Off to the wilds again!

I’m about to take off for a long trip to Alaska. I haven’t been home in over two years, so I am super overdue. I’ll try to put accounts and photos up here, but it seems like the more interesting things happen, the less time I have to report back on them. Funny how that works.

Rough Itinerary
July 25-28 – Ferry from Bellingham, WA to Haines, AK
July 29 – Haines
July 30-31 – Drive from Haines to Hope, AK
Aug 1-5 – Hike Resurrection Pass Trail
Aug 8 – Fly out of Homer to see BEARS!
Aug 16-22 – Probably hiking in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.
End of August – Denali
First week of Sept – Fairbanks
Around Sept 8 – Bonnie flies back to Seattle, Alex drives back to Haines & puts car on return ferry.

Safety
Yes, we each have a first aid kit, and bear spray. The trip to see bears is a guided trip in a place where guided trips go every summer day the weather allows. On our deepest back-country trip, we’ll be accompanied by my dad, who works for a fire department, has been an EMT for about twenty years, and does plenty of backcountry trips on a regular basis.

We’ve got a spot beacon, which links up with a sattelite and sends one of three messages to a select list of email addresses and cell phones. The options are OK, HELP and OH-SHIT-SEND-THE-MOUNTIES. Alex has got it figured out to have the messages go here as well, so you can check them if you like. Coordinates and a Google maps link are included in each message.

I wasn’t planning on bringing my cell phone, but I think I will actually do so, and maybe try to update my voice mail message when I get service, so if you call me you’ll get something along the lines of “Hi, you’ve reached Bonnie’s phone. It’s July 24 and we’re getting on a ferry tomorrow for three days to Haines, Alaska. Still alive, haven’t done too much packing yet.”

So far, (haven’t quite left yet) the only thing that has gone wrong is that my cat, overnight, pulled out my carefully prepared bag of bags of dinner food and chewed a hole in one. Zatarain’s Red Beans & Rice smells like something tasty, so maybe we had better eat that one in a campground rather than on a trail somewhere…

Oh, and there’s apparently a foot of snow in Wrangell-St. Elias, which might melt off or might become two feet of snow before we get there, but we haven’t made any reservations with the air company to fly in for our hike there. Maybe we will bail and go somewhere else?