I forgot this panorama yesterday. It is almost like I felt you might have, perhaps, seen enough of this beautiful scenery and didn’t want to burden you with any more of Denali. Who could get tired of this, though?

As always with panoramas, click to embiggen.

We left Denali today, drove back to Anchorage, cleaned most of our clothes and repacked, this time for the airport. Our Alaskan adventure has, sadly, come to an end.

Cheers to our good friends and wonderful hosts:

They are sweet people and have been wonderful to us as always. And they are terrible enablers. We would have done none of this adventure without them. They’ve only been in Alaska for about five months and they already come off as experts, at least to us. Adam’s work keeps his attention far more than a 40-hour work week, but I hope they get to go and do and see more and more of the area; it is surely beautiful.

Today, Adam is already in France and now Jessica is joining him there. He’ll be jumping as a part of the D-Day anniversary festivities next week, which is some incredible news for him. To catch up, Jessica will be flying with us to Seattle. We are due back in New York at around 1:30 tomorrow. Her trip will, really, be just getting underway. Leaving from Anchorage after midnight to fly to Paris and take two trains to the English Channel is just about the worst red eye flight you could imagine.

If my math was correct she’ll be traveling for almost 31 hours. Of course, she’ll make it halfway around the world, but still.

Her layover in Seattle is ridiculously long, so we bought her way into the Delta club. I insisted. Better chairs, more plugs, no crowds, free snacks, private restrooms. The one in Seattle has showers, apparently. For all of the driving around and putting up with us she did, she deserves to not spend almost eight hours as an airport refugee.

As we’re sitting in the airport, waiting on the plane, listening to these guys talk about their work schedules on the north slope — the real frontier — I realized something: This is the first time that I have seen darkness since Tuesday of last week in Wilton. Every waking moment it has been daylight or something vaguely resembling twilight. It wasn’t creepy until just this moment …

Anyway, here are the last of the scenic Alaskan pictures — I have some random shots that’ll land on the Tumblr site eventually — but these are the last mountain shots. It has been a wonderful trip, and they tell us we have to come back to see the other Alaska, the winter Alaska. Wouldn’t that be neat? I bet all of these mountains would look different then!

The only two bears we saw:

But this guy was the best animal in the entire 49th state:

We booked a tour at Husky Homestead, home of Jeff King, the four-time Iditarod champion, and his many dogs. At first, I was a tiny bit skeptical. Learning about the Iditarod would be interesting, but Jessica and The Yankee were more interested in seeing the puppies.

They did not disappoint. And they’ll win you over. Cuteness follows. You step off the shuttle and they thrust dogs right into your hands:

Those puppies are all about six weeks old. We’re told we are a part of their training. We’re socializing the animals. They should be paying us for our help!

This is Chase, he gave us the general idea of the place, introduced us to a few of the 60 or so dogs there, including a couple of champion huskies and told us about their general life with the mushmaster. Some turn into competitive sled dogs, others get passed along to a more domestic lifestyle. For now, they’re all pulling stuff. In the winter they drag a sled. Right now, as we were there, they hooked up nine or 10 to a four wheeler and the dogs ran like the kibble bowl was on fire. The rest were loudly jealous.

The short version: they’ve got it pretty good.

This dog is already a champion, and at a young age. King said she could be one of the best ever before she’s done.

This one is a couple of months old. Each litter is given a theme name. This litter is named after Jeeps. This is Cherokee. Or Wrangler. Hard to keep them straight:

King has a nice patter as he talks about running the races. I have some video of this I’ll be putting together in the next few days. Be sure you come back to check it out. It is informative and entertaining.

In the afternoon we went out riding four wheelers. There’s a large parcel of land that abuts the national park that is private land. The story goes there was a coal operation there when the park was federalized. And that was in a time when the government wouldn’t just snap things up. So the mining continued. When that played out, the land stayed private, and now there are ATVs.

And this guy is our guide. What could go wrong?

He was good, a personable fellow, a fine guide. He didn’t drive fast enough.

He took us up close to views like these, though:

We saw the train on our way back to the lodge:

More mountains:

And a moose — unconcerned on the side of the road. I walked to the center line on the road before the moose would worry about me. That’s, what, 15 feet? Not a bad evening find.

Tomorrow we head back to Anchorage and, much later tomorrow, back to the lower 48.

On our way out of Seward we stopped by the Exit Glacier. This required a walk up a paved path and hiking up a few rocky passages. Black and brown bears are frequently seen in the area, but not by us.

There go Ren, Jessica and Adam now:

One of our views along the way to the glacier:

Our second glacier in two days. Ho-hum.

Did you see that carve out? Ren has a great shot from there that will figure into our Christmas card plans.

The glacier was, get this, cold. I chipped away a few handfuls of clean ice. It tasted like 100,000 year-old water.

Here’s a view from the receding glacier, looking back across the valley. She’s posing:

After the glacier, we backtracked up the peninsula and then turned toward Homer. We stayed on the spit itself, a little strip of land surrounded by water that could be swallowed up by an imaginative breeze. Our rooms are at the very edge of the land, having nicked a part of the town and then driven through this funky little stretch of tourists, hippies and campers. Homer was originally a coal town. Now you can put a tent up on the beach, or stagger around buying local crafts as you wander away from your RV.

We were hungry, and stumbled around looking for food at the wrong time of day in a village where no one wants to make money after 8 p.m. So we had a midday snack of fish and chips. We enjoyed the view, and tried to figure out why this guy carried two pairs of shoes down to the shoreline for no reason.

We were sitting in this little restaurant plotting our next move when we noticed a bald eagle flying by:

And then she came back. And again and again. We realized she was on a hunting pattern, pulling fish from the sea for her eaglets tucked away in a nearby cellphone tower. We stayed and took pictures.

Now, I know a bald eagle personally, but it isn’t every day that I get to see one fly in the wild, so I’m sharing almost every decent shot I have. After another lap or two I resolved to get in the flight path. There is one in here where the eagle is looking right at me.

No doubt she’s thinking “If I were big enough, I’d eat you.”