Author: Willem

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Sunday/ Alaska Route 2 🏞

Today we drove in a southeasterly direction from Fairbanks, on Alaska Route 2 South along the Tanana River.

There is gold in the trees on the rolling hills that the Alaska Route 2 road runs through.
The vista from the Alaskan Range Viewpoint, a scenic viewpoint on Route 2 that is a few miles from the Harding-Birch Lakes.
And here is a feathered friend (wild duck, Anas platyrhynchos) stretching its wings on the waters of the Harding-Birch Lakes.
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Saturday/ Alaska Route 3 🏞

These pictures are from a four-hour roundtrip drive on Alaska Route 3 South— from Fairbanks to the Denali National Park Visitor Center.

There is a dog sled sign on the dirt road from our cottage to Fairbanks. It’s not that the dogs and sled will cross the road— they will share the road with traffic (in wintertime, when there is several inches of snow on the ground).
That’s the Alaska Native Veterans’ Honor Bridge over the Tanana River in the distance, constructed in 1967.
This monument is at the entrance of the town of Nenana.
The plaque on the monument reads as follows: During World War II under the leadership of Major “Muktuk” Marston and 21 paid staff, 6,368 volunteers from 7 native ethnic groups and European Americans, whose ages ranged from 12 to 80 years old, and including some 30 women, watched the northern shores of Alaska for enemy movements and were instrumental in the Battle for Attu, a foreign war battle fought on domestic soil. In commemoration of their personal sacrifices for our Freedom.
This canister accepts entries for a ‘lottery’ for which entrants need to predict the exact minute in May of 2024 when this beacon on the ice of the Nenana River will fall over, due to the melting of the ice in spring. (Winner gets several thousand dollars, depending on the number of entries).
The Nenana River Bridge near Healy, not far from Denali National Park, was constructed in 1970.
A view from under the Nenana River Bridge.
The tourist season is over and the rafts are gone, but here is a picture of what the rafts looks like. There is a steep embankment and a launch ramp (without people in, I presume!) for the rafts to the waterside on the left of the picture.
Hellooo Mr Moose. Inside the Denali Visitor Center.
Looking back at Denali mountain, from Healy on Alaska Route 3.
The summit of Denali is the highest mountain peak in North America, elevation 20,310 ft (6,190 m).
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Friday/ Fairbanks, AK 🏞

It’s fall here in the Northern Hemisphere, and the three friends from Seattle made it out to Fairbanks, Alaska, for a long weekend.

Top to bottom: Stepping on board in Seattle; a glacier somewhere over Canada; approaching Fairbanks— and noticing fall’s colors in the woods; a bear at Fairbanks airport; the view from our rented cottage, some 15 miles outside Fairbanks.

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Tuesday/ Canoe Pass bridge 🛶

Two two-lane bridges (Canoe Pass Bridge and Deception Pass Bridge) on Washington State Route 20, connect Whidbey Island in Island County, to Fidalgo Island in Skagit County in Washington State.
The bridges opened on July 31, 1935.
[Source: Wikipedia]

These pictures of the Canoe Pass Bridge were all taken from Pass Island, looking south. The pictures were taken around 4.15 pm. The Salish Sea is to the west, and with high tide at about 6.48 pm today, the tide from the Pacific Ocean was still coming in.

 

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Monday/ at the roastery ☕️

Here’s the scene at the Starbucks Reserve Roastery on Pike street.
We didn’t get to see the roasted coffee beans spill from the roasting barrel into the giant cooling pan, but the place was packed with tourists and locals (a guy wearing a shirt with an Amazon Web Services logo on, for example).

Coffees from Sumatra, Malawi and Viet Nam were being brewed, and we picked Malawi. (My friends that are visiting Seattle, are from South Africa).

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Sunday 🪷

The summer days are rapidly running out, but the dahlias in the little rose garden in Myrtle Edwards Park (the extension called Centennial Park) are still in bloom.

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Saturday/ setting sail 🛳️

Here’s the Norwegian Bliss just leaving the pier in Seattle and setting sail for Sitka, Alaska, shortly after 5 pm this afternoon.
She will go as far as Juneau and then to Icy Straight Point 30 miles across the Alaskan Inside Passage, before turning back to Seattle.

The Norwegian Bliss was built in 2018 and can accommodate 4,900 passengers.
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Friday/ it’s Oktoberfest 🍺

Happy Friday.
Oktoberfest commences tomorrow (in Munich, Germany, of course).
The price of a beer* is expected to be between €12.60 and €14.90 ($13.45 and $15.90), an average of 6.12 percent more than last year.

*One liter of beer! (34 US fluid ounces or about two pints).

The Winzerer Fähndl (a famous crossbow shooter’s club) was founded in 1895 and has been a presence at Oktoberfest ever since. (The annual German Crossbow Shooting Championships take place next to the beer tent). They used to call the main Paulaner beer tent home but moved to the Armbrustschützenzelt in 1926.
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Thursday/ Mowich lake, one more time 🦌

I made a final run out to Mt Rainier National Park today, to pick up the Wonderland Trail hikers where they had started eight days ago: the campground at Mowich Lake.

It was a stunningly tranquil and beautiful blue-sky day out at Mowich Lake, elevation 4,929 ft (1508 m).
The name “Mowich” derives from the Chinook* jargon word for deer.
*The Chinook Indian Nation is made up of the five western-most Chinookan speaking tribes at the mouth of the Columbia River.
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Tuesday/ Sourdough Ridge Trail ⛰

I made another run to Sunrise Visitor Center on the slopes of Mount Rainier on Monday morning. (My hiking party needed me to help them retrieve their food for the next four days. It was in a cache down by the White River Campground, an arduous trek by foot from where they were on the mountainside).

I took the opportunity to walk up to the Sourdough Ridge Trail to the north of the visitor center. The summit of Rainier is then to the west.
There was a little drizzle on the mountain early in the morning.
It took a while for the clouds and fog to clear, and for the snow-capped summit to reveal itself for a picture through the trees.

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Monday/ may we never forget 🎀

A relative of one of the victims pays her respects at the Wall of Names before a ceremony commemorating the 22nd anniversary of the crash of Flight 93 during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks at the Flight 93 National Memorial on September 11, 2023 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
[Posted at nbcnewyork.com   Picture Credit: Jeff Swensen/ Getty Images]
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Sunday/ it’s a wrap 🪲

The US Open tennis tournament is a wrap*— and I believe this coat with a green sheen, on a Tesla Model Y, is a wrap as well.

*Novak Djokovic (Serbia, 36) beat Danill Medvedev (27) in straight sets in today’s Men’s Singles final. I pay my respects to Djokovic begrudgingly.  I am not a fan of his.

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Saturday/ congrats, Coco! 🏆

Coco Gauff (19) is the first American teenager to win the US Open since Serena Williams won the tournament in 1999 at 17.

Coco Gauff (above, USA, 19) ran down just about all the shots that Aryna Sabalenka (Belarus, 25) blasted at her, neutralizing Sabalenka’s aggressive play.
Final score: Gauff 2-6 6-3 6-2.
[Photo: Karsten Moran for The New York Times]
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Thursday/ at Sunrise 🌅

Located in the northeast corner of the park at an elevation of 6,400 ft (1 950 m), Sunrise is Mount Rainier National Park’s highest visitor center.
It is only open from early July to early September.

The butterfly is a mariposa copper (Lycaena mariposa), and on the log is a Clark’s nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana) and a Townsend’s chipmunk (Tamias townsendii).

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Wednesday/ Mowich Lake 🏞

This morning, I dropped off the hiking party of two (my friends visiting from South Africa) at the Mowich Lake campground on the slopes of Mount Rainier.

Mowich Lake is where they will start out on Thursday morning, on the Wonderland Trail/ Northern Loop Trail for an eight-day hike.

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Tuesday/ washed out 😢

Blue diamonds, strike ’em anywhere
First we caffeinate then incinerate
We’ll get you
And sparks will fly in the summer air
Did you pull out of your stall
Maybe I’ll see you after all

[Chorus: Stephan Jenkins]
Hold me down, I want to find out
We say no ’cause I live my life like a burning man
Like a burning man, a burning man
Like a burning man
And I won’t get enough until my legs are broken
– Lyrics from ‘Burning Man’ by Third Eye Blind, 1997

It’s nice to see the stranded— stranded in mud, in the desert!— festivalgoers to this year’s Burning Man are able to finally make an exodus from the muddy grounds there.

‘Burning Man attendees say learning to live with the unexpected is part of the program’ – headline from an NPR report.
Torrential rains disrupted this year’s event. It appears to me from this picture as if the wood pyre (a ‘burning man’ effigy) was not set alight this year. 
[Picture from official Burning Man website]