The road to the small town of Valdez is magnificent. In any season, at any time of day.
Magnificent is the sunlit mountain range named after Admiral Wrangel Ferdinand Petrovich.
Magnificent is the Thompson’s Pass with ancient glaciers at sunset.
And magnificent are the eternally gray peaks around the Valdez Bay.
Three were three kinds of sky this summer in Alaska.
Very rarely — blue, slightly more often — with fleecy clouds.
But mainly — with low gray clouds, which regularly watered us with cool rains.
And now the summer is over, or rather, it wasn’t even here. The spring gradually passed into the autumn. The autumn sky is quite morose, but even through this darkness the sunlight occasionally breaks through.
Autumn has come to Alaska, but my story about the northern summer is not yet over.
Even though there was no summer in the north this year, the sun still came out for a couple of days.
I was having a dream that I was riding a giraffe, which had a human soul. Shocked by this discovery, I embraced his neck and burst into tears, but was pulled out of the context by the mournful howl of a neighbor’s cat. I opened one eye and immediately jumped: a fire! The room was filled with red-orange flames of fire, the cat howling, brain, still showing the giraffe with huge human eyes, could not switch to the second gear. Tangled in a blanket, I jumped to the window, and there – a northern sun rising above the steaming lake.
I won’t say about the whole Alaska, but here, in the lake country, we have a real summer for the third day in the row. Not stuffy, as in Florida or Minnesota, and not red-hot, as in Arizona or Nevada, but north-like calm, restrained and even modest. But from that no less pleasant and desirable.
The locals poured out from the surrounding houses, cottages and huts each to their own lake, and there is a myriad of them. These guys attached the engine to the platform, pushed it out into the middle and now relaxing in all possible ways. And all who remained on the shore can hear their every word due to the perfect surface acoustics.
As if ripe, but still sour berries intensively process sunlight into sugar.
The ladybugs are also totally stoked about the sun.
And so is Kylee, the small animal with an easily memorable breed “cavalier-king-charles spaniel”.
If we could only get two more weeks like that, so we could drive through the key places, we would be able to say that we got a real taste of summer in Alaska.
One of the Alaska photo-clichés: the bay, the sea mark, the seagull, the fishing boat and the snow-covered mountains on the background.
Still life of a fishing stead. Nets for fish, cages for crab.
Salmon fever during the tide in the Kachemak Bay.
Nikolaevsk Road leading to the Nikolsky Church in the Russian village of Nikolaevsk.
The inglorious end of the northern sea veteran from the ’70s, the times when fishing was the main trade in Alaska.
Say, you wanted to live in silence and seclusion, far beyond the city, in the valley of wonderful mountains.
So, you bought a plot of land on the mountainside, brought the machinery up the winding serpentine and built a nice house.
Starved in the winter and spring young elk is feeding on our strawberries.
Tourists are trying to familiarize with the harsh history of the legendary north.
Alaska has the highest percentage of pilots per capita, but this overcast summer they are in the sky less often.
“Summer in Alaska” are, of course, big words. We have not yet seen the summer, because the spring is till strolling through July’s yard.
The returned from sunny California ducks are too in somewhat bewilderment: it’s too cool for the ducklings.
No, of course, we also get some sun, but in its special northern entourage.
But only if most of May in Anchorage it was like this …
… then all June and, it seems, July we are awaited by something like this.
One consolation: on cloudy days the most beautiful colors appear in the photographs. And we will have a lot of them. Photos.
Cause after a long break, we’re back 🙂
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