Joshua turned 1 on August 3. Since we were leaving that day for
Alaska, we celebrated the weekend before. I made him a monkey cake with cream cheese frosting (he loves cream cheese) and we did the almost-obligatory let-the-kid-eat-with-his-whole-face routine. We got him all set up in just his diaper on a tablecloth on the floor and gave him his cake. He took a few tastes and then just wanted to play with Ben and
Kendall and his balloons. And that was it. The next morning, his brilliant aunt Suzie thought maybe he wasn’t interested in his cake because he wanted chocolate instead. So I cut him a slice of the chocolate cake I had made for everyone else and gave it to him for breakfast. He poked it once or twice, picked it up, and shoved the whole thing in his mouth. Love that kid!
So off we went to
Alaska for two weeks. We got in to
Anchorage just before midnight and met my mom at the airport. We got our rental car and drove all night to a tiny little place called McCarthy that happens to sit in the largest (and one of the coolest) national parks in
America called Wrangell-St. Elias. We spent the day exploring McCarthy, which didn’t take long as it’s only one block long, and another tiny town called Kennecott. Kennecott is what’s left of a huge copper mining operation that was abandoned a few decades ago. And what’s left is pretty cool – it’s a bunch of decrepit, beautiful red buildings perched on a mountainside overlooking an ENORMOUS glacial moraine.
The next morning we hopped on a little plane with a guide and our gear and headed into the backcountry. We set up our base camp in the rain, strapped Josh into his backpack, and headed out for our first adventure. Betsy, our awesome guide, didn’t hold anything back just because we were hiking with an infant. That first day we headed up a lateral moraine (the miles and miles of gravel pushed up by the sides of a glacier) until we couldn’t go anymore and had lunch on a huge gravel mountain overlooking three glaciers and countless peaks. The biggest peak around,
Mt. Blackburn (16,390 ft) didn’t make much of an appearance that day because of the rain, though.
We finished dinner and got settled into our tents before the rain really got going, and it poured all night. When we got up the next morning, though, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was an unbelievably perfect day. Betsy took us gallivanting through the bush and up mountains to find
Iceberg Lake.
Iceberg Lake is unique among lakes found near glaciers in that it fills every year and then completely drains in early August. When it’s full, it’s dammed by the glacier and is big enough you could fit every person in the
United States in it at once. When it drains, as it did a week before we arrived, the flow is so big it makes the whole glacier field undulate as it rushes underneath it. People who happen to be standing on the glacier when those thousands and thousands of gallons are passing below can see on GPS units that they move up and down by a few feet as the waves of water move below, which is pretty impressive since the glacier is hundreds of feet thick. When the lake is drained, however, it leaves acres of house-sized (Well, the tiny ones are house-sized. Most are much, much larger), powder-blue icebergs lying on an enormous sand bar. The hike up to the overlook above
Iceberg Lake was a tense and intense scramble up grassy hillsides and rocky outcroppings. Mario didn’t miss a beat, though, and Josh had a ball. Betsy recommended we not try taking Josh down into the iceberg valley itself as it was even worse than the way up, so me and J had a date on top of a mountain while Mom and Mario went down to check out the bergs.
Our third and last day in the backcountry was spent out on the glacier itself. We spent all morning trying to get to the glacier, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. About 90% of the glacier’s shoulders are lined with fields of hip-deep mud, lakes, rivers, and ice walls tens of feet high. After multiple failed attempts to get onto the glacier, I got lucky and found a place that worked. We strapped on crampons and went for a little stroll out on the ice. It was an incredibly memorable day. We even found a moulin, which is French for “mill” and refers to a place in the ice where water has bored a hole straight down to the rivers below. It’s basically a raging river on the glacier that turns into an under-ice waterfall. It was amazing. I tried to take a picture that would convey just how impressive it was, but Betsy stopped me as I started to get close and said simply, “If you slip right here, you will die.” That’s all. It was a pretty effective deterrent. I’m many things, including clumsy, so I decided to forgo the picture in an effort to not die. I did take a picture of this small moulin so maybe you can imagine what looking into the mouth of the big one was like. It was an amazing day and a great end to our backcountry backpacking trip.
We drove back to
Anchorage to meet my brother Jed and his family who recently moved to
Fairbanks, Alaska. We went with them to Seward on
Resurrection Bay where we did a day cruise in the
Kenai Fjords National Park. It was a very dreary day for the most part, which totally ruined a bunch of the pictures I tried to take of some of the awesome stuff we saw. On the way out, we saw a humpback whale, sea lions (not very impressive since we have these in Oregon), puffins (they were very cute and EVERYWHERE and I didn’t get a single decent shot of one!), otters, and Bald Eagles. When we arrived at the glacier we were traveling to see, a HUGE part of the face calved off and plunged into the water, sending a very large wave towards our boat. The park ranger on our boat said that was the largest calving she had seen in her 15 years at the park, and the wave was still 8 feet tall when it rocked our boat that was ¼ mile away from the fall. It was quite impressive. Unfortunately, it was raining and windy during that part of the trip, so there are big fuzzy patches in all of my pictures from water on my lens.
While we were in Seward, we wanted to get some good seafood so we asked the owner of the campground we were staying at (who happened to be from Medford) where we should go. He said without hesitation “Thorn’s Bucket of Butt is the bomb-de-diggity-sh*t.” When a local fisherman tells you someone’s fish and chips is the bomb-de-diggity-sh*t, you get it. End of story. And it sure was! In fact, a week later Mario and I were hundreds of miles away on a train back from Denali and we asked the conductor where we could get the best fish and chips around. Once again, without hesitation, we heard “Thorn’s Bucket of Butt in Seward!”
We also participated in some snag fishing for spawning salmon, which was absolutely nothing like I thought it would be. We rented fishing poles and went where the campground owner told us. We didn’t need any bait. We could see the fish in the water right in front of us. Basically, my brother Jed said it best when we said “Catching these fish is like going to a nursing home to pick a fight.” You pretty much cast right onto the fish you wanted to catch and reeled your line right into it. Crystal caught her fish on its back fin. None of them were good enough to eat since they were spawning, but it was a very interesting morning at least!
We camped for most of our two weeks in Alaska, which some people might think would be hard with an infant. It might be with some infants, but there is nowhere Josh would rather be than outside playing in the dirt. We bought a full rain suit for him before we went, so even when it was raining we’d just put his suit on him and let him mess around in the mud. He was absolutely filthy for two weeks, but never happier! He didn’t want to eat or sleep, just throw rocks and play in the dirt. Even when we were backpacking for three days in Wrangell, he was perfectly happy to ride around in the backpack all day and throw rocks all night.
From Seward we headed north to Denali National Park. There are very few private vehicles allowed in the park – the great majority of people take a bus from the entrance to a visitor’s center near Mt. McKinley (also called Denali, the highest peak in North America). We reserved a spot on the first bus, which necessitated getting up at 5am, but we were more than rewarded with a crystal-clear morning. Our bus driver said it was one of the best days he had ever seen in the park. We saw lots of bears, Dall sheep, caribou, moose, wolves, eagles, a coyote, and probably the coolest mountain I have ever seen. It’s a good thing we got up so early, because by the time we were leaving the visitor’s center at 11am, Denali was already starting to be covered with clouds. It was a very fun day.
We spent our last few days exploring Anchorage and headed home to Utah.
We left Salt Lake and arrived in Boston exactly 46 hours later. We’re so happy to be back, and we’re so grateful Tyler and Suzie let us live in their basement all summer! We have lots of plans for our last year in Boston and hopefully I’ll be better about blogging about them!
Josh is doing great. He’s cutting his 4th tooth, which has made for a few very fussy days, and is very close to walking. Mario started classes last week and is working hard on lining up a job for when he graduates in May.
We kicked off our last New England autumn with a visit to Vermont to see Mario’s family there. We took a little detour to the original Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream plant in Waterbury. We got to tour the plant and taste one of their new flavors, Milk & Cookies. It’s a fun place and includes a Flavor Graveyard where they commemorate ice cream flavors they’ve discontinued. Why did they ever think putting popcorn in ice cream was a good idea?
After that, we had a visit from Mario’s cousin (sort of – it’s a long story) and her lovely little family. Alicia, Tucker and baby Weston were out visiting Alicia’s sister in Vermont and came to Beantown to go to a cranberry festival with us down on Cape Cod. It was SO COOL! Visiting a working cranberry bog being harvested has been on my Bucket List for a long time. Ripe cranberries have small pockets of air which cause them to float in water. At harvest time, they flood the cranberry fields, called bogs, and then use big lawnmower-type machines to beat the berries free of the bushes. Once the cranberries float to the top, 
harvesters put a very long, bendable piece of floating plastic around the bog and then draw it in tight, gathering all the berries in one area. When they have an entire bog corralled, the berries can be 8 inches deep. Then they suck the berries up with a big vacuum and load them on trucks to be shipped off for processing. Very fun and satisfying day. On our way out of the festival, we got some fried dough (as they call it on the east coast) with cranberries. Lovely stuff!
We used one of our free Wednesdays (our travel day since Mario doesn’t have class) to visit a little coastal village just north of Boston called Marblehead. It’s famous for its affluence, quaintness (is that a word?), and history. It was one of the first villages established by the first settlers to America, and most of the cute little houses that make up its downtown were built in the 1700s and have little plaques hanging on them that say things like “Jacob Clay’s Shoe Factory 1674.” It’s also the birthplace of the U.S. Navy. We spent a beautiful morning wandering around taking pictures. 
Experiencing fall in New England is like spending Chinese New Year in China (which, ironically, we didn’t actually spend in China – on purpose, I might add). New England was made for autumn, plain and simple. It’s so effortlessly perfect. First you get the weather – gentle breezes, clean and crisp air, and lots of sunshine. Then you get the apples – a dozen kinds of delicious, dripping with fresh, crisp, tart, liquid sugar. With the apples you get fresh-pressed, unpasteurized cider that tastes like you just bit an apple, and tender and crumbly cider donuts tossed with cinnamon sugar. And then you get the leaves. Oh my goodness, the leaves!
We wanted our last fall in New England (Mario graduates this spring) to be a good one. The last two years we haven’t really gone crazy trying to find good places to see leaves since we still had time left and Mario was really busy with class. Since this is the last one, though, we were on a mission! We decided to go to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. As you can see in a few of the pictures, this area was a little past “peak” (you can see a lot of the trees have lost their leaves completely), but it was still AMAZING. We’ve seen pretty great fall colors the past two years, but it was nothing compared to this place! It was kind of a rough trip for Josh – it seems he has grown out of his easy traveling age – so we didn’t see as much as we would have liked, but it was still the perfect last “leaf peeping” adventure! 
I also dragged Mario out to the orchard to pick apples for our last time. A trip to an apple orchard is an obligatory part of a New England autumn. He wasn’t terribly excited about it, but he did warm up to it a bit as soon as he got some apples and cider donuts in him! And he enjoyed a very refreshing apple juice bath from Josh gnawing on an apple while sitting on his shoulders. 
