even saw her giving him her number as we were getting of the plane. I suppose his stories of wealth and fame worked on her.

So basically I think I know what I don’t want to be in 6 years. I don’t want to work for the government making the big bucks, and I surely don’t want to be the guy hitting on 19 year old girls on airplanes. Thanks for the life lesson, Terrance. It was a pleasure to meet you.

The drive

I drove up to the Denali Princess Lodge on Friday to do some work and train. I left from the McKinley lodge around 9am where it was pretty nasty and snowy. Not the kind of weather that you want to drive for two hours in. As I got going on the lone highway that I would follow for the next 105 miles to Denali the weather seemed to go from yucky to just plain bad. It started snowing really hard to the point where it was accumulating a couple inches on the road. Luckily my trusty old GMC Sierra minivan that I was driving is all wheel drive and has studded tires. I still had to stay in the narrow tire tracks that had been made by other drivers on the road to stay out of the snow. Where these other drivers were, I have no idea. I didn’t see a single soul on the road till about 40 miles into the trip. I started to get a little scared as I thought about the situation I was in. 40 some miles away from the place I am staying, no cell phone reception at all, not even another car passing the other way on the road. All the while the snow is coming down harder and harder. If my van broke down or I slid off the road, I was a goner for sure. It was kind of scary and yet also exciting at the same time knowing that I was in that kind of isolation. And I’m sure if something actually did happen that another car would have come by to help within an hour or two. Long before I would have died of hunger or hypothermia. But it was still exciting to think about having to survive out in the wild.

I did have one good “oh crap” moment as I was driving. I had the cruise control set around 65 which is the posted speed limit and was going over a little bridge that had accumulated much more snow than the rest of the road. The road went into a turn right after the bridge as well. Well as soon as I hit that bridge I felt the tires hit the deeper snow and instantly knew that the van was no longer under my control. I tapped the breaks to turn off the cruise control and held on for the ride, because I knew that there was nothing I could do at the speed I was going. And of course this happens to be one of the extremely rare times when another car is passing me from the other direction. Crazy how that works out isn’t it. Luckily I listened to my instincts and didn’t freak out and try to madly turn the wheel to stay on the road. I let the van drift into the shoulder a little before I felt the tires grab the road a little and carefully turned the van back into the tire tracks that I had been following for most of the trip. I could feel the adrenaline flowing through my veins as my body prepared for what could have been a pretty terrible accident, but all was well.

After I safely made it to Denali I worked on setting up computers with two other Princess IT guys. Both were a lot of fun to work with and made for a fun trip. I spent the night up there in their employee housing called the Stampede which was pretty cool. It was like an old hotel. Actually I’m pretty sure it was an old hotel. It even had a little diner setup in the back where we ate too. My room was tiny but it had a poster of Jessica Simpson on the wall. That’s kind of hard to beat I suppose. Across the street from the Stampede was this little inn/bar/restaurant called the Totem. They had the most amazing homemade pizza there. So good. I also had some Alaskan Amber from the tap which was just delicious. Who knew that even in the middle of nowhere there is still good beer and pizza to be had.

On Saturday I did a little more work around the Denali Lodge till the afternoon and then began my trip back to McKinley. The roads were clear now and I got to pull over and grab a couple pictures of the sights. The mountains are just awesome. Words and pictures just can’t describe what it is like to be there. It’s amazing how small it can make you feel when you around something so huge. It makes you feel rather insignificant when you stand there in awe of the snow covered mountains with rock faces sticking through the blanket of white giving each mountain it’s on special identity like a fingerprint. Paul wasn’t lying in Romans when he said how the invisible things of God are clearly seen through the things He has made. As I stood in front of one of the rivers that was silently frozen over with the mountains shooting towards the sky in the distance, I was reminded again of awesome power of God that is revealed through creation. It is truly breathtaking.

Side note: I’m going to start using Flickr again. I started using it a couple years ago, but I haven’t touched it in three years or so. But now it’s back. I’m going to have lots of pics to share and I don’t feel like having to upload them one by one on here and put them in each post, so Flickr it is. Look to your right and check it out.

There’s no money in rock and roll

Make sure you read the previous post to get a feel for what is going on.

So I made it onto my plane for the flight to Pheonix. Yeah not really on the way to Alaska is it? But who can argue with a $250 one way to AK? That’s really hard to beat. I chose an aisle seat for this flight. My philosophy is aisle seat for flights during the day when I am going to be up and want to feel like I have a little space, then window seats for later flights or red eyes so I can lean on the window and sleep.

As I found my seat, I carefully put my guitar into the overhead hoping that it would make this trip in one piece. I felt better when the guy that was behind me putting his luggage in the overhead said “oh there’s a guitar up here. We need to be careful.” It turned out that the guy was a professional musician who had been playing for like 30 years. He was friends with the new singer from Boston. Pretty sweet if you ask me. He was one of the nicest guys you will ever meet. I asked him how he got his start in the industry to see if I could get some tips, since I still have some dreams of rock stardom. The first thing he said was that there was “no money in rock and roll.” Man, way to put a damper on my dreams. But he did speak the truth. This is something I’ve known for a while. Well, it’s not entirely true. There are some people that do make a good living at playing rock and roll, but the chances are extremely slim. He said if you wanted to actually make enough money to live on as a musician you just need to join a cover band that can get regular gigs. It’s really sad, but true nonetheless. Oh well.I’m not sure if I would even get desperate enough to play in a cover band.

This isn’t really what I wanted to talk about for this post, but now I want to save that for it’s own post. It’s getting late now too, so I will hold off till tomorrow.