Jared in Alaska: August 2009

Hey All,

Just got back from a fun trip to Katmai National Park. Cheri got another free ride to Anchorage, so we hopped a plane across Cook Inlet to King Salmon, then a small float plane to Brooks Camp in the park. Brooks is famous mostly for bear viewing. There is a short river between two huge lakes that the salmon swim up every summer, and the bears are there to greet them. So we spent a few days chasing them around and snapping photos and such. We met up with an old co-worker of mine who now works there for an evening and she showed us around and fed us well.

Then we boarded a very tall bus (for the river crossings) for a 20 mile ride out to the the Valley of 10,000 Smokes, where we would spend the next 4 days living out of our backpacks. This valley is not filled with pot-smokin' hippies as my loving brother suggested, it is filled with hundreds of feet of volcanic ash from the 1912 eruption of the Novarupta Volcano. The ash covered the river valley, causing the trapped water to superheat into steam and escape to the surface through thousands of thermoils, hence the name. Scientists of the time thought the smokes would continue forever, but they were wrong, and by now they are just little pedastals of brightly scorched red, orange, purple, and white rock. The rivers quickly eroded back through the ash to the bedrock to form ominous and difficult to cross mini canyons. It was a neat scene. Kind of like hiking on the moon. We spent all of the first day trying to locate a place to cross the river without falling to our dooms, then made it to an abandoned USGS research building near the volcano on the second day. Spent the night in those luxury accomodations, and then hiked up to the volcano itself, still smoking, and climbed to the top. Then a two day hike out, bus ride, and plane flight back to Anchorage.

It was a geologically and biologically interesting trip and well worth the mucho dinero paid to fly there.

The first bear we saw.