Flightseeing Denali

Our big adventure on Wednesday was a flightseeing tour with Talkeetna Air Taxi (TAT) around Denali, including the summit and a glacier landing.

Talkeetna’s a pleasant little village, very tiny. Basically one main street and a couple of side streets with a few shops and restaurants. It was a pleasant change of pace from the touristy Denali park entrance. Talkeetna’s biggest claim to fame is that it’s the departure point (and hopefully, return) for almost all the Denali summit expeditions. They fly them in and drop them off on a glacier at 9,000 feet. As I said, Denali is BIG. The pilot said their saying is “A week’s walk or an hour’s flight”. Expeditions on foot run into logistical limitations too; they have to carry supplies for the trek up to base camp, and that limits how much they can carry for the actual climb. (Incidentally, this is also one of the big challenges for expeditions to K2. K2 is the world’s second highest mountain and almost without question the deadliest. It’s so far up into the Karakoram it’s more than a week’s trek up the Baltoro Glacier. The expeditions must use large teams of porters to carry all their stuff.)

In Talkeetna I was fond of the West Rib Bar and Grill, a casual place where the food is pretty good, the climbers hang out, and the beer is excellent. This is where I had that Ice Axe Strong Ale at 9.2% ABV.  It was good, but not nearly as memorable as many Belgians I’ve had at 8%. I did taste the beer again in Anchorage at the Glacier Brewhouse, who make it for West Rib. They call it simply “Glacier Blonde”. They also sold really tasty caribou dogs (hmm, doesn’t sound quite right) on the street.

I just heard today that there was trouble in Talkeetna for the annual Moose Droppings Festival. A large crew of rowdies came in and basically overwhelmed the town and filled the street with people. One person went into the Susitna river right next to town and was never found, and another fell from a railroad bridge. It’s quite a shock to imagine this happening in a sleepy little town just a couple of days after we left, whose population seems to normally be doubled only by gray-haired tourists debarking from cruise ship tour buses.

But – the flightseeing trip was fabulous. I sat in the back of the plane and took photos and videos from both sides. Hundreds of photos; it will take me a while to get through all of them and cull the very very best. For example, as we passed the summit I simply hosed it down with the auto shutter in hopes of getting some climbers up there. I definitely got some nice ones of climbers enroute to the summit though!

What really made it special was a landing on the Ruth Glacier, high up in the Denali massif. The landing and takeoff was exciting, certainly (even my son reluctantly acknowledged it was okay), but actually being out on the quiet glacier in the pulverizingly bright sunlight, mountains all around was, was really an experience.

When I was younger, I was captivated by a Galen Rowell photo of Concordia in the Karakoram. Concordia isn’t a town; it’s simply a place where the Baltoro and Godwin Austen glaciers meet and flow down to their terminus. But around you are like 10 or 12 of the highest mountains in the world including K2. It’s a stupendous photo, and landing on the glacier gives me a little bit of an idea what it must be like there – without the arduous trek and existence at 18,000 feet.

My trip photo album will be posted at http://picasaweb.google.com/sean.deuby; I’ll put my very best photos also on http://flickr.com/photos/shorinsean. I have over 1500 photos to choose a few from, so it’ll take a few days!

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