Thursday, September 27, 2007

Wednesday

On Wednesday we ported at Skagway. Skagway, Alaska is a very small town of about 600 people. There are no towns for about 200 miles around them. Surprisingly enough, Skagway is the second biggest town (in land mass) in the United States. The first biggest is Juneau, which we ported at the next day. So on my trip to Alaska, I visited the 2 largest cities in the US. We had our first excursion on Wednesday. John and I did a hike and float. We hiked 2 miles on the Chilkoot trail, which is the most well known trail in the US, if not the world. It is a total of 33 miles with unbelievable elevations. John and I discovered our new passion is hiking while on this excursion. We are currently looking up books that have different hikes in IL. Unfortunately my guess is they won't have elevation gains of 1000+ feet.

Before the hike.


Our guide. Is it just me or do all wilderness types look alike??


The beginning of our trail.


This was the biggest elevation rise we had. It was only about 700 feet, but it was very difficult. I was huffing and puffing, had to stop and rest and my leg muscles felt like they were going to give out. I would have loved to see what the bigger elevations were like because this one was a little burp on the path compared to the rest of the trail.


A picture of the gorgeous forest that surrounded us on our hike.


A picture of the gorgeous girl that was on the hike....haha, just kidding.


I thought this part of the trail looked impressive. Going down the 700 feet was MUCH harder than going up. I had to creep along because I'm a big scardey and didn't want to fall.


More trail.


At the end of our hike we did a float down the river back to our van.






A picture of another group that went ahead of us to give you an idea of our float down.


It was about 40 degrees with the wind chill on the float back. I was so cold!


A bald eagle. We saw lots of these on our trip to Alaska.


Here's a seal who came to visit on our float back. (The river is fed from the glaciers and flows into the ocean at some point so it's salt water.) You can see his little head sticking up. This was really neat.


Way in the distance, that speck is a bear. This is the closest we got to a bear despite being told on both excursions that bears were really common and there was a good chance we'd see them.

1 comment:

Nicole said...

Cool!! I LOVE hiking! My family used to ALWAYS go hiking on our vacations. Let me know if you find anything cool around here-maybe we could even do a double date hike?!