[swf]http://www.moosepeterson.com/swf_imgs/_BMP1194.swf, 585, 473 [/swf]
This is the scene the next morning when we awoke. Typical Alaska fall skies, even though it’s August, they are gray if not falling on you. Knowing this, the one smart thing I did was take our bigger 4 men Kelty backpacking tent. The other tent is Jake’s two men. I took the larger tent because knowing it would be wet, I wanted space to hang and get clothes dry. Also need to have all gear in the tent and I wanted space to work. You can see the large Pelican we shipped up to AK, it contained the 200-400s, tents and other misc gear. Once thing new this trip were the new Therm-a-rest NeoAir pads. My old Therm-a-rest which is 28yrs old and still works great has one issue, a big issue when you camp by plane. And that is it takes up a whole lot of space! Well the new NeoAir rolls up smaller than a water bottle and inflates to nearly four inches tall! Jake & I didn’t think that once we used it, we could roll it up to the same small size but low and behold, we could and it did. Great find, thanks Kevin!
The other thing you might notice is the orange cord going around the tents. That’s an electric bear fence the biologists wanted to test since it was brand new. Working as we were and as the biologists do all over Alaska, these things have become quite popular and many swear by them. Even though there were no bears anywhere near us, it went up anyways. Was it tested you ask? Only by us silly humans who wanted to see if two D batteries actually but out any zap. It was like Homer, we couldn’t stop touching it and going ow, ow, ow, ow.
And that mountain behind you, that’s what we would be climbing shortly.
Photo captured by D3x, 18AF on Lexar UDMA digital film