July 2010
We were able to get very close to the face of Hubbard Glacier. You’d never know it since there are no man-made structures for comparison but the face of the glacier is 450 feet tall and 8 miles wide. The sound you hear is the rumbling of ice calving off of it and creating icebergs.
Our difficulty in getting a flight scheduled to the glacier allowed us some time to make a side trip to four-time Iditarod winner Jeff King’s Husky Homestead. He provided a fascinating look at the sport of dogsledding. Here you see two of their training devices, a giant hamster wheel and a dog-powered carousel.
These two caribou were wandering along the Park Road in Denali National Park in Alaska. They were on the road avoiding mosquitos and causing a little bit of a traffic jam.
We went through so much effort and stress trying to schedule a flight to a glacier, but after a week of trying we managed to get there on the third try. After all that effort, I had to record our landing! The landing was bumpy, but not nearly what I expected considering we were landing on skis.
Ruth Glacier is like a little icy airport out in the middle of nowhere. The night we were there, there were many small flightseeing planes coming and going.
This isn’t the most exciting video, but the lodge we stayed at in Denali, Grande Denali Lodge, is situated on the edge of a cliff 500 feet above the George Parks Highway. They have a 1 mile long, mostly unpaved, driveway that descends 500 feet to the road. Everyone who drove us up and down it said they hate it. This was our last trip down in our Royal Celebrity tour bus.