One of my favorite shops in Anchorage was a place called Octopus Ink Clothing where I found an awesome reusable bag with three humpback whales swimming on it.

Other things that made us smile and had to purchase was this awesome purse I have been caring around made of several fabrics, a needle felted puffin, a moose photo album, a tea/coffee cup hand made and painted with a grizzly bear on it. This life size moose was also a hit, although we did not feel the need to purchase such an item!

In Anchorage, we did a lot of eating as well. I had real salmon that had never been frozen before and actually enjoyed it. Our new photographer friend David cooked us halibut that they had caught a few months prior to us visiting. We stayed in some wonderful bed and breakfasts too!

Along with Anchorage I think about some of the amazing drives we took. Here are some of the photos we took as we traveled to and from this fun city.

Denali has their own dog sled team. They are needed in the winters. They bring out food to the rangers and make sure the trails are safe for people.

We got to pet some of the pups and even see them in action!

Denali National Park is so beautiful and full of so many animals (my favorite part).

We first saw some Willow Ptarmigan, this is the state bird. They are quite unique in the fact that the mother and father raise the babies together. If the mother dies, the father takes care of them.

The mom and dad bird flew away and I looked around and yelled, “LINX!” He was so close to us it was amazingly rare. The bus driver told us that this was only the second one he had seen all year. Not a bad start to our eight hour day.

Next we saw golden eagles.

This was the first bear we saw. He was so far away that I couldn’t even tell where people were pointing.

But throughout the whole day we saw 18 Grizzly bears. We saw 3 sets of mothers with their cubs. These bears are blonde because they are mostly vegetarians. There are no salmon in the park, so they mostly eat soap berries.  These grizzlys only get up to 800 lbs. Where as their relatives the Kodiak Grizzly Bears get up to 1400 lbs.

We also saw Carabou a few times.

I never knew that Red Fox’s came in a variety of colors.

Ground Squirrels were all over the park. Not even slightly afraid of the large bus going by.

This was the view two blocks from our stay in Seward! Breathtaking!

I had heard you would see Dall Sheep all over the drive to and from Seward. The way there, we saw no sheep. I was quite upset and felt that the Dummy Book was wrong, but then just as the book had described, there were cars all along the one lane highway backed up. I yelled to Rich to pull over. We got out just in time to see a mommy and her baby! We got so close to them and they left shortly after we got there.

Brrrr! This was taken at Exit Glacier. We took the hike up to the glacier to get very close to it. We heard that ten years ago you could actually touch the glacier from this spot.

Another wonderful view on the drive. The pretty purple flowers in the background are called Fire Weed. They grow from the bottom up. The Alaskans say that when the flowers bloom at the top, it means summer is over. As you can see, they are at the top. Once it has bloomed all of the way, The green of the stems and leaves turn a brilliant red, hence Fire Weed.

Our first wild life spotting was a Harbor Seal. The whole boat tipped to one side as everyone on the boat needed a photo of this animal.

It was another particularly rainy and windy day. This is rich in his please don’t get me wet outfit. The weather this day was in the 50′s and I was a little cold despite the long johns I had on under my clothes.

We then came across some fantastic Humpback Whales that decided to give us a show. Showing us their fins, tails, and even breaching for us! This really made my heart pump anticipating where they would jump and the giant splash that followed.

We were fortunate enough to see the glaciers calve. This is when parts of the glacier start to fall off. There was a huge one that we had to hold onto the railing for, the wave from the piece of ice falling was rather large. We also found out that the glaciers are blue because it is the only color that we can see, the rest of the colors get stuck inside.

This was about as close as we were allowed to the Stellar Sea Lions. They are on the endangered list.

This is a Tufted Puffin. See his cute little mo-hawk?

I was very much looking forward to seeing the puffins. To my surprise, we found out that puffins are normally an all brown bird. They change colors and grow an extra beak just for mating season. Need to impress the ladies I guess!

Some Sea Gull looking things, I liked the little babies though.

The Common Murre looked like penguins when they stood up. These unique birds lay their eggs on the cliffs with no rocks below them. When the babies see all the adults flying they think that they can also fly. They end up jumping off of the cliff and plummeting to the water. This is where they will spend the majority of their lives and where they ultimately learn how to fly underwater.

We got off the boat at Fox Island for an all you can eat lunch of salmon and prime rib. We also got a half pound of King Crab!

This is the first Bald Eagle we encountered. He looks quite wet.

This Bald Eagle was standing on a dolphin right as we were pulling into the harbor. Beautiful!

To see photos from the rest of our trip please click here.

Our trip started out on sort of a bad note, we missed our flight. But when we talked it out, it was not a big deal. Although there were tears involved. I hate having to be so emotional. We were going to originally be arriving in Anchorage around 9pm (midnight our time). So we were only planning on sleeping there. We got a flight the next morning and everything worked out perfectly. We rented a car and were off to Seward as originally planned.

It happened to be rainy and quite windy. Stepping out of the car on the side of the road to take a photo was a littler harder than we had imagined. I felt like the door was going to fly off of the rental car. The wind was so strong it was pushing us, we had to run back to the car against the wind. My hair pretty much tells the story.

On our drive we stopped at a little fishing spot. We didn’t know then why the water was so blue. Later we found out that this is water from a glacier. The runoff of the water picks up the silt found in the glaciers and makes the water very thick. Salmon can not even swim in this water because it is too thick.

To see photos from the rest of our trip please click here.

We look forward to sharing our photos of the trip!

We are also going to be getting our photos done as a birthday gift for Rich. Chris from www.chriscupp.com will be doing that shoot on our last day in Alaska.

We will also hope to meet up with local photographer David Jensen from www.alaskaportraits.com.

Also check out some fun Alaskan art work on etsy.