Alaska - Thursday - Mt. Alyeska

Thursday we headed south again and went to Girdwood. Once there we headed to the Mt. Alyeska resort which is a ski resort in the winter.

We said hi to the bear, then headed out to get our tickets to the tram.

They have a tram that takes you to the top of the mountain, over 2000 feet elevation change. One goes up while the other goes down. It sure was a pretty view, though a bit freaky at times for the acrophobic part of me.

Up at the top it was COLD! There was still snow (though much to patchy to actually ski on), and the wind was strong enough to cut to the bone. Rachel and Jake stayed and played in the snow for a little while, but I was a wimp, and took Annie over to the observation deck/gift shop out of the wind.

There was a great view of the Turnagain Arm from up at the top:

Once we got back down to a reasonable temperature and elevation we went to one of the restaurants in the resort for lunch. This was our view for lunch:

So beautiful! (If you look closely you can see Annie reflected in the window.)

Here's my mountain man with the beginnings of an Alaskan beard (though once we got back to Tucson he claimed it was too hot to keep it--pshaw, like 110 is really that hot!):

And here's Annie and I:

Yes, we did give our baby a knife to play with (though it was just a butter knife). She was not a big fan of Alaskan restaurants, it seems, as every time we ate out she would give us about 5 minutes to get settled before she started throwing a big fit. Silverware usually bought us another 5 or 10 minutes.

After lunch we headed outside for a hike. Annie fell asleep pretty quickly (that's the main reason for her big fit during lunch), and Rachel decided to decorate her stroller with dandelions.

While Rachel was doing that we snapped a quick self portrait:

Then Rachel volunteered her services as our photographer. Check out her skillz:

Oops, missed Mom. We helped her zoom out a little, then got:

"Dad! You're too tall!!!"

Finally we did end up with a pretty decent picture:

We really enjoyed our little hike. We came to a stream that Rachel really enjoyed. We played "Pooh sticks" where you drop a stick (or in this case a dandelion) on the one side of the bridge, then run to the other side to see whose stick won going down stream.

Maybe it's just being surrounded by desert all the time, but everything was soooo GREEN to me. Very pretty.

The trail turned into boardwalks several times where the ground was perpetually wet from tons of mini streams from all the runoff.

Annie eventually woke up, and really enjoyed the stream when we crossed the bridge on the way back.

A nice guy who works at the resort offered to take a family picture when we were on our way back to the car.

And the view of the resort and the mountain from the parking lot:

It was a beautiful place. And it was so nice to be hiking in 60 degree weather in June.

After we left the resort we stopped on the way out of town at a really cool park. The girls had lots of fun.

 They had a huge playground set that was all interconnected with lots of slides, tunnels, bridges, etc. It was the coolest playground I can remember seeing ever. Too bad we didn't really get any pictures of the whole thing.