Alaska @ MindSay

I found this beautiful...

 

My first year in college there was a duo who played a local hotel lounge that introduced me to MMM.  Though everyone mostly only knows his song "Wildfire", his album "Peaks Valleys Honky Tonks and Alleys" is one of my favorites.  It can't be found anywhere, not even on his own website! 

Odd how back then I identified with songs of travelers and one of his tunes became a fast favorite, "Once A Drifter".

But another made me think of a childhood friend I had a crush on, she was headed to Texas to train with the US Air Force and the song "Texas Morning" is about a guy who goes there to search for a girl he knows asking about her at a roadhouse in the early hours of the morning.  The final strains of the song though are simply a great example of his lyrical art, the idea of driving in search of something/someone being compared to being a paper cup blown by the wind.  (can you see it? skittering in a half circle one way, then back in the other direction?)  A lonely song yes, but I love this last minute or so - here against the Alaska afternoon south of Denali National Park :

After some camping and getting to know Alaska's State Bird pretty well

 

 

I traveled on towards Anchorage with a couple of moose sightings along the way :

 

I decided that going to Anchorage would instead be more camping, but this time, all the way down in Seward. I thought I'd split the difference between camping and moteling, and get a rustic cabin instead.  Barebones, but electricity, heat and screens in the windows - this has been my "night" hideaway for the past 3 days (yeah, "night", tonite?  sunset 12:06AM, sunrise 3:24AM woo-hoo!).  This was midnight last night:

 

But I went to Seward to treat myself to a seacruise (woo-eee!). 

 

8 hours on the highseas except the water was so calm it was amazing!  Starting out of the harbor we immediately got a closeup view of a sea otter which we were to see everywhere, all day long

 

Next was a hillside where we spotted the unfortunate balance of nature, at the bottom of a cliff two eagles and a crow feasted on the remains of a mountain goat that took a tumble.  Still up on the grassy slope a momma grazed while her kid lay comfortably :

 

On another hillside of a nearby glacier field, I finally got a snap of a wild bear foraging

 

Back in the water, we were also hopeful of sighting a whale or two even though this was not specifically a whale watching tour.  As I understand it, the dramatic shot of a fluke fin is the result of a whale that has surfaced in order to dive deep.  They typically have breached several times to take a breath and on the final surfacing, they break the rise more fully, and get the fluke extended to help make the deep dive where they will stay down for up to 7 or 8 minutes.  The trick is it happens fast!  We only saw one of those events while watch 3 seperate pods of Orca (killer) whales - no, I missed it!  The best I got was this shot of one breaching with his dorsal fin up - they aren't huge animals, so sorry, this is no Moby Dick moment, LOL!

 

Farther in the cove we got our first glimpes of Harbor Seals - here's a pup that was sharing a rock with a dozen adults

Among the seals, the bull is always the largest and the most vocal, here one tries to herd his harem away from the boat

 

All the way in the cove we spotted a bald eagle who seemed to content himself with sunning on his own rock :

 

We ventured back into the open sea and around a peninsula to go check out a glacier, pay no attention to the cracking noise and splashing of tons of ice into the sea, there is no global warming here, move along!

 

Also in the bay which was clogged with floating icebergs, we spotted a momma sea otter with her pup :

 

We then headed out to some nearby islands to see some rookeries.  I've missed seeing them in Ireland, but finally got to see a real live puffin!

 

On the rocks below, were colonies of Stellar Sea Lions, some seemed to live for posing for passing boats

 

 

Sharing the cliff ledges with the Puffins and the seagulls, were penguin look-alikes, Common Murres :

 

 

In the open water we spotted more spouting and rushed to investigate - reports were of humpback whales in this area, again, no dramatic fin slap or flukes, but we got to ease up among them for a few minutes before they took their deep dives

 

On the way back to Seward we met up two different times with Dalls Porpoises, black and white like the Orca whales, but the porpoise is only about 7' long compared to the 20' whale, while I missed the leaping in this still shot, I'll put a short video at the bottom of this entry of them as they 'ride the bow' of the boat

 

A last shot taken today as I took a trip up into the hills south of Denali, more glacier snow and lakes and this guy caught me by surprise - he was upended bottom feeding and I couldn't figure out what it was as I went past at 65mph so I slowed, made a u-turn, and saw my first Trumpeter Swan :

 

 

And last, the video of one of the Orca Porpie(?) Porpeese(?)Porpoises.

            Saturday night, the wife and I went with some friends to see 30 Days of Night, the new movie about vampires terrorizing the town of Barrow, Alaska, for…thirty days of night.

            I knew we were doomed as soon as I walked in and saw about twenty other people in the theater.  You know what I’m talking about.  We’ve all had a movie ruined by at least one jerk that thinks he or she is the only person in the theater.  I knew that in a crowd of twenty there had to be at least one.  I wasn’t counting on sixteen. Unfortunately, that sort of thing happens more and more these days.

            Children too often are brought to movies they don’t need to see.  Surprisingly, no rugrats turned out for 30 Days of Night, but how many other times have we tried to enjoy a little sex and violence while enduring a nearby child talking incessantly, kicking our seats, or crossing in front of us every five minutes on their way to and from the bathroom?  It’s really fun when a kid behind you soils their diaper, and no one has the decency to take them out.  People with children should stick to Disney movies, or stay at home and wait for the DVD.

            I realize you can’t really blame a child for acting like a child, but adults who act like children in the movie theater just need a punch in the mouth.  Why can’t anyone sixteen or older go to the toilet by themselves?  Every time one of the gals in the last row got up to go Saturday, four friends followed suit, stomping down the stairs like a herd of Clydesdales.

            Cell phones are another annoyance.  Perhaps the only thing more irritating than the woman two rows down gabbing all through the trailers was the bozo directly in front of me constantly flipping his phone open and shining that damn blue light in my face.  He apparently had opted to go to the movies rather than attend a wake, but someone at the funeral home was kind enough, or, rather, tasteless enough to email him photos of the body in the casket, which he had to look at over and over, and then pass around for the other members of his party to gawk at.

            Don’t you hate it when people decide to eat their evening meal at the movies?  The couple behind us couldn’t have had enough hands to carry everything they bought at the concession stand.  I listened to crinkling wrappers and rattling bags throughout the first half of the picture.  One of them must have been a messy eater, for constant wiping with noisy, rough paper napkins could be heard during most of the second half.

            One thing I failed to realize going into 30 Days of Night was that it’s a comedy.  It must be.  Every time a vampire took another victim, practically everyone who was guilty of any of my aforementioned grievances hee-hawed like a jackass.  The more gruesome the killing, the funnier it was.  I fail to see the humor in someone’s throat being ripped out, but then that’s just me.

            I’ve yelled out “Shut up!” once or twice in a theater, and I’ve turned around and glared at many a person who thought I enjoyed having the back of my seat kicked; but remember that episode of Seinfeld where George decided to do the opposite of what his instincts told him to do?  A guy behind George in a theater kept bugging him, so George turned around and basically went postal on the guy to the delight of the other patrons.

            Perhaps if more of us had George’s gumption, going to the movies would be a more pleasant experience than it has become; and better yet if more people used a little self-control and common sense.  If you engage in the sort of activities I have described, just bear in mind that no one paid $7.50 to watch you.

 

© 2007 by J.D. Lewis