On board a ferry from Valdez to Whittier in Alaska, in the midst of our "big" trip of the year, punctuated by three notable things: (1) kayak trip out of Homer, (2) bus tour in Denali National Park, and (3) salmon fishing in Valdez.

The kayak trip was a two-night, three-day affair where we stayed the evenings in "yurts," a canvas-sided semi-permanent structure that kept us warm and dry during both evenings when it, as is typical for this time in Alaska, rained. The yurt also had a central wood stove for heating, had it been cold, but it never dropped below 40 on our trip, and instead we built a campfire for warmth and enjoyment before sleep both nights. Most of our paddling was done in the protection of Tutka Bay, although on the first day we id have to go around the point of one island that had three-foot swells which never quite threatened to capsize us, but we did have to pay attention to the direction of our bow.
Lots of great wildlife viewing, helped by being low and quiet in the water in the sea kayaks: many bald eagles--both adult and immature, sea otters, river otters, sea stars, salmon, and some other birds, sometimes impossible to identify.

On the second day, in the afternoon, we paddled up to the headwaters of the bay to see the total carnage that is the middle-to-end of salmon spawning season. When television covers salmon spawning on nature shows, the common picture you take with you is the salmon leaping in the rapids as they fight their way upstream. While that is real, the larger reality and more lingering image you get when you are actually here is the thousands of dead, rotting fish on the rocks and in the shallows left visible by the receding tide, made even more memorable by the overwhelming olfactory addition. Hordes of seagulls picking among the fish, eating eyeballs and cheeks first, a veritablesmorgasbord of carrion, overseen by individual bald eagles (likely immatures not yet good at hunting) keeping watch from the tree stumps.

The only way to get into the deep interior of Denali is by bus, although you can, if you want, basically hitchhike into the back country by using the "camper" buses. We only had a day, though, so we went on the bus tour that goes far enough into the park to catch a full glimpse of Mt. McKinley.
Along the way, the tundra vistas are stunning, and we had the opportunity view another series of wildlife particular to Alaska, including the Willow Ptarmigan, caribou, Dall sheep, and a grizzly bear, hungrily munching on low-growing berry bushes.

One of the reasons we were in Alaska this year was because of Jill's father, who's been coming to Alaska every year for the last 20 to go fishing. He had wanted to share this with Jill for years, and we had been sharing the bounty of his fishing for a number of years, so the time seemed ripe. I've never been a big fisher myself, having found the few time I've gone fishing in the past to be quite boring, but I was assured by my father-in-law that salmon fishing was different, simply because there are so many fish out there, trying to gobble up as much as they can before spawning and dying. Sure enough, we all managed to catch our limit of six fish each in three hours during our early morning charter. The second bite on our lines was even a "quad," where we ended up having a fish on each of the four lines that we had baited and put out. We pulled back into Valdez port at noon, had the charter captain filet our catch while we cleaned it, then spent the rest of the afternoon cutting the fish into dinner portions and vacuum sealing it for the plane ride home.

Alaska is so big that doing these three things was only scratching the surface of the place, and i can easily see why people return time and time again. I could even see us returning, and we're usually the first to disclaim return trips to anywhere, even if we enjoyed ourselves quite a bit, because we could go to entirely different places and see different wildlife.