More from Alaska

Here are a couple more loose ends and photos from Alaska, assuming that my flaky Internet connection will allow it.

First, a couple of shots from the Denali flightseeing trip from last week. I uploaded a bunch to Flickr, I think—you can see them by going to http://tinyurl.com/yuxskv and clicking on "detail." In an earlier blog entry I showed you a shot of the mountain itself. Here's a shot of the McKinley River, at the base of the mountain, as taken from the Cessna:

Like all the glacial rivers around here, the McKinley River is really more like a river bed with a small stream trickling through it. If I heard correctly, the bed represents how big the river used to be, a zillion years ago when the glaciers were advancing; now that they're retreating, there's much less water flowing through them.

Below is a shot of the kettle ponds that dot the tundra, also taken on the flightseeing trip. I didn't catch why they're called kettle ponds—the guides and drivers are passing along so much information that it's hard to take it all in.

More on the mountain later. I also wanted to share a shot of a willow ptarmigan that we saw on our bus ride out of Denali. It's cool because you can see the feathers on the bird's legs—something that most birds don't have. It's an adaptation to the cold tundra winters.

At the end of our bus ride out of Denali, we had about a half-hour to hit the national park visitors' center and gift shop before getting on the train to Talkeetna. The train ride was most excellent: We had seats in the Gold Star section, which had cloth-napkin meal service and a clear dome overhead for optimum viewing of the scenery. The whole thing was quite deluxe. I'll upload shots from the train ride later, but here's one that Carol, a fellow trip member and fellow photography nerd from South San Francisco, took of me after we got off the train in Talkeetna.

I'll try to write more later when we get to Anchorage, which is a little closer to civilization and thus might have a more reliable Internet connection.