Alaska kayaking adventure!

Herein lies the account of my daring adventures during my 7-day kayaking adventure through Alaska. Read on, if you dare!

This whole thing started when my friend Marek suggested over dinner that a kayaking trip to Alaska would be fun. We were both so excited by the idea that we had booked the entire trip, airfare and all, less than a week later.

The travel guitar I purchased recently has come in very handy, let me tell you:


After arriving at the Anchorage airport at midnight Saturday night / Sunday morning, we had planned to just bum around town until our scheduled departure from the train station at 5:45 am. We spent a few hours at the local hot spot Humpy's, where we enjoyed drinking, dancing, and general tomfoolery until the bar closed and they kicked us out. Thanks to Diane, Libby, and Shelley for showing us out-of-towners a good time. And thanks to Daryl for randomly handing us double shots of Grey Goose.

With no where to go for the next 3 hours, we wandered into the Hilton resort, where they let us order a pizza and have it delivered in the lobby. Here we are enjoying a Steak Chipotle pizza at 4:00 in the morning:


Fun little landmark piece in front of the Anchorage train station:


We had a nice relaxing train ride through the mountains, where we took the chance to sleep a bit also:


I ran into a guy named Steve who had brought a travel harp with him. He was having problems tuning it, so I asked for a go at it. Of course because of my obsession and talent at being able to tune and play anything with strings on it, I tuned up the 26-string harp by ear and was plunking away at it in no time at all.


I then of course grabbed my travel guitar and had a little jam session with Steve on the travel harp.


Random beautiful Alaskan scenery from the train:



Here's Marek and I in the town of Seward, enjoying only one of two sunny days we had on the entire trip:


I also took the opportunity to do some painting on a neat watercolor travel set I brought:


Our group hiked up to a nearby glacier:



Here's me with my new friend Gunthar from Germany, (photo taken by my new friend Horst, also from Germany)


Nature!


This shot is actually underneath the glacier, where a river of water was flowing underneath. The white on the bottom is actually water, but just reflecting the white ice above it. I actually laid down on the ground and held the camera way inside to get this shot.


Stormy boat ride to our campsite:


Our campsite:


Here's a 360 view, narrated by Marek:


This is a huge wall of snow right next to the campsite.


And now for some kayaking!






It's quite an amazing experience to be paddling across this 3-mile wide bay. The act of doing such a strenuous activity like paddling for a long period of time has an interesting effect on your mind as well… maybe something to do with the endorphins. But it became so serene to be only experiencing my body paddling, tired yet full of energy; the sound of my paddles pushing through the icy water; rain showering lightly on the bill of my old Fender baseball cap and on my ears; the sight of mountainous, snow-covered fjords in every direction; seeing white birds soaring against a background of green slopes which ascended into an oblivion of smoky grey rainclouds.

We're approaching the Aialik glacier:


These pictures were taken about 3/4 of a mile away from the glacier, which is as close as we could get. It's still pretty freakin huge:
We couldn't get closer because as the glacier calves (big ice chunks break off into the sea) it sends out huge waves, which would pitch us right out of our kayaks. And there was ice washed up everywhere:



Another 360 view filmed/narrated by Marek. If you look closely, you can see me waving at one point:


Yeah, paddling around these huge icebergs was hard:


You wouldn't believe how a cup of hot cocoa can really warm you up when it's 30 degrees, raining, and winds blowing at 40mph:

And you'll notice that the slightly grueling conditions are already taking their toll, as we are both starting to look like complete shit.

Here's most of our group:
You can see the Aialik glacier in the background. We had a nice view from it right from our camp.

It was crazy… whenever the glacier would calve, you would hear this tremendous thundering, even from our camp 5 miles away. So even all through the night, you would hear the distant rumble of the calving glacier, or just the groans as the huge valley of 10,000 year old ice cracked and shifted.

And we had these amazing dry suits on, which were entirely water-proof suits. Which meant the only thing that got wet was our head and hands. So if you fell in the water, it would delay hypothermia by a few minutes. Which is good. In fact, when Marek fell out of his kayak during some REALLY heavy currents and was swept out to sea for about 10 minutes or so, I'm damn sure he was glad he was wearing his dry suit.


Or you could just enjoy a nice swim after a hard day's paddle.

Here's where we had lunch one day. We called it the Enchanted Forest:


Nature!


Pederson glacier, and lots of big icebergs:


One of which I was daring enough to swim to! (don't try this at home folks)


And the ice we paddled through on the way back was rather alarming at times:


This had actually thinned out quite a bit. At one point it was so thick it was almost solid, and I didn't dare try to use the video camera then (it was hard enough to do it here).

Some of the scenery we witnessed was almost magical, like something out of a Tolkien novel:


Here's me looking up from the end of a waterfall:


I did actually paddle under/through a huge waterfall at one point. What a rush! (no pictures of that though, our batteries were dying, and the cameras were getting too cold to work properly)

And of course, the day we got picked up the boat to go home, it got gorgeously sunny again:


But that's ok, on the boat we spent the rest of the day on a nice sight-seeing tour of all kinds of neat stuff throughout the bay.

In Alaska, fashion pales in comparison to dryness and warmth. Hence my huge yellow rubber pants that kept me warm and happy throughout the trip:



Here's the 4 of us that were there for the entire 7 days:
From left: Ron Clauson (our fearless leader), Marek, myself, and Kelley.

Random beautiful scenic pictures from the boat:


and I loved this little island:


I'm the king of the world!


LOTS of seagulls:


This is a Musk Ox:

We didn't see any wild there, but we did in fact eat one in the form of a hamburger after we got back to Seward. Tasted like a regular burger, only the meat was a little firmer. We could have gotten a buffalo burger or some reindeer & eggs if were feeling sassy.

And here are all the paintings I did in my little watercolor sketchbook throughout the trip:





And our fearless leader Ron:


I also have to fully recommend Backcountry Safaris for this great experience. Ron Clauson, our guide, is the owner and quite a cool guy to have around in these kinds of settings. Please receive a confident recommendation from me, and check out his website if you ever plan to do any kind of visit to Alaska, as he does more than just kayaking (he even does simple things like the boat sightseeing tour we did on the way back) http://www.backcountrysafaris.com/

And this concludes my the epic Alaskan kayaking adventure! I must say it was filled with so many incredible experiences I can't put them all down here. In this week I saw and didso many things that I will never forget. I just can't enough how much of an awesome exhilarating adventure this has been. I can't wait for the next one, so stay tuned!

PS: here's a look at the post-Alaskan beard. It's funny what simply not shaving for a week and a half will get you.

It's actually federal law up there that all men must grow rugged Alaskan adventure beards.