Our airplane landed on Denali glacier<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n
Exploring Talkeetna and Mount Denali.<\/h2>\n
We drove the six hours north to Talkeetna after spending two nights in the charming little town of Homer. Talkeetna is a quaint fishing village nestled near the bottom of North America\u2019s biggest mountain, Denali (formerly known as Mount McKinley). Of course, the original name was in honor of President McKinley, but President Obama changed the name to Denali because that is what the native people call it.<\/p>\n
There are three impressive mountains next to each other: Foraker at 17,400 feet elevation, Hunter at 14,500, and Denali soars to 20,300 feet. The locals say that there are only a few days each year when they can see the top because of the persistent cloud cover. We were lucky to see the top of Denali both days we were there.<\/p>\n
About 1,200 people each year attempt the climb to the top of Denali and several die during the descent. This incredible mountain has the quickest elevation increase in the world. In 20 miles the elevation goes from 300 feet to over 20,000.<\/p>\n
We hired a pilot to fly us in his Cessna 180 up to Denali. We wanted to see it up close but weren\u2019t ready for a climb. It was so thrilling to fly above the rivers and forests toward this towering mountain.<\/p>\n
After about an hour or so we landed on Ruth Glacier which sits atop 3,000 feet of ice at 5,600 feet elevation. We hiked through the snow-covered glacier exploring the various outcroppings of rock. What a thrilling trip that was!<\/p>\n
We enjoyed this charming little town for the rest of the day and drove a couple of hours to Palmer where we returned the spunky car to our friends and prepared to leave for home the next day.<\/p>\n
Our trip was packed full of fun adventures and breathtaking scenery. Our hosts are excellent chefs, so we had many scrumptious meals including their own halibut and salmon as well as smoked salmon dip. It was definitely a trip of a lifetime!<\/p>[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dennis, his son Jeff, and I were off on a grand adventure to visit friends in Alaska. I was so excited about the trip because I had never been to Alaska, and it was at the top of my bucket list. It turned out to be a trip of a lifetime! On Thursday, July 29, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":373,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nonprofitkinect.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nonprofitkinect.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nonprofitkinect.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nonprofitkinect.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nonprofitkinect.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/nonprofitkinect.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1243,"href":"https:\/\/nonprofitkinect.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions\/1243"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nonprofitkinect.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nonprofitkinect.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nonprofitkinect.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nonprofitkinect.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}