Alaska May 2008
Don and I took a 6 day mountaineering course in Alaska with Alpine Ascents. Our guides Eric and Jason were wonderful! The professionalism and skills demonstrated by our guides were top notch.
We started our trip by spending the night at the Fireweed Inn in Talkeetna and it was by far the nicest place we ever stayed! Tom and Hobbs were wonderful to us and spoiled us rotten with great hospitality and awesome food! It was a great way to relax before meeting our guides the next day and flying onto the glacier.
We all met at Fireweed the next morning and took the van to the hanger and sorted our gear and made all sorts of prussiks. Then we headed off to Talkeetna Air Taxi and got on a small plane that took us onto the Kahiltna glacier. I was petrified of the airplane ride but the scenery was amazing!
We had a fun group of people. We learned so much and got to do it all in an amazing place! We got to practice carrying sleds, setting up a base camp (where we got to eat great food!), self arrest, glacier travel on a rope team, setting up a z-pulley system for crevasse rescue, summited Control Tower, went ice climbing on glacier ice, got to see a big avalanche go right over something we hiked across and hear avalanches letting loose the whole time, Kristina fell into a crevasse by mistake and got out with just a scrape on my chin while my rope team did a fine job with self arresting (Eric fell in it first while leading his rope team, I just accidently stepped around his hole and made my own!) We had everything from smokin hot sunny days to cold windy snowy days and even got stuck on the glacier for an extra day due to bad weather! It was really fun stomping out the runway for the planes to take off when we were waiting to be picked up.
The coolest part was that it never got dark on the glacier! It was sunny from 3am-11pm and dusk between 11pm-3am! You kind of loose track of days and time out there! It was so much fun that we are already planning our next trip to Alaska for next summer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Check out the pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kfolcik/sets/72157605122772812/
