Alaska’s Seward Highway to Glenn Highway

On our way back up through Soldotna, we picked up some of the sockeye that we’d left there to be processed.  We don’t have any trophy shots of us holding up our salmon because our guide had already fileted them by the time we got back to the boat with our backpack/camera in it.  Boo hoo!  Instead we had to stage some photos for you guys.

But to be honest five pounds of filets doesn’t look like all that much.  (The other ten pounds are still being honey smoked….mmm.) 

We spent last night in Williwaw Campground in the Chugach National Forest.  It rained pretty much all day, but we did have a nice view of one of the nearby glaciers from our campsite.

This morning we stopped off at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, which rescues injured and orphaned animals.  They have about 200 animals.  Some of them are being rehabilitated so they can return to the wild, while other animals have found a permanent home because they arrived too injured or were orphaned very young.

The lynxes are sisters that were rescued from a forest fire when they were just tiny kittens.  And that was the first live porcupine we’ve seen in Alaska…all the others have been lying dead by the side of the road.  (Not the fastest runners, those porcupines.)

After the wildlife park we continued through Anchorage and took the Glenn Highway heading east.  Along the highway, kind of in the middle of nowhere, is the Matanuska glacier.  It’s one of the easiest ones to get to by car.  Once we had parked, it was just a half-mile walk to get out on the ice, and it was nice that we didn’t have to pay extra to have a guide walk us out there.  We’ve decided that glaciers are the “forts” of Alaska.  In the Caribbean, every island had at least one historic fort.  We felt obligated to go take a look at most of them, until we got “forted out”.  I give it maybe one or two more before we are also “glaciered out”.  But it was hard not to be at least a little awed by the Matanuska – especially since there weren’t very many other people there that day so we kind of had it all to ourselves for a little while. (That speck in the red shirt is Kevin.)