School has started for Kristen which means that things have become busier and we're back to our familiar routine.  Nate is planning to continue substitute teaching while he looks for a job that is more up his science alley.  It's been a nice escape to look back on our summer pictures and remember how it was a chaotic non-stop adventure.  After we watched our families fly home we had an additional week with Jay to go backpacking in the Wrangell St. Elias National Park.  The park is the biggest national park in the United States with a total of 13,175,799 acres.  It's incredibly difficult to access much of the area because there are only two roads in the park.  Therefore, an air taxi dropped us off and we would have to trust that it would come to pick us up 4 days and 35 miles later.  We took a SPOT satellite radio with pre-programed texts in case we ran into an emergency, which gave our parents piece of mind as they watched our progress on google maps.  It was by far one of the most amazing trips we've taken and as we were flying back everyone was talking about where we would be going next summer.  Here are some of the pics.

We drove out to McCarthy and camped before flying out.  The tiny town is surrounded by glaciers.

 

The guy in the cowboy hat is our pilot, Gary.  He's known as the cowboy of the Wrangells and he's a bad ass.

 

 

Climbing into the plane was like flashing back to the 70's.

Looking back at the Root and Kennicott glaciers.

The Chitistone River.

 

Wow.

 

 

The flight in was breathtaking.

Coming in for a landing.

Gary leaving us!

 

Beautiful day hiking towards the Russell glacier.

Jay and Nate look camouflaged with their green backpacks.

 

 

 

Hmmm, where are we?  This was a common ritual throughout our hike because there are no maintained trails in the Wrangells.

 

There was still quite a bit of snow in the high country

Looking down at skolai pass where we landed before heading up chitistone pass to the chitistone valley.

 

 

Once again cheicking the GPS for our route.

Glaciers everywhere!

 

 



 

 

Jumping for Joy on Chitistone pass.

Looking down Chitistone valley.

 

Reminds us of a Colorado valley except for the glaciers and the extreme isolation.

First night's camp.

 

A wolf track.

Sadly, this is where Kristen lost the extra battery for her camera.  Which meant we had to be very picky with any pictures that we took the rest of the trip.  

There were a disturbing amount of bear tracks in this valley. Pretty much any sandy area had visible bear tracks.

Our first real obstacle was the goat trail section. The chitistone valley turns into a gorge with a four hundred foot waterfall. The only way out of the valley is to head high and into the scree fields you see behind Nate. The only creature brave enough to trek across these is the mountain goat.

We had to venture across five gulleys on the goat trail each with a lot of exposure. The last of these gulleys was called the gulley of death, much to our discontent.

 

Big smiles after crossing the gulley of death!! Our guide book said of the scree fields, "red is dead, yellow is mellow". Red would've been dead but yellow was anything but mellow.

The views on the otherside of the goat trail were world class...words can't describe the magic of this place.

Our camp 2nd night. This picture looking to the West was a massive glacier valley. To the North was Chitistone gorge and falls. To the south was the massive Chitistone valley and to the east was another unnamed waterfall.

Looking north at chitistone falls.

The only Grizzly we encountered on the trip was a very good bear. He got within 100 yards of us before we noticed him crossing the chitistone river and made ouor presence known. He took off, stopping every so often to check us out.

Stopping for water after a river crossing. We had 6 glacial river crossings in the chitistone valley and since our weather was so nice, the rivers were swollen and crossings were difficult. We had to use the chain link crossing method as a unit.

A public use cabin at our endpoint. It had only one window which had iron bars on it. We slept very well, especially since Jay and Nate had stayed up all night the previous night due to the high bear activity at our 3rd campsite.

Gary come to rescue us on day 5!

The Chitistone valley on our flight out.