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Alaska Tattler Along the Dalton Highway |
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Aialik Glacier. It's "calving" behind the rock at right. That means it's delivering icebergs. |
Forecast for Barrow, AK
Summer Snodgrass Summer, of Alaska Tour and Travel, won the Travel Consultant award and Rebecca, of Northern Alaska Tour Company, won the Tour Guide award. Congratulations!
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A fairly common notice. I'm sure there is a story behind this.
The pipeline is well patrolled by muskox. That's my story and I'm sticking with it.
Our tour group at the circle. Guide Rebecca at front and center. I am the pudgy one at far left and Anne is in the middle. There are many stories here!
Common, but there are variations. I suspect that at some time, the state warned people to wear bells and use pepper spray.
I don't fish but we took a fishing tour anyway. Guide at right and angler at left. There is a fishy story here.
Here's what I call a rack, Jack.
My audience with the Mayor of Somewhere -- I believe, Talkeetna. There is a story here, too.
The guy who chickened out got the girl.
Anne and me at the Arctic Ocean
Party in the dome car! These San Diego Sunday school teachers do mission work in Alaska every summer. She in the center serves wine for Alaska Railroad. Bread is broken downstairs in a private dining room with great fare, two chefs and two servers. The car also had a tour guide. |
Alaska Notebook Anne and I have returned from two weeks at the last frontier, where we met some great people on our tours. We scheduled a mix-n-match variety of tours through Alaska Tour and Travel at Anchorage (our agent was Summer) and we had a great time, even though the weather was not perfect and the hotel lost one of our bags in Anchorage. It is beginning to look as if Marriott is sandbagging me on this. We will see. Summer's agency does not use Marriott — I am the one who selected that hotel. Oh dear, I forgot to introduce myself, I am Lester Hendrix of Schoharie, N.Y., retired, still raising the devil, and going back to school for a Master of Malarkey degree. I will be posting my diary over the next few weeks and many more pictures, but I ripped some of the more interesting ones for this quick introduction. Locations and more data coming! We started at Anchorage July 12 and visited the museum July 13 before going to Seward Windsong Lodge by train on July 14 and took a catamaran boat ride to the glaciers July 15. Windsong is a great place and Renown Tours has a great glacier and nature excursion. Then we took a bus to Talkeetna and the Alaskan Lodge where we were supposed to fly around Mount McKinley, but unfortunately, the planes were grounded due to the weather. We did a jetboat river trip with Mahays instead, and also a planned trip with Talkeetna Fishing Guides even though I am not a fisherman. July 18 we took a bus to Denali and the Denali Bluffs Hotel. On Saturday, July 19, we took an all-day bus excursion through Denali National Park and that was a thrill ride over mountain roads with hairpin turns and steep drops. We saw moose, bear, mountain goats, sheep and lesser critters, usually at a too-safe distance. On Sunday we took the Alaska Railroad's Denali Star train with Goldstar dome service to Fairbanks — a really great ride and well worth the extra bucks. Fairbanks Rivers Edge Resort is a great place, with cottages and an attached RV park. We took a city and museum tour and a riverboat ride. Then we flew to Deadhorse on the north slope in an eight-seater Piper Navajo Chieftan from Northern Alaska Tour Company. The Prudhoe Bay Hotel is like a cargo container on skids and has freezer doors that open from the inside by pushing the round handle on the stem. Our tour driver-guide, Rebecca from Northern Alaska Tour Company, did a super job driving down the Dalton Highway for two days, to Fairbanks. The overnight was in Coldfoot, where (if I recall right) the tavern is named Frozen Toes or something. Even though it snowed on the North Slope and we were rained/fogged out of our flight around Mount McKinley, we had a great trip. Thank you Summer from ATT, Rebecca from Northern Alaska and all the others involved. Much more — and many more pictures — in coming weeks. Below is a piece that I wrote for a course I just finished, and promised to provide to some of the people pictured at left. On the Nap This is an excerpt from a longer piece I did, titled "On the Nap,” in which I argue that nothing is more vital to the well-being of yourself or your nation than a good, sound nap. I posit that napping must be made a constitutionally protected right. My fifth argument in favor of this is that while napping, you are exempt from reciting Beowulf by heart and demonstrating mastery of the ablative and pluperfect cases. As an alternative to declining in the ablative, you may wander through the imperfect past tense, the semi-perfect present tense, and the perfect future without getting too tense about it, because the nap is the favored locus of the daydream! Methuselah's Big Long Nap This is the imperfect past tense daydream de jour. It is set in 2348 BC. That’s really past tense, and you will see in a moment just why it is the imperfect past. At commencement of this daydream, Noah has not yet even thought about the good ship Ark. He awakens from a nap at age 969 years, having surpassed Adam as oldest man in the world (Adam checked out at a mere 930). As we know, Adam was the first person and was not born, but created. Since he was first, he was created before Methuselah, who was not created, but born. Adam was still alive when Methuselah was born and Methuselah was still alive when Noah was born and so he (Methuselah) was the direct link between Adam and Noah. Anyway, God slipped up and told Methuselah his top-secret plan for the forty-day “Marathon to Cleanse the World.” Once Methuselah knew the secret, he had to be put down for The Big Nap to prevent him from warning Noah, because God wanted to be the One to tell Noah that Noah was going to build the darned ark. That's because God felt that He had to tell Noah that it was only the secret that leaked, not the ark itself, because Adam had claimed on a radio talk show that the ark had leaked, even though he (Adam) was already dead and the ark wasn’t even built yet. (Death is never a problem in the Bible. It is always an opportunity.) See the imperfection? God himself let the secret out. That happened because, as they say, anything’s possible with God. Anything’s possible in a dream, too. Put them together and man, you’ve got, just WOW! So, God zapped Methuselah into a Big Long Nap, Methuselah missed the Great Flood, and therefore he did not have to sweep offal from the deck of the ark after all. I submit that is a fine reason to nap. But wait -- there's more!
I also argue that naps inspire the writing of bad poetry. “Mangled from Evening Prayer” As now I lay me down to nap,
“Apology to Joyce Kilmer”
I know I can’t together slap Here's where you can reach me:
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