Since I already booked Mt. McKinley flight seeing tour with glacier landing from Talkeetna for that evening, our plan was to spend the day in and around Talkeetna. On our way from Anchorage we took couple of breaks to capture the scenic view of mountains covered with fog and Mirror Lake. Next, we visited Thunderbird falls. It was approximately a mile hike from parking lot to the falls. After .75 mile we found that the trail to viewing platform was closed for construction. Bummer! However, couple of other visitors told that there is an alternate trail to the falls. The alternate path was slippery and muddy, but the falls view was good. Btw, the trail was greenish everywhere. It was quite scenic. We spent few minutes at the falls and headed back.
I thought river rafting (Talkeetna River Guides or TRG), on Talkeetna river would be fun. The rafting tour was at 2pm and when I punched the address on GPS, it showed arrival time as 2:10pm. I called TRG to check whether we can make for the 2pm trip, but they said that we got to be there by 1:45pm at least and it is pretty difficult. Though most of the vehicles were at speed limit, I decided to drive "little" fast. We didn't take any break and finally we reached TRG at 1:37pm :-). We initially thought we would skip our lunch, but we had plenty of time to have our lunch. Btw, I am not advocating to drive fast, but to leave few mins buffer for unforeseen events. River rafting was really nice and relaxing, especially after that drive. Kirti enjoyed it much more than us. She had a chance to row the raft as well. The guide was friendly and Kirti chatted a lot with her about the beavers, eagle, fish, etc. The whole activity took little more than 2 hours. We had couple more hours to explore Talkeetna and thought about horse riding. However, the minimum age was 7 years so we decided to spend some time on the river shore instead. Then, I meditated for few mins while Vidhya changed Kirti's muddy dress.
We picked up Pizza for Kirti on our way and reached Talkeetna airport around 6:30pm. There were ten of us including the pilot and the plane (little one) was full. We flew over the Denali National Park and it was absolutely scenic. We got a glimpse of Mt. McKinley and our plane landed on the glacier. That place was fantastic. We all got down to play with snow and take some pictures. All of a sudden the plane started sliding down the glacier and we all stood in a shock. The pilot acted swiftly by climbing the plane and steered it into the soft snow to stop it. Once the plane was under control, we all breathed. After few minutes we took off from the glacier and reached the airport. We had our dinner at the airport and headed back to hotel. We reached hotel around midnight.
The climate was pleasant that day and next 3 days. According to the weather forecast, it was supposed to shower all the days. We heard that rain was pouring on the previous day, but the
mother nature took care of us nicely.
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