Great Alaska adventure, part 2

[Blue_In_AK]

We left Lake Louise Sunday morning and headed north on the Glenn Highway, intersecting the Richardson Highway at Glennallen. The terrain around Glennallen is generally pretty flat with lots of birches, so we didn't stop much, but we did see several porcupines and rabbits along the roadside. Of course, as usually happens, I had on the wrong lens every time. After a while the road began to climb and soon we came upon a pond with several pairs of nesting swans. I managed to get the telephoto lens on but didn't want to risk scaring them by setting up the tripod, so this is handheld at 300 mm. A little fuzzy, but acceptable.



At Paxson we came to the intersection with the Denali Highway which used to be the only way to get to Denali National Park from either Anchorage or Fairbanks (back in the days when it was known as Mt. McKinley National Park). The highway is 130 miles of gravel road, but the first 20 miles back to Tangle Lakes is paved, so we took that little side trip. It was quite cold, extremely windy, but awesomely beautiful. Here is a shot of one of the Tangle Lakes.



Back out on the Richardson and continuing north, we came upon another series of lakes that were an almost otherworldly shade of aquamarine.



Here's one from the road.



The weather had been beautiful all morning, but shortly after that picture we dropped down into thick clouds.



We stayed the night at Donnelly Creek campground where we were soon joined by the ever-present camp robbers. We had already had a run-in with these guys at Lake Louise where they pretty well destroyed our hotdog buns and even got into the dark chocolate which we had brought for s'mores, so we were very careful to put everything away when we went to bed at night from then on.



The campground was separated from the river basin by a levee, apparently because the road and the river are at the same level and floods periodically occur. This was the view from the top of the levee Sunday night.



Sunday night was another cold one, although not as windy as Lake Louise (and only a little snow). The next morning we awoke to an absolutely gorgeous day. This is the view from the levee Monday morning - we didn't even know all these beautiful mountains were there because of the cloud cover the night before.




...more to come...

[regnaD kciN]

1. Blue, you need to be thinking about...

...expanding your written story, and submitting an article with photos to one of the backpacking or Alaska tourism magazines. I would think any of them would be interested, particularly with the images you'd be providing!

:applause:

(I do need to get back up there again, this time with a bit more leeway than merely shooting from the deck of a cruise ship...)