Reflections of My Travel

click for pix
This morning, we got up bright and early, around 05:30, to get our tent and gear all packed up and ready for the 06:30 bus. We had discussed it last night and decided that we just couldn’t take another miserable day of heat and mosquitos in there so we’d just go ahead and get out on the first bus. By this morning, the smoke had moved in so heavily that if I didn’t know any better, I would call you an outright liar for saying there was a 20,000+ foot mountain right there in front of us. It was insane just how absolutely obscured it was. While waiting for the bus, we were amused that everyone who was waiting for the bus was wearing mosquito nets. Someone took a pic of all of us “netheads”. When we all boarded the bus, so did the mosquitoes. On the way back out, we saw several owls, more ptarmigan, more caribou (one blocking the road ahead of us), and a big black bear running (and i mean full speed) up to the top of a mountain. But the highlight was a 350lb grizzly that was in the street ahead of us, we stopped and it walked around the bus a few times – right under the windows where if we would have put our arm out (not that nuts) we could have pet it. It was highly exhilarating. When we got out of the park, we headed north toward Fairbanks. The closer we got, the less we could see or breath. We were heading straight at the fires and the smoke was horrible. We had planned on trying to go to Chena Hot Springs but it was just too smoky (and i think the road was actually closed anyhow). We started back south and stopped in at the North Pole in order to mail out postcards with a North Pole postmark (I was so happy that we spent all that time there breathing in pure smoke just so for all the postcards to end up with Fairbanks postmarks – dangit! I want my money back). We stopped in at Santa’s workshop and saw his reindeer. It was all pretty dismal though, I was really expecting more from the North Pole. After breathing a sufficient quantity of smoke, we continued south and ended up camping out at Delta Junction for the night. The road on the way to Delta Junction must have just been moose haven – we had to have seen 15 moose on the side of the road throughout the night. No bulls, but we did see one cow with calfs.