As I mentioned earlier, I took a new job recently. Last week I visited the company headquarters in Boulder for the company’s new employee orientation. Though I dreaded the thought of days of mind-numbing meetings it turned out to be a lot of fun. I was particularly impressed that my new colleagues and I took an afternoon out to volunteer for a local charity. That, and everyone was incredibly enthusiastic and helpful during the event. Obviously the company hires the right people – these are people anyone would want to work with.

I stuck around a few extra days to get in some work with my department, too, which was spent in a few team-building exercises and overviews of the product I’ll be supporting. It was a big jump-start to my daily responsibilities.
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Well, over 12 hours and 3,500 miles later we are back home from Anchorage, having walked out of RDU around 11 AM. It was an amazing, unforgettable trip filled with many stories I have yet to tell. The red eye on Delta was exhausting, however, and my head does not know what day, time, or place it’s in. I thought I would blog more tonight of our trip but catching up on lost sleep seems more prudent.

Tomorrow I may awaken to wonder if it was all just a dream.

Yesterday we rose early to make the drive to the mouth of the Matanuska River in Alaska for some whitewater rafting! The Matanuska is a glacier-fed river and our rafting outfit, Nova, was about a 2.5 hour drive from Anchorage. We rode up some beautiful, twisty mountain roads to get there, passing a pair of moose standing in the ditch on the way. It was our first moose sighting in Alaska!

We arrived around 10:30 to the rafting office, a nice but remote cabin by the river. After using the pit toilets and checking in, we were given rain gear to wear and spent some time adjusting our GoPro camera before taking the short bus ride to the edge of the Matanuska glacier.

The put-in point near the glacier is private property and the rafting staff (Colin, our guide; Riley, our other guide; and Marsha, our bus driver) paid a hefty fee at the entrance for us to visit. On the way to the launch site, we stopped momentarily at a picnic spot overlooking the glacier: a massive, brilliantly-glowing sheet of blue ice. It was stunning to see! We took lots of pictures and witnessed the trickles of meltwater from this ice combine to form the ice-cold, silt-loaded Matanuska River. We would be rafting on water that was only hours earlier part of a glacier. That was incredible to think about.
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Yesterday we piled in the car and headed up to Eklutna Lake to check out the scenery and do some kayaking. This was our first venture into real bear territory but fortunately we loaded up on “bear bells” beforehand at the Anchorage REI store so that bears, which are attracted to the smell of money, stayed miles away.

The drive was a scenic one as the weather cleared out for the first time we’ve been here. Sunny skies surrounded us as we drove north to Eklutna. After an hour’s drive or so, we pulled into the parking lot at Eklutna State Park and wandered over to get our kayaks.
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Monday, we decided to tackle a rather ambitious hike: Flattop Mountain. Flattop is a mountain in the Chugach Mountain range next to Anchorage, distinctive not for its height but for its flat top. As the most accessible hike from Anchorage, it is the state’s most-climbed peak. “Accessible” does not mean easily-climbed, however, as we were to find out!

We arrived a little before noon, having taken a variety of clothing since we didn’t know what the weather there would be like. It was overcast and in the low-60s when we arrived, so layers were the rule of the day. After a stop at the trailhead’s pit toilets, we set off for the summit.

We hadn’t made it up to the first saddle, a mere few hundred feet away from the parking lot, before Kelly and I were already huffing. This clearing offered our first incredible view of Anchorage below us, though, so we took a moment to catch our breath and take it all in. Trudge on we did, though, winding our way along the east side of Blueberry Hill loop.
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The family and I made it into Anchorage Saturday afternoon after an 18 hour day of preparing and travel. Getting here took a long time (only slightly less than flying to London, Kelly says) but was surprisingly smooth, all things considered. Our Expedia booking put us on different airlines for each leg and the outgoing one was on United through Houston. I’ve complained before of how airlines are going out of their way to make flying as miserable as possible, squeezing every last cent out of its customers, but our flight didn’t suck as bad as I thought it might. The leg from Houston to Anchorage got us there in under 7 hours, though we weren’t treated to the spectacular views of the area that I’d been told about due to the cloud cover.

Waiting an inordinate amount of time for our baggage at the carousel gave me some time to people watch. I saw a number of bearded young men there, all in the Alaska uniform of the day: ball caps (preferably camo) with cheap sunglasses propped on top. In Raleigh, bearded young men are considered hipsters. In Anchorage, they’re rednecks. It made me wonder what it must be like to be so rigidly conformist, if these guys ever felt trapped in the routine.
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