Girdwood is a ski community – really a fancy ski resort with a few stores and a couple dozen homes. I have only skied once so the slopes looked terrifyingly steep. I'm not sure I'd want to go there unless I had a lot more practice. It didn't take long to drive through the whole town and see it all, so I headed out to the Seward highway and rode down to the Portage Glacier. I couldn't actually see the glacier because it was around a bend in the hills, but I could see about 3 or 4 others and I took in the view and visited the National Park visitor center at the end of the lake that the glaciers created.
The lakes and streams that are fed from the glaciers are an intersting milky-blue color, and are gritty. The water has a very fine silt from the ice grinding across the mountains. That water all eventually ends up in Turnagain Arm (a bay off the ocean) and has silted it up to the point where it is mostly quicksand. The tide varies by 30' or so and if you walk out on the sand and get stuck you will quickly get drowned. There is a tidal bore there – a phenomenon where the incoming tide builds up over the outgoing tide, so when the tides change from low to high the incoming tide is actually a 6' wave coming into the area from the sea. It looks like a tsunami wave. I was not able to time things to see it while we were there, but it happens 2x a day.
I only left the house for 2 hours the first day there (Wednesday) because I was tired and wanted to talk to Aunt Donna. It was also a chance to catch up on some work I was doing.
On Thursday, dad and I headed down to see the Kenai Peninsula. We had heard it was a 3 hour trip to Homer – but when we got to Homer it took 5 ½ hours! We barely had a chance to look around and then it was time to make a fast run back to Girdwood. We only stopped for gas, and that was a very quick stop. We managed to make it back in just under 4 hours.
On the way down we did stop quite a few times, for photos, and also to check out the little villages and some of the rivers. I wasn't able to get a photo of the “combat fishing” conditions along the Kenai river, but the fishermen were definitely lined up along both sides of the river, each with their own little 12 – 20' “personal space” around them. There were also boats running up and down through the rivers, which are very swift and could be considered “whitewater” in some places.
Homer was the end of the line for us, both for the day and also for our whole trip. It is as far south as we could go on the mainland portion of Alaska – the rest would have taken a Ferry to reach or you'd have to go through Canada. We had lunch at a pizza place called “Fat Olives” then rode out onto the spit – which reaches about 2 miles out into the water. At the end of the spit I took a picture of the bikes – from here on we would be riding back toward home.
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