Mountain Avens:
June 28th: The three of us went on a 3-hour scenic wilderness raft ride on the Nenana River. The staff at Denali Outdoor Center helped us into our drysuits, which entailed pulling on a rubber turtleneck. This was tricky - and quite a stretch - for everyone, but Bill's rubber collar didn't look right from the beginning. It looked like it was made for a toddler. A staff member assured him it would go on, and it did . . . eventually. The veins in Bill's forehead immediately popped out, his face was red, and he looked generally like a tick about to pop. We immediately called one of the guides over, and he said it was a new suit and the collar would stretch in a few minutes. Bill kept stretching the collar during the ride to the river, and it kept coming back, tighter than ever. Finally, our guide cut the rubber in several places. It still wasn't the greatest, but Bill could finally breathe without pulling on the rubber with both hands.
The ride was a lot of fun, with all of us getting wet now and then, but Sue bore the brunt of any white water that came within 100 yards of the raft. At one point, she just sat down in the bottom of the raft while the water poured over her head. Here we are with our guide and sole paddler Joslin, in the middle, and in front, from left to right, Ray and Becky Peter from Elizabethtown PA (about 25 minutes away from where we live), and Sue and Teren (another mother/son team) from California. The picture was taken by a photographer at the Old Sourdough Studio, owned by Jimmy Tohill, whose own photography is on display in the University of Alaska Fairbanks Museum of the North. By the way, Bill's wearing a helmet because he was going on the wild canyon run after our mild wilderness ride, and there was no place in the raft to store his helmet!
Scenes along the Parks Highway between the RV park and the Denali Outdoor Center.
A railroad trestle, with a bit of the Nenana River in the foreground:
A smaller railroad trestle:
Ravens:
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