Happy Valentine's Day

Brant and I made some last minute plans for our Valentine's Day weekend. Brant had Monday off for President's Day, so we decided it would be the perfect weekend to leave Anchorage, since we haven't been had time to travel much inside Alaska yet. We made reservations at a bed and breakfast in Talkeetna, AK and scheduled a guided snomobile tour from Trapper Creek, AK to the entrance of Denali National Park. We had heard a lot of people talk about how neat the town of Talkeetna was, but we didn't realize exactly how small it was until we got there. I'm talking smaller than Lakeview, MI -- for any of you from MI reading this :) There are only 1000 people who live there year round. This is the "welcome to downtown" sign for this little "hippie" town. There is 1 street considered "downtown" and it had probably 4 small restaurants and a few places to stay.

We rented snow shoes from the base and took them with us. We had a little time on Saturday when we got down there before it got dark to go on a short little hike. Brant thinks we saw Bigfoot tracks :) We ate dinner at Mountain High Pizza Pie - yummy! And we found out that our waiter went to Clemson!! It was really weird to meet someone that far away that went to Clemson - he probably thought the same thing though.

Saturday night, the entertainment in town was a Valentine's Day show put on by the Denali art's council called "The Complexities of Love." It was packed - I guess it was the only thing going on in town. It was a cute little show with a variety of people singing, dancing, playing the banjo, acting, etc. We were a little worried about what we were in for, but we both really enjoyed it.

On Sunday, we drove to Trapper Creek, about 30 minutes away, and met our snowmobile guide, Bob. We had a total of 7 people in our group. We rode about 3 hours north to the opening of Denali Park, and out in the middle of nowhere to a little cabin that served us lunch. You can only reach the cabin by ferry (when the river isn't frozen) or by snomobile in the winter. And people live there. We had awesome homemade turkey and dumplins, homemade bread, brownies, and hot chocolate. After we warmed up, we headed back a different route and arrived back to the cabin just as it was getting dark. It was a really awesome trip and I had a sore back for 2 days afterwards :)

Brant had Monday off, so we went to Hatcher's Pass with our friends Richard and Lori to hike with our snowshoes. We hiked up some really steep hills and around Hatcher's Pass to an old mining village. The snow was really deep - no way we could've hiked it without snowshoes! We had a great weekend and enjoyed being outdoors for most of it. And it is finally starting to stay light longer!!!