North to Alaska
North to Alaska
Alaska is a land of a million scenic landscapes ever changing with lighting and time of day. Eagles patrol the skies flying as high as mountain tops. Bears fish for salmon as they run any of hundreds of rivers and streams to spawn. Moose course rivers and lakes diving for tender shoots. Beavers never stop working to create more lakes and ponds as the world’s best damn dam engineers. Wolves run free and occasionally announce their dominion with a chorus heard from one snow capped peak to another. Alaska is a sportsman’s and photographer’s paradise.
Although I have been there several times, I yearn to return. This time, I will fly my own amphibious airplane, my Seawind, with my friend and fellow pilot Jay Drury. We will leave on or after August 3, 2016 for Seattle, WA and then head north to refuel at Ketchikan, Alaska and then on to Merrill Field near Anchorage, Alaska. Here we’ll meet and fly with friend and Seawind owner Dean
Ricarson. From there we’ll head to the Seward Military Resort, http://sewardresort.com/ for four or five days of fishing and R&R. Then we’ll visit Katmai National Park, https://www.nps.gov/katm/index.htm where we’ll kayak in a tandem Klepper to fish and view wildlife. From here we will choose to go to either Lake Clark National Park, https://www.nps.gov/lacl/index.htm or Wood Chik Tik State Park, http://dnr.alaska.gov/parks/units/wtc/ for a little more kayak exploring and fishing and camping.
Then it’s heading back toward Ketchikan with a multi-day stop and stay in a USFS cabin, Baranof Lake near Sitka, Alaska. This is one of the most scenic spots in SE Alaska, second to me only to Misty Fiords National Monument. Take a look here: http://www.publiclakecabinsak.com/06-sitka/baranof-lake-cabin. By this time, we should have a boat load of preserved and fresh fish and we’ll probably look like well fed grizzly bears after more than two weeks. From Ketchikan, we fly back to Seattle, overnight and head home. If we’re lucky, we’ll pick u a strong tail wind and make it home in as little ad ten flying hours. It’ll be a trip our grandchildren will echo to their own children one day and even that would not be enough to reflect the beauty and grandeur of our 49th state!
