Our plane trip over Mt. Denali & the Alaska Range

Excursions

In our little 5-seater floatplane, we flew over the Alaska Range and Mt. Denali, the tallest peak in North America at 20,320 feet. The mountains are so huge and so tall that with nothing but rock and snow below you, it's very hard to have any sense of scale at all. At one point, when we were looking at the deep snowdrifts on some of the mountains, we supposed that they might be as much as 100 feet deep. But our pilot corrected us and said that they're actually more like 1/4 mile deep -- we were just too far away still to tell, even though we thought we were within a couple hundred yards of the side of the mountain! The mountains and glaciers below us were truly awe inspiring!

The Alaska Range

My dad (with the camera on the right) and the pilot, with Mt. Denali in the background

That's a glacier

Mt. Denali

Alaska Vacation

My family went on a cruise in southeastern Alaska at the end of August. It was more beautiful there than I had imagined! We did all sorts of fun things -- from fly fishing for salmon to kayaking in Sitka to flying over the Alaska Range and Mt. McKinley to admiring a 74 pound cabbage at the state fair. Our trip to Alaska was a true adventure!