Winter in Alaska!

If we could only use one word to describe the part of Alaska we saw, it would have to be “wow”. We spent Christmas day on an airplane, and arrived in Anchorage in the middle of the afternoon. Already, the sun had started to set! While we were there, the most daylight we had was just about 5 hours. It’s truly amazing how easy it is to fall asleep when the remaining 19 hours are in darkness! It goes without saying that we had to make the most of our days when we could see what we were doing!

Snowshoeing in Denali National Park

Dog mushing near Healy with Earth Song Lodge

Also, excitingly, we were lucky enough to spot wildlife. On our trip, we saw 3 snowshoe hares, a herd of caribou (aka reindeer!!) and 9 moose. By the time we saw our last moose (seen in the pictures below), we were perhaps a bit too confident that they’re always docile animals. Although she let us get close and watch her for a good 30 minutes, she apparently had enough of us. She charged us, stopped about 15 feet away and stared at us. We took the very obvious hint, turned around and walked away to give her back her privacy. It was a tremendous, heart-pounding experience!

Ligeia getting the perfect close-up of the moose eating snow and relaxing

The moose watching us watching her as she chomps down on tree branches

A herd of caribou outside of Cantwell

Below are some of the breath-taking, awe-inspiring, absolutely stunning and jaw-dropping pictures of the scenery. It doesn’t matter what kind of camera you have, you can’t help but take a great picture! Even so, looking back at the pictures now, it’s hard for an image to do justice for the landscape we witnessed!

Sunset (3:45pm) near Cantwell

Afternoon overlooking the Nenana river valley

Denali National Park – view from the park road (near mile 2)

Denali National Park – the perfect winter scene

Denali National Park

Sadly, our hopes and desires to see the Northern Lights were unfulfilled. This is the closest we came to them:

Whenever the solar cycle comes around again to the time when the sun is its most active, we’ll have to return!

If life takes you to the “Last Frontier”, we highly recommend Earth Song Lodge in Healy – wonderful hosts and fantastic dog-sledding experiences! Of course, if you go in summer, we were told it’s a completely different place, so take notes and keep us posted!

Hope your holidays were as exciting, beautiful and enjoyable as ours were!

Lots and lots of love,
Mindy and Ligeia 🙂 🙂