Our Alaskan Adventure: June 2011

Thursday, June 30, 2011

More Visitors: Clamming and Fishing Day (June 30, 2011)

We dug up 39 clams today at Ninilchik Beach and then went home to clean them. Joe and Danielle are great clam cleaners! In the late afternoon we went fishing at the Kasilof River. Still no bites. Not surprising however, we are still pretty early in the season. While out fishing, Jon saw a moose cross the river.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

More Visitors: Seward (June 28, 2011)

Down in Seward the 5 of us hiking up to the Harding Ice Field, which was very snowy in the alpine areas. We saw many marmots and on the descent, slid down many snowy spots. We also stopped in at the Rehabilitation area at the Sea Life Center. I am now helping out there from time to time as a volunteer for the Stranded Marine Mammal Network out of Homer. This allows me to go into the rehabilitation area and work with orphans or injured/sick marine mammals. Right now they have 9 orphaned seals: one ring seal out of Nome and 8 harbor seals from around the Kenai Peninsula. Our visitors got a personal tour of the facility.

Monday, June 27, 2011

More Visitors: Geocaching and Captain Cook State Park (June 27, 2011)

After a long hike yesterday, we took more of a relaxed day today. Joe, Danielle, and Luke, all new or fairly new geocachers, searched for 3 geocaches around the Kenai area and succeeded at all of them, 2 being double caches! One of the caches brought us down to enjoy the Kenai Beach. After geocaching we drove around Old Town Kenai and took in the beautiful design of the Old Russian Orthodox Church, built in the late 1800s. We then stopped in at Kassik's Brewery, a local brewery found in North Kenai. Then we headed out to Captain Cook State Park. We ended the evening with salads and snowcrab legs dipped in butter!

Sunday, June 26, 2011

More Visitors: Skyline Trail and Moose (June 26, 2011)

Sunday, June 26th Luke, Joe, Danielle, Rochelle, Attie (the dog we are currently dog-sitting for), and Jonathan hiked about 2 miles up a trail called Skyline. The trail leads to an overlook at the top of the Kenai Mountain Range. The elevation gain for this hike is 1800+ feet. It took about 2 hours to get to the top and an hour and 20 minutes to go down. As you can see from the picture Attie was having a great time and probably did the trip about three times. Then we watched three moose (a cow and two calves) eat and play around close to our home. The calves were really rubbing up agaist their mother after she laid down in the weeds. The mother proceeded to rub faces and show a lot of love to her calves. Unfortunately we did not have our cameras at the time of this event.

Denali (June 23-25, 2011)

On Thursday we drove from Kenai up to Cantwell (just south of the entrance to Denali National Park)where we camped for the night. We woke up early after a sunny night of sleep and headed up just north of Denali for some river rafting in the Nenana River. The run was beautiful and refreshingly wet, winding us through a deep canyon.
After eating some delicious reindeer sausage, we headed to the National Park. Unfortunately, all we saw for wildlife were butterflies and birds, which were lovely in their own ways. We did however get a nice, clean view of Mt. McKinley. After leaving Denali, we stopped in at the town of Talkeetna. It is a very charming town with many historic buildings and very touristy in the summer. On our way into Talkeetna, we were able to take in the best view of Mt. McKinley yet!