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The forecast was for cloudy weather, and clouds can add a lot of drama to an aerial scene. So I drove the van to the airport and slept in it outside the hangar. Then it was pretty easy to get up at 5:30, pull the plane out, fly the 20 minutes in the dark to somewhere above the Sierra Nevada. And see this. Then landed in time to hit the Waffle House around 8:00 am.

Epilogue Well folks, that’s it. The end of the 2025 Alaska Expedition. I had started this series of Alaska blog posts with “Day one, Day two, etc.” but soon gave up on keeping track of numbers for each post. Now here we are at day 71, post number 27, and it’s truly been one of the most memorable trips. 70+ hours of flying as well as 8,500 miles on our van. That’s a lot of flying and a lot of…

Truly the highlight of the trip to or from Alaska A local in Hope BC on the way north to Alaska told us we couldn’t miss Stewart BC and Hyder Alaska. I was surprised as I hadn’t heard of these before. We were in too much of a hurry flying north over two months ago, but now on the way home, we decided to take the Cassiar Highway route on the way back through Canada so we could visit. Wow! Highly…

The packrafting down the Tokositna River was our last major Alaska adventure, even though we still had over a week of traveling before heading home. While flying home doesn’t bring the same anxious anticipation as flying north, it’s still really fun and offers some incredible flight-seeing. We took the Cassiar Highway route on the way back through Canada in order to stop at Stewart, BC, and…

We were pretty confident about our decision to launch into the upper reaches of the Tokositna at high water. We had had our helicopter pilot follow the entire route so we could scout for logjams, big rapids, and estimate the amount of floating debris. It looked pretty good. The challenge was stopping for the night on the Tokositna! The water was moving extremely fast (about 10 mph) and there…

I like Valdez. Cool fishing village, good food (Nat’s Shack and The Fat Mermaid),  the spectacular Prince Willam Sound with all it’s glaciers, two good museums and oddly, little domestic-type bunny rabbits running around. We spent a few days in Valdez exploring and sea kayaking. We took a small tour boat (Pangea Adventures) to the foot of the famous 37 mile long Columbia Glacier and then paddled…

Typically, you’ll see us doing human-powered adventures, but what the heck, this was fun. This adventure involved jet-skiing at about 50 mph from Whittier Alaska up a fjord to view a glacier.  These are beefy jet skis that I think are probably almost impossible to turn over. I think the bulk of their business is from cruise ships and it’s probably important for them to return the same number of…

If you are planning a trip to Alaska it’s important to understand the current environment . The last few times I flew north I noticed a trend toward big tires on planes – really big tires (made by Alaska Bushwheels). Now on this last trip, I noticed the trend is reaching a peak.  Big wheels are everywhere. Resident planes at Talkeetna airport If you are a real man, and apparently I’m not, you…

Visiting the famous Miles and Childs Glaciers This is one adventure where flying your own plane makes so much sense. It starts in Cordova which you can’t reach except for a plane or boat. You can take a scheduled flight there, but you’d probably have to stay the night before or after the adventure to make the scheduling fit.  The adventure? An under-the-radar tour via jet boat up the Copper…

How to Fly a Small Plane Over a Big Mountain If you have time and an airplane, the best way to fly over or around Denali / Mt. McKinley is to have patience and monitor the weather. 90% of the visitors to Denali don’t actually see the mountain! We were planning on heading south on the Kenai peninsula when the weather report at Denali was for clear weather in a few days. So we dropped everything…

Trains, Icebergs and Rivers This has to be one of the most fun packraft trips ever. You start by throwing your backpack/packraft into a cargo railcar on the Alaska Railroad and then climbing into a passenger car. You take the train to the Spencer Glacier “whistle stop”. Not a train station or even a ramp, the train stops and you get out on the tracks, then hike a mile or two to the beautiful…

Check out the Harding Icefield The day after silently gliding down Exit Glacier from the Harding Icefield in my Cessna 182 with the power off, we hiked up the same glacier from the bottom. It’s not an easy hike at 8.5 miles and 3,000 feet of elevation gain, but worth it! There are a lot of icefields (where glaciers are born) in Alaska, but not many as accessible as this one. From the top you…

Incredible Iceberg Air Tour I had been to Seward but never out into the nearby Kenai Fjords National Park. The area does have a different feel to it, with incredibly steep forested walls of the fjords leading into iceberg-choked inlets. We decided to do a couple of aerial tours. Like in a lot of Alaska, I flew low at about 1-2,000 feet above the ground unless I needed to climb over glaciers or…

We were told multiple times that we should visit Hope Alaska, more of a local’s secret than a tourist destination. The old gold rush town lies at the north side of the Kenai Peninsula, on the south shore of Turnagain Arm, (Anchorage is north of the Turnagain Arm) near the mouth of Resurrection Creek. It’s a super laid-back charming town and you can camp right on the edge of town overlooking the…

Next up on our Great Alaska adventure are grizzly bears! This was quite safe, since we were in a boat and they were interested in salmon and couldn’t care less about us. The entire day was an adventure since it started and ended with a floatplane ride over Cook Inlet. There are several ways to go bear viewing in central Alaska, many of which involve flying over Cook Inlet to the Katmai area.…

Happy River and Skwentna River Packrafting This was a wild ride, for sure. Graeme and I ended up on a true Alaska Adventure: To start the trip off we flew my plane to the tiny Alaskan village of Skwentna, on the Skwentna River. The Skwenta is a huge river and was just coming off of flood stage. Float Plane over the Skwentna The Happy River, Class III Canyon We hired an amphibious float plane…