Day-by-day look at Alaska

The following is an in-depth look at Vic Leipzig and Lou Murray’s trip to Alaska.

Vic’s Version (the nuts and bolts)

Day 1, Aug. 2

* Phil and Judi Smith drive us to JWA in our Highlander

* Fly Delta to Salt Lake City

* Fly Delta to Anchorage, arriving late. Actually early Thursday!

* Pick up car from Avis, gray Subaru Forrester EZE 444

* Avis is VERY concerned about chipped windshields.

* We find a chip and I go back and notify the guy.

* Drive to Microtel (Northwood at Airport Drive), just outside airport.

* Due to road construction, Microtel is hard to get to!

Day 2, Aug. 3

* Breakfast at Microtel

* I drive to Glen Alps in Chugach St Pk

* Lunch: Peanut Farm

* Alaska Zoo

* Brief visit to Chugach St Pk

* Dinner: Gwennie’s

* Cook Inlet bookstore

* Lodging: Microtel

Day 3, Aug. 4

* Breakfast at Microtel

* Rust Flying Service to Redoubt Bay Lodge

* Drive to Eagle River Nature Center

* Dinner at Snow Goose

* Lodging: Microtel

Day 4, Aug. 5

* Breakfast at Microtel

* Drive toward Seward

* Lunch of leftovers on the road

* Visit Alaska Sealife Center

* Dinner at Marina #2, reindeer burger + muskox burger

* Lodging: Microtel

Day 5, Aug. 6

* Breakfast on boat

* All-day boat cruise

* Lunch on boat

* Dinner at Ray’s Seafood

* Lodging: Breeze Inn

Day 6, Aug. 7

* Breakfast in Seward

* Check out of Breeze Inn

* Drive toward Denali

* Visit Alaska Native Heritage Center

* Lunch: ANHC

* Dinner at The Summit at Denali Princess

* Lodging: Denali Princess

Day 7, Aug. 8

* Breakfast at Denali Princess

* All-day bus trip into Denali

* Drive back to Savage River

* Dinner at Denali Princess

* Lodging: Denali Princess

Day 8, Aug. 9

* Breakfast at Denali Princess

* Drive to Fairbanks

* In Fairbanks discover missing purse

* Buy lunch at Safeway while shopping for groceries

* Dinner in room at Wedgewood for five

* Lodging: Wedgewood

Day 9, Aug. 10

* Breakfast in room at Wedgwood

* I look for bird banding — not running today

*Lunch at Bakery Restaurant

* Arrange to meet Ken and family at Ice Museum

* Ice Museum

* Ken, Vic, Lou visit UA museum and botanical gardens

* To Ken’s for dinner

* Lodging: Wedgewood

Day 10, Aug. 11

* I visit bird banding

* Checked out of Wedgewood

* Drove from Fairbanks toward Glennallen

* Lunch at Rika’s Roadhouse

* Checked into Caribou Hotel

* Dinner in Glennallen at Caribou Cafe

* Lodging: Caribou Hotel

Day 11, Aug. 12

* Drove from Glennallen to visitor center of Wrangell-St.Elias

* Drove toward Anchorage

* Lunch in Chickaloon

* Dinner in Anchorage

* Souvenir shopping

Day 12, Aug. 13

* We depart Anchorage with nearly one-hour delay

* Scheduled for 12:45 a.m., didn’t fly until nearly 1:45 a.m.

* Missed 8:05 a.m. flight in SLC. Got flight at about 11:30

* Arrived JWA about 12:15 p.m.

Lou’s Version—the details (6,400 words)

Day 1 — We fly to Anchorage

We got into Anchorage late. It was an easy flight (5 p.m. Delta from Orange County with plane change in Salt Lake City), no hassles. We picked up our rental car (a gray Subaru Forester with all-wheel drive).

The guy at Avis told us to make sure that the windshield didn’t have chips or cracks. It did. Seems that about one out of every ten cars — and half the trucks — in Alaska have cracked windshields. That’s because even the paved roads in Alaska have gravel on them because of constant road repairs. Gee, do you suppose minus 50-degree weather, winter frost heaves and summer thawing of permafrost due to global climate change have anything to do with that? We joked that people in Alaska who aren’t boat captains or bush pilots must work for the gravel industry, spreading new loads of it on the roads every day. The car rental places tell you to stay off gravel roads, but that’s impossible. They’re all gravel roads, even the paved ones.

We drove to Microtel Inn and Suites in Anchorage, arriving at around 1 a.m. We checked into our LOVELY room, which had wall-to-wall mirror at the head of the bed, kitchenette separating the bedroom from the living/dining room, view of mountains and a meadow of wildflowers right outside our room.

Day 2 — Anchorage

Vic went birding early this morning while I slept in. We had lunch at The Peanut Farm overlooking Campbell Creek. Our first stop was the Alaska Zoo to get pictures of animals to use in class presentations in case we don’t get good photos in the wild. They had six wolf pups at the zoo. They were amazingly cute, nipping at the heels and pants of their keeper, trying to bring her down. We heard the pups howling from the other side of the zoo. The sound of wolves howling is bloodcurdling, even at the tender age of 11 weeks. We also saw a polar bear, wolverine, porcupine, Dall sheep, muskox, caribou, moose, arctic fox and lots of other animals, including the only elephant in the state of Alaska.

We drove up the “hill” behind Anchorage to Chugach State Park, where we got a great view of the bay and town. Next, we explored some little city parks (DeLong Park, et al.). They didn’t look anything like city parks. These city parks were like being in the wilderness with lakes surrounded by forest. Wildflowers were everywhere. Even with cloudy skies, it was beautiful.

At Conner Lake Park, our last stop and less than a mile from our hotel, we were standing by the lake when a mother moose and two calves came out of the woods. I froze and started taking pictures like crazy while they munched on seemingly oblivious to me. The cow moose came so close that it was scary, maybe 15 to 20 feet away. I had only my 55 mm lens on the camera but got some heart-stopping close-ups anyway. Wow! At one point, mama moose approached too close for MY comfort, so I backed up. The calves were a bit more timid, but I got some good pics of them too. Mind you, this is in the town of Anchorage in a city park.

At Gwennie’s Old Alaska Restaurant, I had my first reindeer sausage, along with an old favorite of mine, sourdough pancakes. I know that makes for a strange dinner, but that’s what I wanted. Reindeer were domesticated 7,000 years ago by Laplanders. In the 20th Century, reindeer were brought to Alaska as a farm animal of sorts. Reindeer sausage was on most breakfast menus where we stopped in Alaska. It is WONDERFUL! Wish we could get it in Huntington Beach.

It drizzled on and off today. Forecast is for rain for the next week, but rain up here is kind of like Seattle’s weather — more of an easily ignored smattering of light rain than a torrential downpour. Sunny skies were sure not the Alaska that we saw on this trip. We think that when the sun shines, every photographer in the state turns out to get those blue-sky photos that you see in the brochures.

Day 3 — Anchorage and a floatplane trip to Redoubt Bay Lodge for bear viewing

Early this morning, we took a 5-seater Cessna floatplane from Rust’s Flying Service in Anchorage, flying about 45 to 60 minutes to Redoubt Bay Lodge on Cook Inlet in Lake Clark National Park. From the air, we saw several pods of beluga whales feeding on schools of fish and a large group of harbor seals sunning on the muddy shore of Cook Inlet. This was our first experience on a floatplane. The water takeoff and water landing was smooth and easy. We taxied to the lodge, where we docked just like a boat. This bush lodge is accessible only by plane or boat.

At the lodge, we hopped into a flat-bottom boat with a half dozen other people and headed across the narrow bay to a waterfall. There, we watched a sow brown bear with twin cubs fishing for salmon. Our guide said that the cubs were just beginning to put on fat and fill out.

The bears were so close it was scary. I hadn’t believed the photos of bears on the Rust’s Flying Service website, thinking that such close sightings were a rare occurrence. Nope, they’re resident bears, sighted nearly every day. The guides go right to them. The mother bear swam out to the boat to check us out. I was looking through my telephoto lens and seeing close-ups of her teeth. I put down my camera because I was getting scared and wanted to see how close she really was. That’s when I got really scared. She was only about 15 feet away, maybe less!

We could hear her heavy puffing as she came up for air after fishing underwater for salmon. When she came up for air, waterlily pads and stems often decorated her head like an askew hat. Vic said it was one of the most incredible and memorable moments of his life.

We watched one of the brown bear cubs catch his first salmon, run away with it into the woods and then drop it down the steep slope that led back to the bay. The salmon flopped its way back into the water and freedom, to the cheers of some on the boat.

We were close enough to hear the two cubs growling as they fought over a salmon that Mom brought to them. After about an hour at the falls, we headed down the bay to another falls, where we watched a black bear meandering along the shore. He walked past the falls for a great photo op.

The guide showed us an outhouse on the shore near a popular salmon fishing spot. It had been tipped over and destroyed by grizzlies. He said that brown bears are like human 2-year-olds. They put everything in their mouth to explore it and get into all kinds of mischief. He said that a young male bear played with the toilet seat for some time, making it slap and clap. We saw such a young male grizzly, possibly the bear of toilet-seat fame, exploring a line of rowboats cached on a lonely shore by a fishing party. The bear chewed some of the wood on the seat of a rowboat, but didn’t find it tasty enough to wreck the boat.

We motored back to the first waterfall, where mom and cubs were now catching salmon galore in the falls, ripping off the skin and gulping it down. We got some amazing pictures. In all, we saw four brown bears and four black bears on our boat trip, plus a bald eagle at its nest.

Lunch at the Redoubt Bay Lodge was wonderfully delicious: tomato Florentine soup and a savory hot pastry with the texture of a bread pudding, loaded with chopped vegetables and drizzled with a hot goat cheese and red bell pepper sauce. The water was interesting, which generally isn’t a good quality in water. Since this is true bush lodge, they generate their own electricity, use old-fashioned wooden outhouses with quarter moon cutouts on the doors and purify their own water from glacial runoff. (By the way, bush in Alaska means no road access.) We were surprised to see streams in Alaska that were as milky blue as the eyes of a husky. This is from “glacier flour,” which is incredibly fine-grained granitic silt. Even though the lodge’s water was filtered, the purification process didn’t take out all of the silt. The water was loaded with suspended fine particles, and was a faint milky blue. However, it tasted great and caused us no ill effects.

The rain from yesterday fell as snow in the mountains, and the peaks behind the lodge were freshly dusted with the first snow of the season. Mind you, this is the first week in August.

The flight back to Anchorage brought us sightings of more grizzlies, moose, tundra swans and more bald eagles. You know we were flying low if we could birdwatch from the air! The pilot said we were at about 1,000 to 1,300 feet.

This flight was the most expensive part of our trip, $519 apiece, and worth every penny. If anyone is considering a trip to Alaska, be sure to include bear-viewing at Redoubt Bay Lodge with Rust’s Flying Service. Folding yourself into the seat of one of those tiny Cessnas is an experience in and of itself.

After our bear tour, we drove into another part of huge Chugach State Park and visited the Eagle River Nature Center where we did a bit of hiking. The wildflowers were incredible. White yarrow and pink fireweed were everywhere, with red rosehips, blue larkspur and other flowers brightening every mountain slope.

In the evening, we toured downtown Anchorage. We dined at Snow Goose, where we had some delicious micro-brewed Alaskan ale to go with our seafood.

Day 4 — Drive from Anchorage to Seward

We drove from Anchorage to Seward along Turnagain Bay. We stopped at Potter’s Marsh, a must-see destination for birders. This green coastal wetland has a salmon stream that meanders through it. At Potter’s Marsh we saw three species of big salmon in the stream, plus a greater scaup female with fluffy ducklings and other birds.

Farther down the road, we saw two separate flocks of Dall sheep on the mountains. Vic caught a picture of one of the lambs nursing. The turn of every corner brought a new postcard scene of beautiful bay and mountains with lots of snow lingering in the crevasses.

In Seward, we toured the Alaska Sea Life Center. We got an introduction to Alaskan marine life, plus some great up-close looks at horned and tufted puffins, common murres and other sea birds. We had dinner in a hole-in-the-wall diner (Marina Restaurant) of a caribou burger for Vic and a muskox burger for me. Both were great. The muskox is misnamed. It is a relative of the goat rather than the cow, but fortunately the meat doesn’t taste like a goat smells.

Our room at the Breeze Inn was right across from the docks, with a great view of Resurrection Bay. It was an easy walk to the Kenai Fjords tour boats. After dinner, we drove to Exit Glacier, taking the short hike to the edge of this land-locked glacier. It was our first close-up view of the incredible blue glacial ice. Amazing colors.

Day 5 — Seward and Kenai Fjords National Park

We kept thinking that this trip couldn’t possibly get any better, but the boat trip out of Seward to Kenai Fjords National Park exceeded all expectations. The terrific weather had a great deal to do with that perception. We had blue sky all day with sparkling calm seas. The captains of the various boats remarked once we were back ashore that it had been the best day of the summer.

Our captain was Steve Fink, a graduate of Ocean View High School here in Huntington Beach. His parents still live here and his brother Dave teaches in Costa Mesa. Steve worked in Hawaii for a number of years, but once he found Alaska, he had found home. We can see why. The scenery in Alaska is even better than in Hawaii. For me, the cool Alaska summer temperatures make it a place I can enjoy. We experienced daytime August temperatures in the 60s, with nighttime lows in the 40s to 50s. Vic was bundled up in three to four layers of clothing most of the time, but I generally had on a T-shirt over jeans and a thin flannel shirt that I kept taking off because I was too warm.

We chose the nine-hour “captain’s choice” cruise out of Seward, which assured us of getting to see as much wildlife as possible. We saw many sea otters, one of them fairly near the boat. It was eating a big Dungeness crab. We saw a couple of harbor seals and then stopped by a breeding colony of huge Stellar’s sea lions. We lingered while big bulls and cows sunned themselves on a steep rock shelf. Their tiny pups tried hard not to slip off into the waves, failing miserably. The bottom tier of pups didn’t succeed in holding a purchase on the rocks for long. They struggled back ashore after each incoming wave. It looked very tiring for them.

Vic was in heaven with all the tufted and horned puffins, breeding colonies of black-legged kittiwakes and glaucous-winged gulls, common murres and other Alaskan bird specialties.

Because humpback whales had been sighted near Aialik Glacier, Steve changed course from our original destination to Northwestern Glacier to better our chances of seeing whales. We lingered in the bay where they had last been spotted, but didn’t find them. We headed on to the tidewater glacier, which was a stunning sight.

The glacial ice was a robin’s egg blue. Glaciers are really rivers of ice. They flow relatively slowly compared to a river of liquid water, but still fast enough to see. Aialik Glacier pushes right down to the sea, moving forward about 3 to 6 feet every day, calving icebergs as it moves.

We learned that glaciers are noisy. They growl as the ice grinds over granite underneath, carving it into glacial valleys. Icebergs calved off right and left with a crack like lightning and a rumble like loud thunder. The sea around us was thick with ice floes just, like the publicity photos show.

Glacial ice is filled with tiny bubbles of air that escape as the ice melts. The ocean around the glacier sounded like a fizzy glass of 7-Up poured over ice. The guidebooks hadn’t prepared us for the sound of glaciers. We were enthralled.

Captain Steve got an alert that humpback whales had been spotted, so we headed out to see if we could find them, too. We did. Two of them. I got photos of both whales blowing and then showing us their tail flukes as they headed down into the deep. On our way back to Seward, we found two other humpbacks, even larger than the first. They were about 45 feet long, longer than our 42-foot boat, the Mariah.

We stopped at Ray’s Seafood, a must-visit restaurant in Seward. Vic had grilled halibut and I had sockeye salmon with asparagus and a delicious crab risotto after our cruise.

If you’re going to Alaska, the Mariah Tours through Kenai Fjords Tours are great for marine wildlife, as well as glaciers. These small boats get much closer to the glaciers than the big tour boats, and the knowledgeable captains cater to birders and photographers.

Day 6 — Drive from Seward to Denali National Park

On our drive back up the Kenai Peninsula, we knew where to expect the Dall sheep. This time I got better pictures of them. After Anchorage, we stopped at Alaska Native Heritage Center where we saw a demonstration of Native Alaskan games. The young people doing the jumping and kicking were incredibly athletic, leaping up to kick forward with both feet to hit a small sealskin ball that dangled from a fishing line.

We decided to have lunch there when we saw that they had buffalo bratwurst and caribou hot dogs. Both were wonderful.

Afterward lunch, we walked the grounds to see some of the various types of permanent lodging that Alaskan native people lived in. The structures were mostly variations on log cabins. Igloos were not represented. Some of the lodges had people demonstrating lifestyles from the old days of living in the bush. Many Alaskan natives still pursue a subsistence lifestyle, living in tiny villages not serviced by roads. However, modern clothing, weapons, housing and other accouterments have replaced a lot of the old traditional ways.

We continued on to Denali, rain and shine. Amazingly, the clouds lifted for us just as we arrived at a viewpoint for Denali, also known as Mt. McKinley. We got to see the top of the peak, although the base remained in low clouds.

The Denali Princess Lodge was sumptuous, with hanging baskets and tubs of flowers everywhere. The lodge was located high on the banks of the Nenana River. Our room had a view of the spruce forest with scattered birches or aspen. We saw red squirrels dashing about, but few birds. The absence of birds other than bald eagles, magpies and ravens was par for this trip, except for our boat cruise. We had to work really hard to get the birds that we saw.

We had dinner at the Summit Restaurant at the Denali Princess. Vic had a Caesar salad and I had salmon. Our huge dessert of hot blueberry bread pudding with butter-rum sauce and blueberry compote was to die for.

Day 7 — Denali National Park

The day started out cold and rainy, but ended up partly cloudy with sun shining through on occasion. We took a 7 a.m. bus tour into Denali National Park, bringing our own lunch, snacks and water, because there is no food or water in the park.

Where to start? How about with willow ptarmigan on the roadside? That was a life species for us both. Ptarmigan go to the roadsides to pick up gravel and are fairly easy to spot there. We’re not sure why they bother to visit the roadsides. Alaska is loaded with gravel.

We saw snowshoe hares, arctic ground squirrels, red squirrels, a sow grizzly with three cubs, a huge male grizzly and a couple of small herds of caribou, including a couple of single males with huge racks. The best sight may have been a black wolf loping along in the brush by the road. A pack of five adults and seven pups has a den near the road. Some of them are spotted about one visit out of 10. We also saw over 20 Dall sheep in the distance on the mountains, a pair of golden eagles, a pair of merlins, a kestrel and a Northern harrier. It was a good day for raptors.

I got great photos of snowshoe hare, willow ptarmigan and a bull caribou, and decent shots of the wolf. The other animals were too far away to make good photos. After our bus tour, we drove back into the park as far as we could go on our own (which is to the Savage River), seeing even more wildlife. We picked up a porcupine, two bull moose hanging out together and more caribou. One big male silhouetted majestically on a ridge in the distance.

We stopped at Savage Interpretive Cabin, a surprisingly wonderful visit. After a short hike, we came across the old log cabin, which had smoke rising from the chimney. Vic hailed, “Hello the house!” Out came Barefoot Jack Webster, or more properly, an interpreter who plays the role of historic Barefoot Jack. Visiting with him and hearing the history of the cabin -- which had been an old cookhouse for the trail crew that built the first road through Denali -- was the best part of our visit to the park. He stayed in character and spoke with an old backwoods dialect used by early prospectors and trappers. We finished our day at rustic Salmon Bake, where Vic had seafood chowder and I had some yummy halibut tacos.

The light in Alaska is very strange and foreign-looking. We’d been told that the sun sets late and rises early (not that I ever saw the sunrise part), but I wasn’t prepared for the long twilight at sunset. It was still light at 10 p.m. with colored clouds that made you think that it would be dark soon, but the twilight lingered for another hour. We kept forgetting to go to sleep because of the long daylight hours, but we were too excited to be tired.

Tomorrow we drive to Fairbanks, a short drive, and stay there two nights. We’ll visit Vic’s old college dorm mate, Ken Whitten, a retired Fish and Game biologist, and his wife, Mary -- who has just returned from a trip to Southern California and Banning -- to help a relative move. They’ve promised us moose for dinner.

Day 8 — Drive from Denali to Fairbanks

We packed up and had breakfast in one of the snack bars at the Denali Princess, this time at the new Canyon Lodge. I had reindeer sausage and mushrooms in scrambled egg on a croissant. I’ve become very fond of reindeer sausage. Vic and I wandered out onto the deck with coffee in hand to enjoy the lovely view of the Nenana River. Without giving my purse another thought, we drove away and left it hanging all by itself on the chair that I had been sitting in while eating breakfast. I didn’t discover that it was missing until we got to Fairbanks. I’ll tell you the outcome later.

The drive to Fairbanks was scenic. We saw a white-phase Harlan’s Hawk. We had never seen one before and had a hard time trying to figure out what it was. We saw a big fish wheel on display at a native-run RV park. The native people put these big wooden and wire mesh structures in the rivers. The current turns the wheel, which catches and scoops up salmon trying to swim upstream. It’s a very efficient way of catching large quantities of fish for subsistence living.

We drove past an extensive recent wildfire along the road. The smell of smoke lingered heavily in the air. The day was cloudless, and we got another long-distance view of Denali.

In Fairbanks, I discovered my purse was missing when I tried to make a purchase. Despite some frantic worrying (it contained my photo IDs, credit cards, and most importantly, my medications), the situation resolved itself simply. I retraced my steps in my mind and decided that I must have left it at breakfast. We called the Denali Princess and found that an honest person already had turned it in. That part really didn’t surprise me, since every contact that we had with people in Alaska was positive. The surprising part was that the staff at the Denali Princess put my purse on the afternoon train to Fairbanks, and a Princess staff person even brought it to our room at the Wedgewood Resort that evening because I told them that I needed my blood pressure medication. We were very impressed.

Now for our room at Wedgewood. This may the best “room” that we’ve ever stayed in. It was really a one-room apartment with full kitchen, a living room that was as big as ours at home, ditto the dining room. The walk-in closet in the bedroom was as big as the bedrooms that our kids stayed in the summer that Vic and I lived in Higganum, Conn., in a house that was built in 1690. The secret to this lovely room was that the Wedgewood rents these places out as furnished apartments in the winter, renting them by the night only in the summer. The furniture and paintings were lovely and we enjoyed our stay there very much.

Our room was only a few yards away from the Alaska Bird Observatory. The nature trails behind our building led to Creamer’s Field, the premiere birding spot in Fairbanks. We saw Canada geese and sandhill cranes galore.

Vic’s dormitory mate from Stanford University, Ken Whitten, lives in Fairbanks. He’s a retired Alaska Fish and Game biologist. Vic and Ken actually reconnected only a few years ago after their college days. Ken was doing some Internet research on national wildlife refuges and came across one of our Independent columns on the internet. He wondered if this clean-cut environmental writer could be the same Vic Leipzig that he knew in college. Back then, Vic was a bearded, pony-tailed political science major.

When Ken was at Bolsa Chica a couple of years ago doing some birding on vacation, he ran into Vic and recognized him immediately. Vic was thrilled to reestablish contact with Ken, and we’ve planned to visit Alaska ever since. Ken has been reading our Independent columns online ever since. Don’t you just love the Internet?

When Vic saw how large our “room” was, he invited Ken and his wife Mary to have dinner with us. That posed a bit of a problem, since we had no staples and no groceries and only a rudimentary set of pans. The situation was easily resolved. We made a trip to the grocery store where we picked up a loaf of good French bread to heat in the oven, some snow crab legs to steam, butter and lemon for the crab legs and ice cream for dessert because we knew the Whittens were bringing blueberries. We also got some pickled herring in sour cream, a couple of cheeses and a couple of kinds of crackers for appetizers.

Mary made a delicious salad with fresh veggies from her garden and brought some fresh blueberries that she and Ken had picked in the wild. Ken makes beautiful wooden bowls out of Alaskan woods, and Mary brought one of those in which to serve the salad. Thankfully, Mary also brought a pan large enough for the crab legs.

Ken and Mary had three house guests at the time of our visit, all of whom were using their house as a staging area before flying to teaching or counseling jobs in the bush for the school year. They brought one of their guests, a delightful young man named Dan Jarashow, with them. Dan is going to be a dorm counselor at a boarding high school in Galeena, on the Yukon River. The villages in the bush are so far apart that the older kids go to boarding high schools. Dan, a resident of Maryland who went to college in Minnesota, was really looking forward to working in the wilds of Alaska and spending his first winter in the bush.

The five of us had a great time. We went birding in the woods behind the resort, finding sandhill cranes, Canada geese, juncos and a wood frog, the only amphibian species in Alaska. Surprisingly, Alaska has no reptiles, so stepping on a snake unexpectedly was not an issue. Dinner was lots of fun, picking apart the steamed crabs and pouring fresh blueberries onto vanilla bean ice cream.

Day 9 — Fairbanks

Again today, I slept in while Vic went birding. I got up to see the (NOT) delightful news on CNN of the terrorist plot to blow up planes that was thwarted in London. Fortunately, I don’t think terrorists have an interest in Delta airlines, and certainly aren’t targeting Anchorage to Salt Lake City, nor Salt Lake City to Orange County. I suspect we’ll just be subjected to more delays at security in the airports when we fly home Saturday night/Sunday morning.

We had blueberries on cereal for breakfast in our apartment at the Wedgewood. It was a rainy day, so we visited the University of Alaska Large Mammal Research Station to see muskox and caribou on a guided tour. Baby muskox are adorable. Later, we went out for lunch but ended up having breakfast instead when we saw the menu. Surprise, surprise, I had reindeer sausage, this time in an omelet with mushrooms, onions and cheddar cheese, with hash browns and sourdough pancakes.

We met Ken, Mary and Dan at the Ice Museum, where we saw a movie about the ice carving contest that is held in Fairbanks every March. We walked through 20-degree coolers and saw eskimos, sled dogs, mining cabins, trees and all kinds of things carved out of ice, much bigger sculptures than I would have guessed. Vic was bundled up in his many layers of clothing, plus his winter coat. Ken walked through in a short-sleeved shirt, shorts and sandals. Two chainsaw artists did a demonstration of ice carving techniques, right down to a final blast from a hair dryer to melt the surface and give the sculptures a nice sheen.

Mary and Dan went shopping to complete his new wardrobe for his first winter in the arctic. He’ll be staying all winter in Galeena, a small village that is accessible only by plane. Ken, Vic and I toured the University of Alaska Museum of the North where we saw, among many other things, Babe the blue steppe bison. The frozen carcass of this ancestor of today’s plains and woods bison was found in remarkably good shape by miners who were blasting a slope with high-pressure hoses to extract minerals. The skin of the steppe bison turned blue shortly after it was unearthed because of a reaction of several minerals on the skin with the air.

The 38,000-year-old steppe bison had been preserved in the permafrost and was pretty much intact. Paleo-forensic studies indicated that the bison had been killed by American lions, a huge ancestor of African lions. They used to live in Southern California, too, but died out here around 12,000 years ago.

Ken’s thesis advisor was the scientist who did most of the research on the steppe bison carcass. Ken told us that the guy even ate a piece of this bison, now extinct, to see what it tasted like. The 38,000 years of freezer burn had pretty much rendered it inedible. I can’t imagine even trying to eat something like that.

We next went to the botanical garden at the university where they are experimenting to see what varieties of plants can be grown in this climate. It gets down to minus 60 degrees in Fairbanks, and yet there were all kinds of things growing there, including a hardy variety of tea rose and apple trees from Siberia. They are experimenting with peonies, which bloom a couple of months later in Alaska than they do in the eastern U.S. and in Holland. They hope to develop varieties for the cut flower industry that are available when peonies from Holland are not in order to create a new industry for Alaska.

Ken took us to his house, where Mary cooked an entire Coho salmon and a moose stir-fry with veggies from their large garden for dinner. The moose was exceptionally delicious. Mary served a beautiful homemade blueberry-rhubarb pie for dessert. Dan joined us for dinner, as well as Mark Heinrich and his wife Yuko. Mark and Yuko were flying out the next day and were busily packing food for their stay in Ruby, Alaska, where they will be teaching elementary school. Since a diet of dried salmon and whale blubber gets pretty old if you’re not used to it, they bought enough food to last nine months. Apparently, it’s cheaper for them to mail food to themselves than to buy it in tiny, isolated Ruby on the Yukon River. In winter, the town is accessible only by plane.

The Whitten house was filled with trophies of caribou, bighorn sheep, mountain goats and even a large piece of mammoth tusk. Ken had been in charge of managing the Porcupine caribou herd on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the herd that is impacted by drilling in Prudhoe Bay and the TransAlaska pipeline. We loved Ken’s stories of living outside of Fairbanks with his own refillable water tower for a water supply, septic tank, wood stove, oil furnace and the unbelievable hassle of keeping this infrastructure operational at minus 60 degrees. Even heating oil freezes at that temperature.

Vic and Ken swapped stories of leading clients on birding trips, as Ken is now a bird guide. I’d love to repeat Ken’s story of the gastrointestinal consequences of eating too many wild blueberries while tracking a wolverine, and how another field biologist mistook the result for something that the wolverine left behind and did some exploration of the “findings,” but this is a family newspaper. Suffice it to say that we were highly entertained.

Day 10 — Fairbanks to Glennallen

It rained most of the day for our drive to Glennallen, but when the clouds lifted a bit, we saw fabulous mountain scenery. We’ve heard some people complain about the boredom of looking at taiga, a form of boreal forest, day after day on their drives in this section of the arctic. Whiners. We loved it. The black and white spruces had interesting forms, the streams and rivers ran either clear or milky blue, and there was greenery everywhere, from low willows to cranberry bushes to the ever-present yarrow and fireweed. Birds and mammals were scarce, but that made finding them even more of a challenge.

We had lunch at Rika’s Roadhouse, a historic site near Delta Junction where the Tenana and Delta Rivers meet. The stop was more interesting from a historical perspective than a culinary one. A contemporary dining room and gift shop have been built to accommodate modern travelers and the tour busses that stop here. We enjoyed seeing the garden, spring house, barn and other historic buildings from the early 1900s more than we enjoyed the meal, although the homemade chicken noodle soup and pecan pie were good.

The original owner who built the roadhouse was off hunting most of the time, and merely asked guests to leave money on the table. Eventually, he hired a Swedish immigrant woman named Rika Wallen to run the place, and it has been known as Rika’s Roadhouse ever since. She bought the place for $10 in 1923. She raised chickens and goats and had a team of oxen to help harvest hay. She ran the place until 1947, and is buried there. Rika’s Roadhouse is now a historic state park, and well worth stopping for.

When I started making reservations three weeks before our trip, my first lodging choice, the Copper River Princess Wilderness Lodge, was booked. We stayed at the Caribou Hotel in Glennallen instead. Glennallen is a more of a way station for oil pipeline workers than a real town. At least the bathrooms in our section of the motel were private. The shower was semi-functional, we had to jiggle the toilet handle to keep the water from running and the tap water had chunks in it, probably flakes of iron from the pipes. But the bed was comfortable, the room was quiet, the lobby had free Internet acces and the few people who were there were friendly. Dinner at the Caribou Restaurant was unremarkable, although the copper ceiling was interesting.

Day 11 — Glennallen to Anchorage

Part of today was spent driving in the Copper River Valley, home of the famed Copper River Salmon. We stopped by the visitor center for the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, the largest national park in the U.S. The park covers an area about equal to Vermont and New Hampshire. It’s bigger than Switzerland and has nine of the 16 highest peaks in the U.S., including the second highest peak, Mt. St. Elias at 18,008 feet. Mt. Wrangell, at 14,163 feet, is one of the highest active volcanoes in the U.S. It erupted most recently around 1900. We’re embarrassed to say that, until this trip, we had never heard of this park. It was created during President Jimmy Carter’s tenure.

It rained most of the day. We caught an occasional glimpse of snow-clad mountains and huge glaciers flowing out of glacial valleys. We saw enough of Wrangell-St. Elias Park to know that we’d like to go back and see more someday.

We stopped in tiny Chickaloon to have lunch at a local watering hole that was long on character. Reindeer sausage wasn’t on the menu and they were out of muskox, so I had a halibut sandwich. Vic had clam chowder.

In Anchorage, we visited the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, which was interesting. We also visited Earthquake Park, where we learned about the devastating 8.4 earthquake that hit the area in 1964. We had one last Alaskan meal, this time at the Old Sourdough Mining Company, a touristy spot that seems to cater to tour bus groups. It was a cute enough place, but kitchy. It made us very happy that we had seen Alaska on our own and not on a tour bus. No self-respecting bus tour would have stopped at some of the interesting places that we visited.

Driving on our own was simple. There are really only four paved highways in Alaska, so it’s almost impossible to get lost. We even managed not to crack the windshield.

Day 12 — We’re back home!

We made it back to Southern California safe and sound, if somewhat delayed.

Our flight home left at 12:45 a.m. Sunday morning, or at least it was supposed to. It was delayed an hour due to late arrival and loading of luggage, probably due to the heightened terror alert. There were explosives-sniffing dogs and watchful cops in the airport. Security was a bit more stringent than on our flight to Alaska. Not only could we have no liquids (bottled water, shampoo, lotions, etc.) in our carry-ons, but no chapstick or lipstick or gel shoe inserts. I did a quick transfer of those now contraband items to our checked luggage.

Our flight to Salt Lake arrived after our connecting flight had left, so we got upgraded to first class and got vouchers for breakfast while waiting for the next flight out, which was three hours later. The last leg of the flight was in beautiful weather, with good views of Lake Powell, Lake Mead and Southern California.

Phil and Judi Smith picked us up at the airport. It’s good to be home, but I miss those exuberant hanging baskets of huge flowers that were everywhere in Alaska. I’ll also miss the open space and fantastic scenery and the quiet and solitude that we found up there. And I’ll really miss reindeer sausage.

Now we’re back to the neighbor’s barking dogs and small noisy children in the backyards that are butted up so close to ours. But this lovely 70-degree weather will continue right on into winter here. It will not get down to minus-60 like it does in Fairbanks. We don’t have to worry about our heating oil freezing up or the septic tank freezing over or even have to deal with such things. We don’t have to worry about the water lines freezing and not delivering water to us. There are plusses and minuses everywhere.

All in all, we’re happy to be back home, but I’d go to Alaska again at the drop of a hat. It was fantastic! We had heard horror stories of mosquitoes in Alaska, but when we were there, it was too cold for them. If you plan to go, get the book “Alaska for Dummies” and spend some time on the Internet planning your own trip with a rental car. You’ll have a great time.

STATISTICS

* Number of bird species sighted: 81

* Number of mammal species sighted: 15

* Number of amphibian species sighted: 1, all that is possible

* Number of digital images snapped: Over 4,000

* Airfare for two: $1,258 (we booked late and the cheaper flights were gone)

* Car rental and gas: $1,263 (we got an SUV because of all the photography and birding gear that we carry; cheaper cars are available)

* Lodging for 11 nights: $1,586

* Bear-viewing, Kenai Fjords cruise and Denali bus: $1,386

* Food: About $600

* Admissions to various attractions: $135

* Our cost of going to Alaska for 11 days and nights: $6,233

* The memories we brought back: priceless