08/14/19 - Hope, AK

Before leaving Anchorage, we stopped at Alaska Wild Berry Products to see their chocolate fountain (and buy chocolate). There is much more than just chocolate there. They have jam, syrups, Alaska clothing, Christmas gifts, etc.

You can click on the pictures to enlarge them.

Also Korene and Jason and the girls went to the Alaska Fish and Game Dept and they were able to get fishing poles for the girls to use free for three days.  Two of the bucket list items for the granddaughters was gold panning and fishing, which Hope, Alaska, has.  So we headed there for the day.

Gold Rush Peck started mining when he was 10-years old, taught by his grandfather.  He has a small tent area with soil, water and pans and will show you how to correctly pan for gold. Both of the girls got a glass jar with gold specks.

Right beside Gold Rush Peck is the Sunrise Historical Museum. It was about closing time for their main building, but there's a lot of other buildings that were open to look at.

After that we walked through town (it's small) and found an area for the girls to fish. They caught some that had to be thrown back in, and they each caught a rock! There were a lot of dead salmon and at low tide the smell is quite "fragrant".

We stopped a couple of miles out of town for the night at a pullover spot.

For more pictures, please click here.  Some of these are my daughter's also.

Happy birthday to our daughter-in-law, Valerie!!

08/13/19 - Wasilla and more sled dogs

Leaving Denali, we made at stop at the Ididarod Headquarters at Wasilla.  We had stopped there before, and our granddaughters wanted to see if there were puppies there again. Our blog post from June can be read here.

You can click on the pictures to enlarge them.

This time there were little puppies.

From there we headed to Cabelas in Anchorage for the evening.

08/12/2019 Denali National Park and Preserve

We had stopped at Denali National Park in June on our way up to Fairbanks. You can read more about it and see more pictures on our post dated 06/19/2019. See here for that post.

You can click on the pictures to enlarge them.

We stayed in Riley Creek Campground for two nights. We took a bus tour to Eielson Visitor Center one day. There's a separate post on the bus tour with pictures. The next day was hiking and watching the sled dogs demo and playing cards. I didn't get many pictures from the second day, so I'm borrowing pictures from our daughter for the second day (with her permission, of course.)