One Stop Closer To Valdez

Fireweed

Pretty lake on the Glenn Highway between Palmer and Glennallen.

The reflection is just........ ~sigh~

My creative picture of yellow flowers framing the glacier in the back. (there's a story behind this, you will understand when you read the blog)

Chip taking a picture of me taking a my "creative glacier picture"

Road damage

Frost Heave damage

Our campsite next to the lake!

We can tell we have been in Alaska a while because the Lupines have given way to the Fireweed. According to the young ladies on our Flightseeing trip that is a sign that summer is coming to an end when the Fireweed goes from budding to seed. Then there is 3 weeks left of summer. I am going to have to keep an eye on them and see what happens. It took us another 4 days to get to Valdez but only by choice. Along the way we kept seeing these beautiful glassy ponds and just had to stop and take a picture or 10. It's no wonder we don't get over 150 miles a day. We stopped to take pictures of a glacier we could see in the distance that the Milepost said was 4 miles wide. From our vantage point we could not imagine it being that large but maybe. I could see all these yellow wildflowers along the highway and I thought they would be a great accent in front of to the glacier. So I took off across the road. I got a few pictures and then headed back. Between where I was and the motorhome was an area of grass, flowers and shrub stumps. This area started at the road level and dipped down then headed back up to the parking lot where the motorhome was. As I was cutting through the grass and looking at where I was headed and not where my feet were I tripped on a stump! I was flat on my belly before I could even make a sound. We were laughing so hard, I had grass stains on my knees, and I haven't had grass stains on my knees since I was a kid. After we stop laughing and trying to figure out how that just happened, I relaxed and felt something in my T-shirt. When I looked down my collar this huge moth flew out practically hitting me in the nose, I am not kidding you it had to be at least 1 1/2 inches long. Even Chip saw it fly away and said "that was a big moth"! That did it we were laughing again! Chip had taken a couple pictures of me walking across the road it is too bad he didn't get one of my face plant in the grass. NOW that would have been funny! I checked myself to make sure I wasn't harboring anymore critters before getting in the motorhome and getting back on the road. We stopped at Lake Louise State Park. The park was 17 miles down a 19 mile long road, but it was paved. The only thing was the frost heaves made it looked like a black version of ribbon candy with a yellow stripe in it (the kind you see only at Christmas). Luckily the entire road was not that bad but we did have to drive about 30 miles an hour the entire 17 miles. So it took us 40 minutes to go 17 miles. Was it worth it? Of course it was! Just to see an area we had not seen and most people would not see because they were too busy getting from point A to point B is always worth it. All along the road you could see pond after pond and could just imagine moose standing in them during the winter eating the grass with steam coming off their warm bodies. But not today! The campground was able to accommodate a rig our size but the sites were not very level. So we picked one site then had to move to another in order to get level. As we were walking the campground, stretching our legs after sitting for a few hours, we noticed another section of sites right next to the lake. How we didn't see them when we drove in I will never know. Because we love being by the water we contemplated moving ****Look out at other campsites and foliage or look out at the lake??**** Hmmm?? We moved! AGAIN. Now we were happy! Sitting right by the lake, looking out at the water and listening to thunder! Could it get any better? After a short cloud burst (I didn't know they had thunder storms in Alaska) we went for a walk to explore the surrounding area. There were no bear warnings in or around the campground so I assumed there were no bears in the area, and we didn't see any. Actually we didn't see anything except little birds flitting from tree to tree and they were so fast you could not even tell what they were. But we did see lots of Fireweed. That is a very pretty wild flower, I wonder if it would grow at home?