Turnagain Trail as winter comes

mark, sim, karen, me, alex, mike - there were a few more that also met up at mchugh after an aborted start at glen alps. too much snow/slush to make it up there and we weren't ready to ski.










sim, shannon and me.





















our gorgeous backdrop framed perfectly by karen r.

9/24/09

this has been a gloriously colorful autumn, but it's going to
be winter soon. See the termination dust (snow) on the
mountains? It'll be on the ground in Anchorage one of these
mornings when we all wake up. Then it will be a race to get
snow tires on. What a great summer, though.



Toshi and others hiked from McHugh Creek up a ways towards
Rainbow, turned around in time to get back to cars before sunset
which is 5+ minutes earlier every day now. It's almost the autumn
Equinox when we'll have 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of
darkness. Then it's a quick drop to total darkness till Dec 21st the
winter solstice.

Jane and I had our annual fall hike from Arctic Valley to gather
low bush cranberries. We didn't find many.


















But we did find gorgeous views of nearby peaks with snow -
termination dust as we call it.


















Around 7:30 the sun was going down low showing off Mt. McKinley
(Denali) to the left and you can see fire island clearly, too.



















And then to top it all off we hiked down while a wolf nearby
hiked up and along the ridge nearby. Poor shot of the wolf, sorry.

evening chugach hike 9/3/09

This has been my best summer of hiking in 18 years.
nice view here of o'malley peak and the entire ridge to false o'malley.
We hiked from the Prospect Heights trailhead in perfect late summer
weather.


















pretty good view of Flattop and peaks east of it. We were hiking
in real tall grasses.


















This is a large part of the "Toshi" hiking group of Monday evening
mellow hikes and Thursday evening more strenuous ones.