You will land on a Glacier!
That is what I said to my older daughter. I also promised that they can make the biggest snowball that they like. Both my daughters loved the concept. Since they live in Houston, winter is nice and comfortable for them, but like many of their friends up north, they miss the snow. My girls also watch a TV show that they like a lot, called, Molly of Denali. It is about the lifestyle and daily activity of a 10 year old girl living in Denali National Park area. Molly's mom is a bush pilot. She is always taking Molly to all over the place in Alaska, and snow is a common feature there. Mind you, being a pilot in Alaska is like knowing how to drive a car (well not quite that much, but it is far more common to know how to fly a plane there than anywhere else in the world!). This is simply because, there are not much drivable roads in Alaska, and large part of the state can only be accessed by bush plane. Anyways, getting the long story short, I promised my girls and I will take them to Ruth Glacier, which is to the south side of Mt Denali and will have them land and play on the glacier.
I have another friend who flies commercially for a glacier landing company which does commercial tours and shuttles climbers to Mt Denali. I contacted Leanne before we were heading to Alaska to find out if she is available to give the girls a ride. She was kind enough to arrange a trip for us!
It is always good to have friends, without good friends and good will there is little that can be done in this world.
Yeah, for them that is done and dusted. Next!
To Get There!
I am always fortunate to be a geologist. Being an earth scientist with a career in exploration I have traveled all over the world, mostly to strange places, where many don't travel. Even I don't travel if not for work! However, one of the perks of traveling to strange places is that you get to know a lot of people. Also since of travel in 'strange places' together, you tend to form a friendship and bonding that you typically don't form in your typical business trips to London and Paris (Damn it! I want to travel to Paris on business!!).
Yeah, especially in Alaska, I have a lot of friends that I can call upon on favor. I shamelessly used it on this trip. I wanted to show the girls my workplace essentially. So, yeah, if you guys want to visit this place, it is possible to do commercially. There are flight services out of Talkeetna, AK that will take you there and get you to land on the Ruth Glacier. Look it up, its not that expensive.
It is relatively easy to get to Talkeetna as a day trip from Anchorage. It is about 120 miles to the north of the town and takes about two hours of driving time. Talkeetna is a nice dusty little town with a small main street and shops around it. It been loved too much by the tourists, so I wouldn't stay there. There are plenty of other places to stay nearby and lots of small towns around to get the proper Alaskan charm. However, it is an important bush plan destination and has the higher concentration of commercial bush pilots there. So to make the trip you got to visit it, and then tour companies will take care of it from there.
On this trip we didn't visit the conventional Denali National Park road, we find it crowded at this time of the year. We have visited it before and decided to skip it this time. That's about it. Highly recommended trip if you managed to get this far up north.
I've landed on. Glacier in a helicopter but a skid-plane would be a whole different thing altogether! Just awesome.
Yeah. This is actually quite common up north. Snow is firm but not icy. You almost feel no difference. But Alaska in unique in many ways.
Scary thing over there is the low ceiling:) Notice the top of those granite towers are not visible to you. Alaska is all VFR so you need precision flying in those conditions
I's so keen to get there and experience it; it's wild-kingdom for sure and so far away from what we have here in Australia. I'll get there.
Just on planes...I did a flight in a float-plane over Lago di Como, Italy ones. Amazing. Landing was interesting.
yeah, lots and lots of float planes in Alaska. Almost as frequent as cars :)
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Wow you guys got a 10 person plane for the glacier. Our visit to the one in New Zealand were only helicopters so we took 2 helicopters for our group of 8.
Yeah, that's the only type of plane that was available....they commercially fly them
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Did you get a discount or was this a special favor?
Just the gas :)
Wow, landing on a glacier must have been a unique experience. If I may ask, how does the experience differentiate from a concrete runway?
It feels very similar, less bumpy actually.
I am thinking the opposite, thank you for the reply.
Spectacular view, All the photographs are just stunning, everything looks so fantastic Thanks for sharing. I also love photography and traveling a lot, Capture and Explore the mighty Himalayas on my Mountain Bike.. do drop by when you are free.
Thank you. Can't wait to get back there.
What an awesome adventure for your girls. And I’m sure you had fun too.
Amazing how the landscape (judging from the photos) is similar to Patagônia and the Andes range. Absolutely stunning.
It is actually quite similar to Patagonia. The inner Denali for sure.
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Hiya, @lizanomadsoul here, just swinging by to let you know that this post made it into our Honorable Mentions in Daily Travel Digest #1286 .
Your post has been manually curated by the @pinmapple team. If you like what we're doing, please drop by to check out all the rest of today's great posts and consider supporting other authors like yourself and us so we can keep the project going!
Become part of our travel community:
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Although I grew up in the north, I had a completely different landscape. And the first association (for me) that causes Alaska is the cycle of northern stories by Jack London. So thank you for your photos! These images will complement my imagination when I reread my favorite author again :)))
দাদা কিভাবে আনারসের কোড ব্যবহার করে? বুঝিয়ে বললে উপকার হতো।