NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:

Vic and I just returned from a fabulous 11-day trip to Alaska. In a way, our columns in the Independent triggered the trip.

A few years ago, Vic re-established contact with a friend from Stanford University, Ken Whitten, who now lives in Fairbanks.

Ken, a retired Alaska Fish and Game biologist, managed the Porcupine caribou herd on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He was doing some research and came across one of our Independent columns on the Internet.

He wondered if that clean-cut environmental writer could be the same Vic Leipzig that he knew from his college days. Back then, Vic was a bearded, ponytailed political science major.

When Ken was at Bolsa Chica a couple of years ago, he ran into Vic and recognized him immediately. We’ve planned to visit Alaska ever since.

Ken and his wife Mary had three houseguests at the time of our visit, all of whom were using their house as a staging area before flying to their teaching or counseling jobs in the bush for the school year.

Ken and Mary brought one of their guests, a delightful young man named Dan Jarashow, with them to have dinner with us at the Wedgewood Resort in Fairbanks. Dan is going to be a dorm counselor this winter at a boarding high school in Galeena on the Yukon River. Dan, a resident of Maryland who went to college in Minnesota, was really looking forward to spending his first winter in the wilds of Alaska.

We may check in with him in a later column to see how he’s doing. We both work with at-risk youth who share common problems of boredom, rampant unemployment and use drugs or alcohol for escape.

But let’s get back to our trip. First of all, Alaska smells good. The air is clean and crisp, redolent with the scent of spruce. Fragrant flowers were in bloom everywhere, from hanging baskets of flowers in the towns to wildflowers on the mountains.

Those long summer days cause the flowers to grow to enormous sizes. We saw tuberous begonias the size of grapefruit, and dahlias the size of dinner plates.

Alaska also smells like sizzling bacon, grilled reindeer sausage and sourdough pancakes. It smells like freshly caught halibut and salmon, and micro-brewed specialty beers. It smells like rain on grass and fog drifting through evergreen forests.

However, not all of the smells were delightful. We also smelled musk ox dung, diesel exhaust from boats and buses, and the musty scent of nesting seabird colonies.

One of the surprising things about Alaska was how it sounded. Mostly quiet.

With few cars on the highways, it was easy to pull over and hear nothing. No birds, no planes, no traffic, no barking dogs — nothing.

But other parts of Alaska were noisy. We heard the hoarse, guttural grunts of a colony of Steller’s sea lions. We heard a sow grizzly huff out her breath as she came up for air after fishing for salmon a mere 15 feet away from us.

We heard the clicking of caribou leg tendons as the animals walked by us. We heard the howls of wolves, the calls of sea birds and the sounds of moose pulling leaves from branches and munching on them.

One of the most surprising sounds was that of glaciers. They are noisy. Glaciers growl as the ice grinds over granite. On our boat tour of Kenai Fjords National Park, icebergs calved off in front of us with a crack like lightning and a rumble like loud thunder.

The sea around us was thick with ice floes. Another surprise was that glacial ice is filled with tiny bubbles of air that escape as the ice melts. The ocean in front of the glacier sounded like a fizzy glass of 7-Up poured over ice.

Coincidentally, our guide to these wonders was boat captain Steve Fink, a graduate of Ocean View High School in Huntington Beach.

Alaska tastes good, too. I couldn’t get enough reindeer sausage, which was served for breakfast at most restaurants. We savored freshly caught salmon and halibut and freshly picked wild blueberries. We ate musk ox burgers and buffalo bratwurst. We had caribou hot dogs at the Alaskan Native Cultural Center and a fabulous moose stir-fry at the Whitten household.

From micro-brewed beer to rose hip tea to hot cocoa on cold mornings, we ate and drank our way across the state from Seward to Fairbanks and back to Anchorage.

But, of course, the most amazing thing about Alaska is the scenery. From majestic Denali — also known as Mt. McKinley — to milky blue glacial streams the color of a husky’s eyes, to robin’s-egg blue glacial ice to thin silvery waterfalls everywhere we turned, Alaska tantalized us with eye candy.

From pods of white beluga whales in Cook Inlet to the silver of salmon skin being peeled off the rich red flesh of flopping fish by a sow grizzly and her two cubs, we saw fantastic sights every day.

We saw nursing Dall lambs on mountainsides, sea otters crunching down on Dungeness crab and humpback whales flipping their tail flukes at us as they went down for 30-minute dives.

Our adventures won’t fit into the confines of this column. To read more, visit the link to our itinerary, a 6,500-word trip diary and our costs on the Independent’s website at www.HBIndependent.com.