Hello Everyone! Greetings from Anchorage, Alaska. I apologize for how long it’s been since I last posted. I’ve been unbelievably busy running tours all summer, and most have been camping tours with limited internet connectivity. But I promise I’ve been thinking about you and taking lots of photos. It’s been a very short but sweet run here in Alaska this summer, with three wonderful trips separated by a short jaunt back to California in August. I’ve gotten my fill of salmon and halibut. panned for gold, hiked up glaciers, watched humpbacks and bears and plenty of moose. And tomorrow it is all over. The leaves have started to change and there’s even some snow in the air at higher altitudes so that means it’s time for me to head south and finish my season in the desert and the Sierras. I promise there are many more pictures to come, so watch this space, but for now I just wanted to check in and let you know I’m still alive and to share with you some of my photos from the drive up to Alaska. Also know that I’ve really been saving my nickels and dimes this summer so I will be back to this project full-time in early 2025. I hope you are all having a wonderful summer wherever you are and I’ll share so much more about my summer when I get back to California next week. Take care and thanks for following along.
-Mike
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In this series I’ve chosen one picture per post which brings out strong memories for me and has a story attached to it. This story is about a beautiful morning along the Nabesna Road in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, my last morning in Alaska.
It all started with a cigarette.
I haven’t been a regular smoker for many years, but sometimes when I had worked a long season guiding tours and the days were turning cooler as summer turned to fall, I’ve been known to pick up a pack. Usually before that pack is finished I’ll remember why I quit, but those first couple remind me why I started to begin with. And so it was that on a sunny afternoon in early fall I found myself smoking a cigarette outside of my hotel a few miles from LAX International Airport.
This was a hotel we used for our staff during turnarounds between tours in L.A, and there were a few other of our vans than mine in the parking lot that day. A fellow tour leader who I didn’t know had seen me get out of my van, so she came over and introduced herself. We made small talk about what trips we were doing and what else we were up to with a few days off in L.A. and she told me she was filling out an application to return to Alaska to work the following summer. In the company I work for, Alaska is like the Promised Land, it’s somewhere everyone seems to want to go spend the summer, but in the old days it was somewhere you only got to go once. One season in the great north land, and that was it. More recently, she told me, we had started running some high-end tours and they needed some experienced leaders to run them so the application process was open to everyone. We chatted some more, and it got me thinking…
