Alaska pics: Mt. McKinley

Here as some pics from our plane ride around Mt. McKinley. This first pic is about all we got to see of the famed peak that day (or any other day we were up there, for that matter).


They say McKinley has weather all its own and that you've got a 30% chance of seeing it in its entirety. I believe it. Chris and I once sat for 45 minutes on the deck of a lodge overlooking McKinley, binoculars in hand, trying to catch glimpses of it. The clouds finally parted for a few minutes where we caught a little more than this pic shows. Then we went down to the river running in back of the lodge where we stumbled upon a wedding in progress. There were four-wheelers involved.









Here is a shot of some of the snow-packed mountains.













And a bit of the grass-covered range.













Here are two glaciers (the winding grey and white things in the valleys) that we flew over.











And another glacier in the midst of some beautiful snow-capped mountains. (For all I know, this might be the glacier at the bottom left in the pic above.)









A close-up of the pools in some of the glaciers below. They had this amazing blue color (something having to do with the reflection from the ice underneath).









The weather was good enough for our pilot to land us on a glacier southwest of McKinley (we couldn't see it from there). Here is the landing strip.











Here is a little camp set up by some folks who were there. A couple of them were rock climbing the formations on the right. More of them were farther to the right on a little snow slope practicing stopping their slide (preparing for a trek, I guess).