Early this year the unthinkable happened. On January 11, exactly one year after hiking out of the Grand Canyon (as blogged about just a few posts ago), I hiked back down and floated the second half!
The serendipity was striking. Get additional details in the full write-up I did for the News-Miner.
Reaching accomplishment creek on the Sag River is indeed an accomplishment. Fully out Alaska’s snowy Brooks Range and into the seemingly endless arctic tundra.
However, accomplishment and completed are not synonymous. Another very full day awaits – half on on whitewater and half in a car.
But what better way to reward an accomplishment than Alpenglow reflected in a tranquil rock garden in a truly wild place.
Fall and winter collide in the Atigun River Gorge. Sept. 2, 2017.
It seems my life is being drawn toward rivers significantly more in recent years. I don’t necessarily go searching, but don’t turn them down either.
Such a situation arose last fall, when I got the opportunity to float the Atigun and Sagavanirktok rivers. They are extremely remote class II-IV rivers, far above the Arctic Circle, flowing north out of Alaska’s Brooks Range.
It’s a nine hour drive north from Fairbanks just to the put in — cell phone service is unavailable after about 45 minutes of driving. Don’t forget to add a few extra hours for the car shuttle.
Needless to say, the trip is extraordinary.
Tucked deep in the forest north of Fairbanks, one of the most vibrant and lush bluebell bushes I have ever seen.
Be sure to check out the full-length article full-length article I wrote about my trip down the Grand Canyon for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.
The year is quickly coming to an end, which makes me think about all the great activities it was filled with — none more monumental than paddling the first half of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, which fittingly started on Jan. 1.
Check out the full story with photos I wrote for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.
Only a few hours drive from the beach leads to the Hoh Rainforest, one of the largest temperate rain forests in the U.S.
My grandma — who inspired the trip around the peninsula — didn’t advise visiting Hoh Rainforest for the very appropriate reason of rain and big trees being all too easy to find in Washington. But it was close, so I went and enjoyed a rare sunny afternoon walk.
The depth and patterns created by luminous leaves made for lovely photographic subjects.
Of the approximately half-dozen beaches visited on the Olympic Peninsula, Klaloch and Rialto seemed in a league of their own, each vastly different.
The Dungeness Spit, technically in Olympic State Park, earns an honorable mention for one of the longest sand spits in the world and a light house.
At Klaloch, limited but amazing camp sites overlook truly vast expanses of gently sloping sand and minuscule tides. A quaint resort is nearby with cabins for rent. Rialto beach is the opposite — strong waves crash into pebble beaches, pushing rocks up the shore before drawing them back out to sea with an almost violent crackle. A lovely 1.5 miles paved road connects the campground to the beach — perfect for a light jog past a pond of croaking frogs.
In response to The Daily Post’s weekly photo challenge: “Happy Place.”
My happy place is a state of being — the culmination of numerous factors. A breath of fresh air in sun or snow. Freedom to run through the woods, twisting along a skinny trail. A beer and a dance floor with great live music, or a slow sunday with a cup of hot coffee.
Of course looking through a viewfinder is often a happy activity for me.
Above: Expect more of a “fishing perch” than a “fishing hole” when dip-netting the Copper River in southeast Alaska. Spirit Mountain pokes above the big and fast glacial-fed river that’s full of silt and very cold. Copper River Reds, the salmon in the net, are some of the most sought after in the world.
The river is also an excellent of the Weekly Photo Challenge of boundaries. Rivers are some of Earth’s most common boundaries. For the fish in my net it is a boundary of left and death, or for a person if they fall in.
Sometimes sweeping is necessary — a time- and labor-intensive technique during which the fisher sweeps the net with the current, resets and repeats.
Even when fishing is done much work is left to be done. Here a king salmon is butchered.
Far North Light 