A couple thousand shutter releases later:
Get fast lenses. The 200mm with teleconverter will be better than a cheap 300mm if the 300mm is a couple stops slower. You won’t have much of a choice of where you’re shooting from if you’re in a tour group. To get acceptable handheld shots on a [...]
The previous entry is Denali part two.
June 11, June 12
In Anchorage, we said good-bye to Tour 21. We’d later bump into people from the tour at the airport — there are only so many flights leaving Anchorage on a given day — but we were on our own now, with Holland America’s guidance now [...]
The previous entry is Denali part one.
June 10
One of the stories Judith told us on the long bus ride down from Prudhoe Bay was about the time she flew on one of the flightseeing tours with a friend of hers to see Mt. McKinley (also called Denali, its Native American name; I’ll use the two [...]
The previous post was the Dalton Highway and the Yukon.
June 9
We ate breakfast — a buffet — at the hotel in Fairbanks. After the somewhat limited dining choices over the past couple of days (I think the Yukon restaurant waiter thanked us for dining with them and joked that “we know you have so [...]
The previous entry is the Dalton Highway and Coldfoot.
June 8
We were still above the Arctic Circle, so it was bright daylight when we left Coldfoot to travel the remainder of the Dalton Highway to Fairbanks early in the morning. This leg of the journey would be less interesting than the one on the North [...]
The previous entry is Prudhoe Bay.
June 7
At that time of year, you can only tell whether it’s early or late in Prudhoe Bay by looking at the clock. The featureless overcast and shadowless landscape annihilates the sense of space and time. After leaving Dead Horse, the highway stretches off unendingly into the flat [...]
The previous entry is Seward and Fairbanks.
June 6
Prudhoe Bay and the town of Dead Horse are at the far end of the Alaskan road system, some 250 miles of gravel road beyond the last service station at Coldfoot Camp (summer population, about 30) on the Dalton Highway. Until a few years ago, access [...]
The previous entry is Hubbard Glacier.
June 5
Debarkation was at 6AM. We actually had been scheduled to leave closer to noon, but opted for this earlier time. The noon passengers would be conveyed to Anchorage from Seward by bus; the 6AM passengers would go by train. Four hours on a train sounded better [...]
The previous entry is Sitka.
June 4
For the Skagway glacier paddling excursion, the tour guide noted that there’s one ultimate answer to any question about why something is the way it is in this part of Alaska: the glaciers did it. Why are there seals here? Because there’s a lot of fish, which are [...]
The previous entry is Skagway.
June 3
In retrospect, Sitka was the first time we went explicitly looking for wildlife rather than geological formations and coincidentally coming across wildlife. The Sitka shore excursion was “Sea Otter Quest and Raptor Center”, in fact, but first we first had to go through a procedure called “tendering” before getting [...]