My Day:
Woke up at 7 and ran to the lodge where I threw down a breakfast of eggs and potatoes smothered in tabasco and kechup (my new daily bread). Hopped on a bus that took me an hour to Talkeetna. There I took advantage of all the employee benefits that have been so hyped up by employees trying dissuade me from quitting so soon. Theirs is a good point.
9:30-3 - Motorboat tour 60 miles upstream into the wilderness, 60 miles from the nearest road. Treelines riverlines with mud and silt and king salmon fishermen. I saw my first bald eagle, lording over a nest, and the tour ended with a hike to an abandoned trapper's cabin and a recreation of old native summer settlements. Hilariously brutal beaver trap: Giant log balanced by a 6-inch thick branch of a type of wood that beavers love. They chew through all happy and satiated when BAM!
Trip is usually around $100, I spend $10 in tip money.
Peanut butter and chocolate cinnamon roll...delicious.
Spend 2 hours at the airplane tour base, waiting for a ride. Annotated some of Finnegans Wake, read a few pages, then a wonderful Whitman poem: Passage to India. Finally, they let me on what is normally a $350 plane ride for...free.
Most breathtaking and inspiring thing I've ever seen. We flew out over the swamplands and rivers in quasi-evening air, while the immense Alaska Range in the distance approached. We hit it, covering hills to mountains to serious mountains. Flew between the tallest (14,000 17,000, 20,000) and wrapped around Mt. McKinley himself - which was almost 100% visible, something that is apparently extremely rare. We were close enough to see the climbers and the glaciers melting, and we ducked by a 5,000 rock face that is apparently "popular with the climbers." The whole ride was an hour and a half long and it nearly brought tears to my eyes it was so beautiful.
When it was over, I tipped the pilot $50 as is customary (for a flight that the other 3 people on the plane each paid more than my entire ticket to get to Anchorage in the first place!) and then chatted with him for awhile. Crazy interesting guy - about to leave Alaska to get a PhD in Theology. I guess I made a good impression on him because he later chased me down getting on my bus in order to leave me his contact information saying I could stop by whenever and he would show me plane stuff or whatever I was interested in.
On the bus, I talked with a co-worker who was in the air force and she was telling me about all the other places she knows and the groovy cats who are willing to take us there and she promised me we would go somewhere together (camping, Denali National Park, whalewatching, kodiak bear watching, etc.) All in all, I made some contacts and did enough in one day to justify my entire trip up here. The money I saved in tours alone pays for my airfare and living expenses for the last 10 days.
Also, yesterday I went on an equally stunning hike around Byers Lake, which except for the mosquitoes, was a perfect day. Mosquitoes were, no joke, so thick I tried to tie my shoe at one point and had so heavy a cloud between my face and my foot, I abandoned the shoe and just ran for it. But we saw swans with babies, mating beavers, and some loons. Today I also saw a black bear from the plane, and just barely missed a moose on the boat ride.
I've had a brilliant vacation on par with all of our guests and have already made a reasonable profit while they all pay up to $10,000 per person for a trip of nearly an equal length. Of course they don't have to bus dirty dishes, but I think ultimately, my precious memories are probably about on par with theirs anyway.
Tomorrow I go back to work and I now wonder if I've broken through the initial gloom of it all or if I start hating it all over again by tomorrow night. Time will tell, as always.
Love
Theo
No comments:
Post a Comment