Day 6 Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Driving back to Anchorage

Here are the pics that wouldn't load from yesterday. Eliot and the Ray-Ban's is probably self-explanatory. The other is the "moose" that was on the front porch of our "hotel" last night. Inside said establishment was more of the same. Really?

This morning we drove down to the entrance of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. It was about an hour away from where we were staying. One of the only access roads to the park, the McCarthy Road, was the way we were planning to enter the park. It is a 61 mile unpaved VERY ROUGH gravel-ish road. Whoa, it was bad. Ever vigilant, we continued. We were really excited about some seeing some wildlife. Well, about half-way down the road, and 2.5 hours after leaving the "hotel," we had only seen these two random swans in a marshy field. Frustrated and well-over the unpaved road, we turned around and headed back toward Anchorage.

On the way back, we finally got a glimpse of the Alaskan Pipeline. As I'm sure most of you know, the pipeline is how oil is transported from Prudhoe Bay/the Arctic ocean to Valdez where it is picked up by tanker trucks. It was interesting to see it in person. I kept thinking about how odd it seemed that the pipeline was the most efficient way to get oil from the Arctic Circle to Valdez.
About half way back to Anchorage, we stopped to take a few pictures of one of glaciers in the area. Really beautiful. Eliot had noticed a grave yard last night that we stopped to check out today. Very interesting. Odd fences around each grave painted bizarre colors.

The whole trip we have been keeping our eyes peeled to observe some wildlife in their natural habitat. We're absolutely killing it with the whales. Two different species in one trip--unheard of. However, bears, moose, caribou, etc are proving harder to peep out. Eliot and I informed our mother that she needed to be on the lookout for any signs of wildlife. She and our dad have been sitting in the back seat the whole trip. They will occasionally get out their camera/video camera and take some shots and our mom is pretty good about using her binoculars to look at scenery, etc. Let me just take a few moments to give you a little background on our mother's observational skills. She has freakish powers relating to both hearing and seeing. As kids, we could be out in the yard THINKING something and she would come out and interview us. She is the person you would always ask to come over and find something tiny and brown you dropped on brown carpet and so on. Seriously, I'm not sure why she isn't working for the government or something.

Now, she is taking the assignment of finding wildlife REALLY seriously. The binoculars aren't out or anything, but she is giving ample consideration to the scenery on her side of the road. The day prior, on the way to the National Park, we passed an area that was allegedly the home to several Dall Sheep. We pulled off and looked for them and saw absolutely nothing. Well, when we drive through the same area today, our mother says she is going to find a sheep. Eliot and I thought "yeah, whatever" and kept driving. About 2 minutes later she says "There's one. Stop! There's a sheep." Flabbergasted, we pull off the road and sure enough--an entire family of Dall Sheep is standing on the edge of the mountain staring down at us. Are you kidding me?

I am going to put up a pic that I took with my zoom lens, fully zoomed out--equivalent to 6x closer than the human eye sees. Granted, these pics are relatively small, so they will not be the most accurate examples, but. . . (those white blobs are sheep)

Now, this is the pic taken at 50mm--approximately what the human eye sees--the white dot in the middle of the frame--THAT is a sheep. This is what she saw with her 59 year old eyes, from a car with tinted windows moving @ 75 mph.

Does this freak anyone else out?

We made one other stop on the way back to Anchorage where Eliot was channeling John Shaw taking macro shots of flowers. For you non-photography people, John Shaw is to Nature Photography what Brittney Spears is to rehab.

The biggest news of the day is that Eliot totally bit it going down a hill when we thought we were chasing a caribou. All of the sudden he was there and then he wasn't. When I got up to him, his ass was totally covered in mud as was a good bit of his camera. Ah, sweet revenge.

In closing, I would like to post a pic of my injured hand. You might not be able to tell, but my entire thumb top and bottom and the surrounding area is a purple-ish, black-ish, green.

Finally, shout out to my girl Amy who is celebrating her birthday in Niagara Falls with her new man. She thinks I have forgotten about her bday/trip, but I have just been hanging out across the country.

I also want to send a shout out to Adolf, who like any good work husband should, has been leaving a comment on every blog entry--even if most of them are about CC. I love that fascist bastard.

Tomorrow we are hanging out in and around Anchorage before heading to Fairbanks on Wednesday. Weather permitting, we are going to do some fishing and horseback riding (not simultaneously) as well as check out the Alaskan Heritage Museum. Until then. . .