"Wild" Alaska-Day One

So I'm having a bit of a hard time getting things together for this post. It has already been over a month since we got back from Alaska, and I'm still working on organizing our photos from the trip. I thought I'd better get SOMETHING posted--better incomplete than not at all.

We drove to St. Louis from Jefferson City, then flew to Minneapolis, then to Fairbanks (about a 6 hour flight). We arrived in Fairbanks about 8:00 pm, where Elisabeth and Dallin met us in the truck with camper in tow. After filling up the camper's tank at the "Water Wagon" (a coin-op water pumping station--new experience #1), grabbed some Arby's for dinner and then we were off to meet Paul somewhere out in the boonies to pick him up from his week at work at Pogo Mine.

On the way out of civilization, we passed North Pole--not THE north pole, but a town on the outskirts of Fairbanks. Yes, it had candy cane light poles, a Christmas House, and giant Santa statue.

After picking up Paul, we drove for about an hour and pulled off the road to camp for the night. Part of the itinerary we had requested was fishing. So all I knew about this camping trip was that we were going to fish. No clue where, or how long it would take to get there. So when we stopped by a river, I thought we were at our destination. It looked like a perfectly good fishing spot to me! Of course, it wasn't even close to being dark, so I was really confused about why we were stopping so early. Well, it turned out we had a long drive ahead of us to get to Chitina and the Copper River where we were going to fish--this was no sissy fishing expedition. So we spent the "night" there, and got up in the morning to start the 6 hour trip to Chitina.

One of the strangest things to me was completely losing track of time (new experience #2). It would be 11 o'clock at night and look like 7 o'clock in Utah. The sun never gets very high in the sky, and it only dips down below the horizon for a couple of hours at around 1:30 am. Then it just looks like dusk. It was weird how your body starts to feel kinda tired, but then it's not getting dark so there's no trigger to go to sleep, so you get a second wind around 11:oo pm and just keep doing stuff. It's pretty cool, but I was exhausted when I got home!

I realize now how utterly unprepared I was to take in the vastness of the size of Alaska. I thought the river we were camped near looked big, but little did I know what we had in store.