In Wasilla we went to the Iditarod HQ. We saw a video about the racers and dogs and got to hold the Alaskan Husky 7-week old puppies. The Iditarod is the longest dog race in the world. Covering 1,150 miles from Anchorage to Nome, a musher and about 16 dogs typically cover the distance in about 10 days. There is a really cool short video about the race at www.iditarod.com Its pretty mesmorizing.
A family from Italy came to see the dogs. I don't think that their two sons had really seen dogs before. The older boy was too scared to come see the puppies, but the younger son just walked into the kennel and sat down. The puppies immediately climbed on top of him and started to lick his face. It was pretty funny, but after a couple minutes the boy said in English, "I want out." So I helped him out. His mom came running back from the car with a huge bottle of hand sanitizer and she sanitized his whole face.
All over Alaska there are these drive-thru coffee houses. Lots of them have very creative names. We liked the Aroma Borealis the best.
We arrived in Talkeetna, the staging town for climbers who attempt to climb Mt. McKinley (Also called Denali- Athabascan for "The High One"). At 20,320 ft it is the tallest mountain in North America and it is also one of the most challenging mountains to climb because of its location near the arctic circle which causes crazy weather patterns on the mountain. I guess in summer it can still reach -40 degrees on the mountain and in winter it has been recorded at -100 degrees fahrenheit. I guess that at the top there is only 47% of the oxygen found at sea level. Because of the high latitude, altitude illness is a huge problem.About 1200 people attempt to climb the mountain each season and only about 50% reach the summit. There are usually several deaths each year, mainly due to avalanches and falls through crevaces. Climbers must be flown onto the glacier with all their stuff- over 100 lbs of food and gear. They set up a cache of food and then bring half their stuff up to the next station. They are roped to their climbing partners, so that if one climber falls into a crevace hopefully the others can stop the fall. Once they reach the next station, they go back down, spend the night and bring the second half of their stuff the next day. The climb high, sleep low method helps with the altitude sickness- as most climbers do not use supplemental oxygen. But it also means that the climbers pretty much end up climbing the mountain twice. Climbers usually take about 3 weeks to climb the mountain. After the grueling trip to the top, the trip down from the summit only takes about 2 days.
Its a pretty serious mountain that is covered in clouds about 2/3 of the time. They say it is so big that it creates its own weather, as storms approach the mountain range they butt up with Denali and get caught there. Weather on the mountain can change in just a couple minutes, from sunny to whiteout conditions. We learned all this from our knowledgeable bus drivers and also the park rangers. We were totally going to climb the mountain, but we forgot to bring our mountaineering gear. And our climb up Flattop was pretty much equivalent to climbing Mt. McKinley anyway... ;)
Talkeetna was a really cute town. Lots of shops and restaurants. We ate at the Roadhouse. It had great food and free wifi. We pretty much hung out in there the whole night chatting with a woman from Maryland. We slept at a campground at the end of main street.
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