Sunday July 9 – Day 37 – Talkeetna – flightseeing tour of
Mt. Denali
Everyone slept in after yesterdays long haul.
Erik, the boys and I headed out around 9:30am to fish (Lynn
is crying as he reads this…..), stopping at a local tackle shop first. The lady running the shop said the fish were
in, but you couldn’t fish at ALL in the area next to the road (easiest access)
and salmon were catch and release only. Further,
all fishing must be done without bait, with a single hook (not treble)
Then she showed us a rig that was endorsed by the local
guru. These rigs are “bottom bouncers”, very similarly to my normal setup for
catfish, with a weight, then a barrel swivel, followed by a leader and a
hook. Upstream of the hook, the “guru”
had a blue floating ball, and on the hook was a ball of string, or imitation salmon egg. It all sounded reasonable at the time….
Rigs were cheap, so we bought several and headed out to the
river to test their performance.
She showed us how to get there, which was a bit involved,
since you have to hike ½ mile from the road before fishing, per Fish and Game
regs.
It wasn’t til we got to the river, that I realized we didn’t
ask her “how do you fish these”? Also,
we didn’t realize the route to get there was a poorly worn rabbit trail tracing
the ragged edge of the river, and it did so right along a series of private
properties, all of which had a bunch of abandoned houses, cars, etc. In short,
it looked like a rarely worn trail through great bear country, with a couple
meth labs thrown in for good measure….
Once I tied up my rig, I realized it looked very much like a
Christmas tree ornament, and I have no experience using anything like it.
As a bonus, once we got out to the fishing location, I also
realized that I’d left in camp: mosquito
net, bug spray, bear spray, and 38, all of which I was in desperate want
of.
The river flowed very fast, so casting the rig out “bounced”
quite quickly straight downstream, ending about 3’ off shore, maybe 40’
downstream. I felt no more a threat to the salmon population than when I was
asleep on my pillow hours before.
Indeed, all the “bites” we got originated from mosquitos, not
salmon. After about 45 minutes of this,
we headed back to camp to prep for the far more exciting afternoon activity.
Said afternoon activity was a flightseeing tour of Mt.
Denali (formerly called Mt. McKinley), the highest peak in North America. This was an incredible experience. Our flight
took off at 3pm and lasted til 4:30pm. The single engine craft had room for our
9, one more passenger and the pilot. The pilot asked the group if anyone,
preferably tall, would like to sit in the copilot’s seat, and I (Shane) was
quickly elected. It was an honor and tremendous advantage to have that chair.
The views of the mountain cannot be described with any level
of accuracy, because it was just too incredible. We saw glaciers, mountain
tops, etc. Between the 9 of us, we took
tons of photos, video, etc, but none of it do the experience justice. I was
continuously reminded of Morgan Freeman's character in “The Bucket List”
describing Mt. Everest, when he said it was “indescribably beautiful”. That’s the
best I can do. It was an indescribably
beautiful experience. Deanna asked the
family for one word summaries of what we saw:
me: Majesty, Deanna: majestic, Travis: complex, Amanda: can’t
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