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Now in Seward!
My current location:
It's a riverside cabin on the Resurrection River near Seward. This river flows out of the Exit Glacier, and if you drive up the road a few miles, you will in fact see the glacier!
I was getting a bit jaded about glaciers by this point because I had just driven through a mountain pass with lots of them, but they were all far away and high up, so by this point I was thinking "meh, another glacier" and then I came around a corner and there was that view and I guess you don't get jaded about glaciers after all.
I checked out of my place in Girdwood this morning (the explanation for the trip is in a locked post; basically I'm visiting family this week), and since the drive to Seward is not that far (about an hour and a half) and I couldn't check in until 4, I stopped at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center and animal sanctuary along the way. I had sort of vaguely heard of it but had never been there, and I was honestly really glad I stopped! It's some of the most up close and personal that I've ever been with large wild animals.
This place rehabilitates injured animals and keeps the ones who are too injured or too habituated to humans to go back out in the wild, and they're all in outdoor pens with a winding one-way gravel road that meanders around the park between the enclosures that you can drive or walk, or do a mix of both (they told me it was okay to park anywhere that didn't have a no parking sign, which was almost everywhere). Their guests are a who's who of North American megafauna - they have moose, elk, deer, bison, caribou, wolves and bears.
If you're wondering if it's a great idea to have tourists a few feet away from a grizzly bear with nothing in the way but an electric fence - I don't know either! But it was a really neat experience.
They also had elk, and because it's fall the elk were in rut, which meant they were bugling. Elk aren't native to Alaska, so this is behavior I had heard of but had never actually heard. It sounds so different from any sound I had any idea an elk could make! I actually heard it while I was elsewhere in the sanctuary, and thought it was a bird, and I was wondering what kind of bird that was and then I came to the elk pen and realized it was horny male elk. If you want to know what bugling elk sound like, here's a Youtube vidoe.
And then I went on to Seward, which involved driving through a whole lot of dramatic scenery such as this:
I got rained on a lot, but rarely for long, and there were brief instances of sun. Seward is a pleasant little fishing/tourist town on the coast, framed by dramatic mountains. I saw a sea otter in the bay and had extremely delicious chowder for a late lunch. I completely failed to take pictures of anything picturesque except this extremely striking - apartment building?
The cabin where I'm staying is nice, aside from the issue that the torrential rains that they apparently have been having for the last two days flooded out the exhaust valve on the hot water heater in this building (at least that's how it was explained to me) and it won't run, so the hosts let me walk over to a different building and use their shower. Otherwise it's very pleasant, and the hosts have been very apologetic about the water issue and offered me a late checkout and some extra off the price to make up for it.
I went out driving this evening looking for a place where I could walk along the river, and first of all I found a place where I could drive down onto a broad river sandbar, but it turned out (not very surprising) that this was crowded with RVs and campers since it's a Friday evening - I had kind of forgotten that. But I went ahead and walked around a little, and then I drove up to look at the glacier one more time with the setting sun peeking through the clouds.
I was driving back when I abruptly realized that one of the many picture-taking pullouts was right above the river and it looked like you could actually walk down to it. The problem I had at most of the river access points was that the river flows very fast and deep along the bank in a lot of places, so it's either a) RVs as far as the eye could see, or b) scenic pullouts with fast, deep river currents along the bank where you can only gaze longingly at the gravel beach on the other side.
But here it looked like you could actually get onto the gravel bars along the river without wading or falling in, if you didn't mind scrambling down a slightly steep bank that was undercut from past floods. So I scrambled down, and I did in fact find the absolutely deserted beach of my dreams, with nothing but me and the river as far as the eye could see.
You could also see the clear water from a stream flowing into the river mixing with the milky gray water from the glacier, which I tried to take pictures of, but it's sort of hard to see it: clearer water in the foreground, milky channel along the far bank.
One of these trips I will actually hike to the glacier - there's a path up to it - but not this time, because I'm only in Seward for one night. Tomorrow I check out and drive all the way from Seward to Denali in one go, which is about 7 hours (thanks, past me). Then I'll be hanging out in Denali for a couple of nights and going back up to Fairbanks on Monday.
It's a riverside cabin on the Resurrection River near Seward. This river flows out of the Exit Glacier, and if you drive up the road a few miles, you will in fact see the glacier!
I was getting a bit jaded about glaciers by this point because I had just driven through a mountain pass with lots of them, but they were all far away and high up, so by this point I was thinking "meh, another glacier" and then I came around a corner and there was that view and I guess you don't get jaded about glaciers after all.
I checked out of my place in Girdwood this morning (the explanation for the trip is in a locked post; basically I'm visiting family this week), and since the drive to Seward is not that far (about an hour and a half) and I couldn't check in until 4, I stopped at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center and animal sanctuary along the way. I had sort of vaguely heard of it but had never been there, and I was honestly really glad I stopped! It's some of the most up close and personal that I've ever been with large wild animals.
This place rehabilitates injured animals and keeps the ones who are too injured or too habituated to humans to go back out in the wild, and they're all in outdoor pens with a winding one-way gravel road that meanders around the park between the enclosures that you can drive or walk, or do a mix of both (they told me it was okay to park anywhere that didn't have a no parking sign, which was almost everywhere). Their guests are a who's who of North American megafauna - they have moose, elk, deer, bison, caribou, wolves and bears.
If you're wondering if it's a great idea to have tourists a few feet away from a grizzly bear with nothing in the way but an electric fence - I don't know either! But it was a really neat experience.
They also had elk, and because it's fall the elk were in rut, which meant they were bugling. Elk aren't native to Alaska, so this is behavior I had heard of but had never actually heard. It sounds so different from any sound I had any idea an elk could make! I actually heard it while I was elsewhere in the sanctuary, and thought it was a bird, and I was wondering what kind of bird that was and then I came to the elk pen and realized it was horny male elk. If you want to know what bugling elk sound like, here's a Youtube vidoe.
And then I went on to Seward, which involved driving through a whole lot of dramatic scenery such as this:
I got rained on a lot, but rarely for long, and there were brief instances of sun. Seward is a pleasant little fishing/tourist town on the coast, framed by dramatic mountains. I saw a sea otter in the bay and had extremely delicious chowder for a late lunch. I completely failed to take pictures of anything picturesque except this extremely striking - apartment building?
The cabin where I'm staying is nice, aside from the issue that the torrential rains that they apparently have been having for the last two days flooded out the exhaust valve on the hot water heater in this building (at least that's how it was explained to me) and it won't run, so the hosts let me walk over to a different building and use their shower. Otherwise it's very pleasant, and the hosts have been very apologetic about the water issue and offered me a late checkout and some extra off the price to make up for it.
I went out driving this evening looking for a place where I could walk along the river, and first of all I found a place where I could drive down onto a broad river sandbar, but it turned out (not very surprising) that this was crowded with RVs and campers since it's a Friday evening - I had kind of forgotten that. But I went ahead and walked around a little, and then I drove up to look at the glacier one more time with the setting sun peeking through the clouds.
I was driving back when I abruptly realized that one of the many picture-taking pullouts was right above the river and it looked like you could actually walk down to it. The problem I had at most of the river access points was that the river flows very fast and deep along the bank in a lot of places, so it's either a) RVs as far as the eye could see, or b) scenic pullouts with fast, deep river currents along the bank where you can only gaze longingly at the gravel beach on the other side.
But here it looked like you could actually get onto the gravel bars along the river without wading or falling in, if you didn't mind scrambling down a slightly steep bank that was undercut from past floods. So I scrambled down, and I did in fact find the absolutely deserted beach of my dreams, with nothing but me and the river as far as the eye could see.
You could also see the clear water from a stream flowing into the river mixing with the milky gray water from the glacier, which I tried to take pictures of, but it's sort of hard to see it: clearer water in the foreground, milky channel along the far bank.
One of these trips I will actually hike to the glacier - there's a path up to it - but not this time, because I'm only in Seward for one night. Tomorrow I check out and drive all the way from Seward to Denali in one go, which is about 7 hours (thanks, past me). Then I'll be hanging out in Denali for a couple of nights and going back up to Fairbanks on Monday.
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So glad you're having a good trip!
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Safe travels tomorrow!
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I clicked through to hear what elk bugling sounds like, and I would never have guessed that was elk. It sounds like a combination of bear (or what I imagine bear might sound like) and bird! Or simply alien. I didn't know that mammals made noises like that.
And the mountains. . . . I'm from a flat area of the Midwest, and I now live in flat, flat Florida.
Seriously, some day, we are going to visit you! :-)
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The elk bugling is a weird noise - I assumed it would be fairly similar to a red deer roaring, which you can hear in parts of Scotland when they're in rut, but it's very different! (Also, every day's a school day, I 100% thought an elk and a moose were more or less the same thing...)
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