Copyright 2019, CABS for Reflections From the Fence
July 23, 2019
We survived! A night sans power. The temps were mild, furnace barely ran, we were comfy. As much as we love The Estate, it has questionable insulation and even tho Man installed a second battery, they are not deep cell batteries and will not give us as much time off the grid as we can get from Tana.
Generator brewed coffee, however, is quite good. Ok. Coffee is good.
This is a sweet campsite. Very private.
Out on the main road, There are peeps parked right on the river, wow! (We are not! LOL) Last night when we were checking out a couple of spots we did see signs for no campfires, did not see any signs indicating you could not park.
Today is partly overcast, low chances of rain. And of course before my breakfast was finished, it started dripping. I was happy it did not last long.
We wanted to hike Byron Glacier Trail, which is somewhere between 1.5 and 1.8 miles, give or take a few tenths either way. Has bout 100 foot gain. I had been told you can “walk” on the glacier. Well, mmm, nope. Seems that was over 20 years ago. Now you will walk on what was called “avalanche snow” by the ranger. Sigh. We went anyway. My Demon needed the exercise and the walk was nice.
Here the hiking path and the stream from the melting glacier are close, they actually are for much of the hike, you just cannot see it like you can here.
What is left of the glacier. And, fog/low hanging cloud. I did not attempt to clean up this photo, or any of the others, you are pretty much seeing what we saw, fog/mist/clouds and all. Water falls from the melting snow to the far right.
Another view of the glacier as we approach, you can see water falls, if you look hard, the water runs so fast they almost look like snow lying in a crevice.
Sony III zoom brings part of that water fall in close for us to see.
Zoom again, teal blue ice pack/glacier and some fog/mist/haze.
I believe this is pretty much the most zoom I can get out of Sony III. I thought the structure and the deep crevices were fascinating. Glaciers can be dangerous, rocks and ice fall from the vertical crevices and there are hidden deep crevices a person can fall down into.
This looks like a black and white photo, but, it is not. It's a lot of zoom. There is a very long crevice running from left to right, and there are those melted cave like features. Melting away - -
Another section of the path we hiked.
Fireweed - -
This was short and different than fireweed, I thought. It was similar in color tho. Will work on identifying at some time in the future.
After our exercise we returned to the Visitors Center where we had our lunch. In the very same parking lot we had lunch in during our trip to Seward.
The rain started, of course. We drove the 5 miles down to the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, where rescue creatures live and where it was not raining. They have bison, black bears, brown bears, caribou, reindeer, wolves, and more.
Moose --
This brown bear was quite photogenic, almost as if it were posing. All the bears are rescues and cannot be returned to the wild. Some of them were found at such tender ages, that they were bottle fed. When babies are found, they are observed for several days by officials to determine if the mother will be returning, when it is obvious she will not, they are gathered up, and brought to this facility as well as others.
Black bear, who was no where near as cooperative for photo ops!!
Caribou, since the likelihood of us spying one in the wild is slim we were happy to see some here, being cared for so well.
We spent a couple of hours and found this special place to stop and relax, ohhh and the internet connected. And it started raining again. So we parked, sat and surfed. With a view.
It continued to rain, we eventually drove back to camp and parked, most level site, by the way. I took a nap. That should be fun later, about 3 am.
They say the wind and the rain is pretty normal here. It sure is pretty, but all that rain, I think would irritate me, I just need my sun.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment