HouseMaster Inspection in morning & Hiking to a Ghost Town in evening

(City of Anchorage in background.) These two fine HouseMaster inspectors, Mark Crawford www.anchorage.housemaster.com and Hal Kunnen www.phoenix.housemaster.com, inspected together today and will again tomorrow. Their collective expertise represents geographic north meeting geographic south and climatic cold meeting climatic hot!

Drove nearly an hour north of Anchorage to Hatcher Pass and Independence Mine State Park.


Mark & Karen Crawford would rate this a HouseMaster-Anchorage "poor/defective".
While George kept the Crawford kids, Josie & Zach, tickled.


This was a friendly hoary marmot or as Zach called it, a "hairy marmot".

The "bridge to nowhere" . . . emblematic - the day after Alaska Senator Ted Stevens was indicted.



Back at home playing in the back yard at 10:30pm while the fresh-caught-yesterday halibut and quill-back rock fish are being cooked in onions and butter on the grill. This fish was the best fish Wendy had ever tasted, bar none.


Well, now it's midnight and the kids are finally going to bed. Hey, it's Alaska in the summertime!

Halibut "Fishing-for-the-Day" - - 50 miles from Seward AK

Seward Army recreational resort had the most excellent overnight cabins, club, and fishing facilites. What a gem of a find. After we caught our fish, we returned to the resort to the two Fish Houses to have the fish cleaned, wrapped, and iced, so they could be sent with dry ice by Fed X to points south in the Lower 48.

7:00am departure from Seward's Resurrection Bay with U.S. Army recreation boat and excellent summer-contract deck hands.


Headed out of Seward for 50 miles away near Montague Island out in the ocean.

George's first catch of the day: a quillback rockfish.
Hal with his first catch of the day - for the "Hal"-i-but. Limit: 2 per person.

Wendy pulled in Hal's second-caught halibut AND this 80-pound lingcod. Wendy had to stop for a rest several times while pulling these two bad boys in. When the lingcod came in, the deck hands were astounded at its size. Wendy was just sore . . . the gear on the reel was skipping because it was so hard to reel in both of these fish whose lines were tangled.



George was instructed that he had to kiss his first ever caught halibut - - it is a tradition.

Seward AK & Exit Glacier

3-hour drive to Seward from Anchorage. Seward: the start of the nearly 1000-mile Iditarod Race and the original gateway for transportation to mining camps inland a century ago. Staying at the wonderful U.S. Army recreational hotel http://www.sewardresort.com/. Lance Corporal George is our "sponsor". Charter fishing trip with the Army tomorrow at 5:30am. We come back when everyone has "fished their limit".


Hiking up to Exit Glacier just outside Seward.

Glacier has been receding (not necessarily due to Global Warming). When Hal was born in 1951 (see marker), it was all the way out to here.

(Click on photo to enlarge.) Notice a mother moose above and her calf along the shore in the green in the middle of the photo.

Whitewater Rafting Six-Mile River - WOW!

Class 4 and Class 5 whitewater. Six-Mile River is purportedly the roughest river in the United States to be commercially rafted. From our limited perspective, we certainly thought so! Wendy and Hal both went into the drink in the Zig Zag rapids. We ALL had to go into the drink at the beginning to qualify and for a confidence builder, plus be briefed on how to get rescued. In short, this was a very thrilling 3 hours of our lives and we loved every minute. We are still thawing out!
(Photographer was alongside in the trees somewhere http://www.novalaska.com/day-s.htm
(As boat faces forward - - )
Wendy (blue helmet in left rear), Hal (red helmet in right rear), George (blue helmet in left front).
Wendy really did paddle and participate, but here I am hunkered down in the back with my paddle sticking out so as not to fall out. I have taken interminable kidding for this intermittent position in the boat in this photo from my son.

Enlarge this photo and see some enlarged mouths and expressions.