The Last Frontier - part 2

Wednesday morning we traveled from Anchorage down the Kenai Peninsula to the Deakins' place in Nikiski. The drive was fantastic and we were amazed at the beautiful landscape with mountains, one after another, reaching as far as we could see.

We made a number of stops along the way. Here, I would like to mention that Ryan carried a journal and documented the entire trip.  It was a great idea and has been an excellent resource for my blog entries.  He has granted me permission to include his intellectual property in my blog, so I will intermittently include excerpts throughout the remainder of "The Last Frontier" entries.
Today is going to be fun. We didn't do much this morning. We went down, ate breakfast, packed our bags and took off!  You won't believe this view!  Pretty, or what?  There's all sorts of cool waterfalls all over the place.

 We're here at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center.  The Bison are huge and cool too!  Next we went to the mooses.  One got straight up close to us and then it started peeing.  It was disturbing.

Then we saw something cool, even though everything here is cool.  We saw a porcupine that was a house pet for two years.  And in the cage by it were a bunch of elk.  There were muskoxen and there's only 2,500 left in Alaska.  And there was all sorts of caribou.  There was a bald eagle and I got a real feather right off the cage!  There was a great horned owl right next door!   

 

There were even two brown bears, but they were lazy-butts and and just kept sleeping.  Then we went and saw the black bears.  One of them was a show-off and just kept walking back and forth.  We even got a little stuffed animal that was a black bear.

We drove eight miles south of the wildlife conservation to view Portage Glacier, which you can see way-back behind the kids in the picture.  Lisa visited this same glacier fifteen years ago and walked out onto it.  It has "receded" (aka melted) to leave behind Portage lake and is now only a finger between the mountains, leaving the lake and the valley you see.

Lisa's sandwich was crab and shrimp - yum!

We spent most of the day traveling and stopping to see these attractions.  Following a terrific lunch on the Kenai lake, we drove the remaining hour and half to Nikiski.