Day 15  Thursday  August 16^th

^{Talkeetna and Mt McKinley}

 Talkeetna is an historic township on the road between Anchorage and Fairbanks.  We arrive late afternoon, having spent some time in Anchorage, visiting REI again to gear up.  REI is the outdoors specialist store and really exciting to browse.  You can learn a lot by just looking at the gear that people need to do all the outdoors things.  It seems to me that by now, Bede and Sophie have enough gear to go anywhere in the world for 12 months, and they have to carry it all on their backs.  But I refrain from comment.  

Nagley's has provisioned Talkeetna and beyond since the 1920s

At Talkeetna, we have booked into the Swiss-Alaska Chalet.  The owner is Swiss.  Everything else is also Swiss.  But we are comfortable, and that is all that matters.  We try dinner at the Denali Brewing Company – Sophie accepts the challenge of the hugest ‘burger. 

 Talkeetna has a best dressed moose festival...

The highlight from Talkeetna is the flight up into the Alaska Range, to Denali, The High One, Mt McKinley.  The gods are good to us and the weather is perfect.  Pilot Trent (who looks to be about 15) says they have had lots of good days this summer.  He has only missed 5 days flying since the beginning of June.  On the flight is a young man, long time friend of Trent, who is a climber.  He sits up in the co-pilot’s seat and points out the various peaks he has climbed.  His Mum and Dad and Grandma and Grandpa are on the flight – their first visit to Alaska.  It is a wonderful family occasion.  Everyone looks after Grandma and Grandpa when we land on the glacier.  We dance and jump about in our special glacier boots.  I am giddy with exhilaration (or maybe altitude sickness?)  

There are lots of glaciers ....

 

but this one is ours....

 

The plane lands uphill on the glacier and turns around before stopping, so that it takes off downhill.  Trent executes a butterfly landing.  So I tell him, only once before have I awarded a butterfly landing, and that was a Singapore airlines pilot landing a plane in Kuala Lumpur, when we did not even know we had touched down, so smooth was it.  I am not sure if he appreciated the compliment.

The flight to and from McKinley – Denalie was over taiga forrest, threaded by Alaska’s “braided rivers”.  These are the runoff rivers from glaciers, and they thread in and out and round about, looking spectacular from the air, and making wonderful sport for salmon fishing and white river rafting.  I suspect the whole economy here revolves around tourists – all of whom are hardy and intelligent about sustainability etc (even if some do drive RVs).