A Catsgill Wedding

The main purpose for our trip was to celebrate Julie and my brother, Alan's, wedding. After we had finished in Alaska we flew to New York State to the town of Catsgill. Here in Julie's parents garden, in the shadow of the Catsgill Mountains they married on a gloriously hot summers day.













Amid week long celebrations for the wedding (with far too much drinking, eating and lots of late nights) we managed to fit in one day hike in the Catsgill Mountains. We walked from the Devils Tombstone Campground up to Devils Acre Plateau Shelter. The most striking thing about this walk is how green the bush is on these slopes.







After the wedding we had one afternoon to head up to North Lake, once said to be the most famous view in America, looking down on the Hudson River.

Bear Country - Hiking Denali.

After finishing the canoe trip out of Whittier, we stopped off at Denali National Park on the way back to Fairbanks. This National Park is massive - bigger than the state of Massachusetts's, and access is limited to one gravel road that runs some 95 miles in to the interior. During the summer you can only use this road by taking the bus system that drops you off at your hike.

The park is divided up in to different zones and numbers to each are strictly limited. As you can't book a zone in advance, it is something of a lottery as to which areas are available to hike in. I thought that I would hate this kind of restricted system, - however the necessity of it quickly becomes obvious. The park is a true wilderness with no trails or facilities at all and without some sort of restrictions the place would be overwhelmed.

On the advice of the ranger we ended up with zone 8, which sits behind a critical wildlife zone, so there is no access directly from the road (this is OK though, you can start in a different zone as long as you camp in your zone.)

After dropping down the road to the river we were immediately in bear country. The scrub was thick enough to hide bears and the wind was against us. Good enough reason to start shouting.

Up on the ridge we relaxed a little, but then as we started sidleing around the side of point 4739 we spotted brown moving shapes in the distance. Grizzlies! A mum with two cubs.

We altered course to avoid them, and ended up contouring much higher than we had first thought. A trip in to the side valley was cancelled, when another bear spotted us before we saw it and headed off in that direction.

Instead we headed down to the Tolkat River Valley to camp, a nice location with much less bear sign and good views in each direction. We adopted proper camping procedures for bear country, cooking 100m away from the tent and storing the food also 100m away to make a nice triangle.

The next day was wet, so we walked out to the road mid morning. This gave us time to catch the bus further in to the park, where we spotted more bears and even some wolves.

Prince William Sound - Sea Canoeing

I flew to Alaska a couple of weeks before Alan's Wedding to do a mixture of canoeing and tramping with him. Our first trip was sea canoeing in Prince William Sound.




Just getting to the launching point at the town of Whittier is an experience. It is accessed by single lane road tunnel which has 15 minute traffic flow in each direction. The railway also shares this tunnel with the road. The town itself is very small, we were surprised to find snow down to sea level here, as even in the Alaskan Interior most of it had already gone.



We set out down the Passage Canal in pretty calm conditions and paddled about three hours on the first day, passing Shotgun Cove, where as the name suggests, we were blasted by gusts of winds coming over from the next bay. We camped at Decision Point the first night, being the weekend there were a number of other groups there, including an instructor who seemed somewhat concerned that we had an open canoe in a "Marine Salt Water Environment"





The sea was flat calm the next day and we rounded the point and headed in to Blackstone Bay to have a look at some calving sea level glaciers. This was a big day and it was afternoon by the time we reached them. This area is truly spectacular. We messed around on the edge of the "pack ice" for a bit being careful not to get too close to the ice bergs that kept turning over as they melted. A capsize in Prince William Sound would be very serious as the water temperature was only a couple of degrees above freezing.











We headed back towards Decision Point, but stopped short and camped at a delightful knoll by a small beach. We had views right down to the glaciers and as it doesn't really get dark here at this time of year, we could sit and watch them in beautiful light.



The third day we headed back to Shotgun cove and camped. In the afternoon we took a short walk climbing to the saddle above the cove to look back over in to Blackstone. There were fresh bear prints here too.



The final day was short and the weather had started to deteriorate. There was just enough chop to make it interesting as we canoed back to the town for a fish and chips lunch, before setting off along the Seward highway for Denali.