Alaska Road Trip, June 2026 - when you know better

    So easy and protected to imagine an event in your future that, with repeated summarizing in the mind’s eagerness and quiver of immanence of arrival, we quite lose perspective of how life’s river in reality carries her current the thing to come. Anticipation builds battlements of protection so tightly pressed stone kissing stone that not a wisp of doubt could slither through to remind us that all does not always go as planned.

    For instance, booking months in advance a flightseeing trip over vast flowing glacier valleys and heaving geologic rocks, jagged sharp crags, of Denali National Park’s northern range, one expects clear skies and smooth wind currents in a region historically well known to whip through all four seasons in a brief ten minutes.

    What a display of hermetically sealed egocentricism!

    Entirely forgetful or dismissive of previous letdowns of fondest hopes wilting like heads of heirloom musclan lettuce in a fluke ninety degree day in May. In the geologic history of glacial mountains rising and stretching to unscroll valleys between to capture very sweet snowmelt pouring through their hearts’ concaves, have meandering rivers surging to oceans calibrated their progress to, for a brief moment, achieve blessed equilibrium? Do flowing rivers ever remain the same? Led Zeppelin assures that the song does, but we know rivers, and fickle Alaskan weather patterns, refuse.

    So my K2 flightseeing trip over Denali was postponed that day. Try again tomorrow…

Alaska Road Trip, June 2026 - the flight

    Archepelagos of British Colombia, narrow inlet bays, soft burnished yellow sands lining waving folds of island hill valleys, small rounded outcroppings like rich green jungle-thick sod mounds anchored off soaring cliff edges appear unmoored from larger island tribes of roadless massed land miles distant, solitary, quietly aloof.

    35,000 cruising altitude above curving phalanx of cresting peaks slicing of creamy fog fields, while foam spreads from solid fabric to rent holes revealing vegetation, spring forest, soil dark bodies of spring earth climbing and pouring green valleys, high volcano-cupped round peaks, circling roughly like hands palmed a silver lake of ice with a perfect circle of clear water like an emerald lightly melted by the gentle northern sun on its reflective arc into solstice, leaving a glacier-blue coin.

    Between peaks runs tidal rivers of frozen snow, gray streaks of swept rock and pale brown scattered deposits of earth. The curving round valleys show ripples like a ballroom dress captured in a moment’s flow.