One Man's Alaska

For some reason it feels like I should show the Denali entrance sign as well.

I have a few pictures of the town as well, but nothing great. I'll be going back next week, so I'll get some more then. FWIW the Princess people seem to have taken over half the town.

I also made my first trip into Denali yesterday. It was as beautiful as I remember it. I'll share three pictures here.

The first picture is from the Parks Highway driving up to Denali. I like it because it shows the fireweed growing on the side of the road and the mountain range in the distance.

I forgot to mention before that I think the river is at least 200' across in the area where I'm skipping the rocks, maybe 300'. I need to find a way to measure it. (Just thought of one way -- the bridge!) I drew a good crowd last night, skipping a few more rocks about half the width of the river. Some day maybe I'll be known as the rock skipper of Talkeetna. :)

It's 6 p.m., Tuesday evening. There's a knock at the front window. It's the squirrel. I open the front door. "What's up squirrel?"

"Another beautiful day" he says, pausing and looking at the clear sky. "You got any more of those white corn tortillas?"

"Yeah, sure, just a minute." I step back inside to get him a tortilla, and he comes to the doorway and looks inside. "Hey, nice place. You got heat in here?"

I hand him the tortilla. "Yeah, a Monitor 2200. A free-standing kerosene heater, over there" I say, pointing to the unit in the living room.

Living here in my quiet, television-free, two-story bungalow on the Alaskan Rivieria (see Maurice Minnifield), sites like YouTube are great for taking music breaks. I just re-discovered a song named "Not an Addict" by K's Choice, and my neighbors and I can't seem to listen to this song loud enough. There are a couple of good versions on YouTube, one live-ish clip from '97, and an acoustic version.

As much as anything the Talkeetna Moose Dropping Festival is a big music celebration, with two days of music from Alaskan performers. One of my favorites was Melissa Mitchell, shown here:

It's easy to forget how REALLY REALLY BIG the Denali mountain range is, even if you live here.

One of the more surreal "only in Alaska" things I see here is a young boy, less than 10 years old, driving an ATV around Talkeetna. I usually see him about every third day. I'll be walking along the side of the road as he rides by, usually with a younger girl on the seat behind him. As he's driving by he's always real nice and smiles and waves. He looks like a kid from a commercial on tv, but I can't think of what commercial it is.

Squirrel generations

It turns out that the squirrel goes back to two previous generations of renters here. I asked the people who lived here before me if they knew of him, and they said oh yeah, they had a picture of him eating the wicker chair that's on the deck, and the renter before them also fed him.

The Talkeetna Moose Dropping Festival parade just finished. Hundreds of people lined the streets street to watch it. Highlights included the VFW gentlemen that started it, followed by the bagpipe players (my personal favorite; they could have played for a while). After that I think the lady on the bicycle being pulled by the sled dog was next best, followed by the hound dog barking out the side window of an SUV.