North To Alaska, Sou'west to Soldotna

Editor's note: not everything included here was written while on the trip, but the bit below I pounded out during my first night in the wild reaches of the Kenai Peninsula. The pictures' captions, though, are so fresh and so clean.

My friends, I no longer fear Hell, because I’ve survived a 13 hour flight where they made me watch Hitch and Million Dollar Baby, but I no longer wonder about the existence of Heaven, because surely Soldotna isn’t far off.

At the moment, (June 5, 2005 – 3:40pm Soldotna time, 7:40pm Buffalo time) I’m comfortable in the confines of our cabin, hidden from the slight rain and the mosquitoes, and sufficiently liquored up. Since it’s only our first day in the outer reaches of civilization, we won’t be fishing until tomorrow (we only just now got our licenses). Today, we’re supposed to rest, make sure we have all the gear we need (read: “make sure we have all the jerky we need”) and force our bodies to accept the four hour time difference. Jet lag wasn’t really that bad, but add to it the fact that it was still light last night at 11pm when we passed out in a port-induced stupor, and we can see why our collective physiologies might be a bit ticked off.

We actually touched down in anchorage yesterday, around 2:30pm by the local clocks. That gave us enough time to rent our annoying-tourist SUV (an escalade or an excursion, I think. It’s red.), and take in some of the native sites. I thought it would take at least a few hours for us to stop saying, “My good Christ, look at the mountains”, but if that point exists, we haven’t crossed it yet. Last night, we found our way to the swanky part of the metropolis (no hunter’s orange camouflage allowed) and had dinner at The Marx Brothers Club. Sorry to say, it wasn’t the Marx Brothers you’re thinking of, so the “how he got in my pajamas, I’ll never know” jokes
wore off pretty quick. But these Marx Brothers had a wine list to die for, and perhaps the best duck I’ve ever had in my life. We drank like sailors, a task made easier by the copious sunlight – “it’s still early afternoon, I can have another bottle…”, said the drunk boys at 10:30pm. We didn’t make it to midnight, but I’m told it didn’t get even remotely dark until 2 this morning.

The drive from anchorage to Soldotna was memorable for three reasons. 1) The view. My good Christ, look at these mountains. 2) The moosen. We saw three! Those fuckers are big, I’ll tell you what. 3) The quotes. My two favorites were: a) “Even in the Wal-Mart parking lot, the mountains are amazing.” and “Out of my way, jerk-ass! We’ve got a ton of alcohol!” I’m pretty sure any other conversation among our troupe so far has been in some way a Simpson’s reference.

Tomorrow, we’re meeting our guide in Seward at 6:15am to catch halibut. Seward is along the southern edge of the Kenai Peninsula, about two hours away. So, yeah, wake up call in 11 hours. Take that, collective physiologies...

This pic was taken as soon as we got out of Anchorage. The mountains really were breathtaking - at one point I was actually mad at myself for never seeing them in person, and upset that we didn't have any real rock climbing scheduled for the trip.



In retrospect, I imagine I'd suck at rock-climbing, so I was still pretty happy looking at them from afar, warm and drunk.


John took this one. His camera is better at shooting photos from a moving car, and if I was more artistic about these things I'd talk about how well he used nature (the tree, the coulds, etc.) as a frame. Or whatever.

This was actually our second moose sighting, but no one had their cameras out in time for the first one. We pulled over to get a picture of this one, a move that probably made the locals roll their eyes. Yeah well, when they're in Buffalo, oohing and aahing at a chicken wing, we'll see who's touristy then.


The Tower Rock Lodge had four or five individual cabins, a mess hall, and this main house, which kind of served as a common area for everyone.


So that was our first day in Soldotna. I passed out pretty much right after dinner, but even though we had a 3:45am wake up call the next day, John and Louis pulled all-nighters partying it up with the lodges owners. Click here to go on to Monday and read about how they both out-fished me, hungover and half-asleep.