The last of the Alaska pics

Finally ... the last of my Alaska trip photos.

OK, so.  First, I'd mentioned that the Princess Denali Lodge is a phony wilderness lodge the same way Disney would do it -- excepting the wilderness is real.  Here's the actual view outside the door of my hotel room.

Not bad, huh?

Come to think of it, I think that's the river we ultimately rafted down -- although we were rafting down one of its rather less calm parts.  Here's the official photo they made my folks pay a ton of money for -- but when else am I going to get a picture of me and my folks whitewater rafting?

Check it out -- that's the three of us on the far side of the raft.  Dad, having just received his first "glacial facial," still manages to look up at the camera -- while me and mom behind him are waving.  (Other couple, paddles in the water, still facing down -- clearly did not plan on purchasing the photo.)

When Dad and I took the bus trip through Denali, we saw lots of animals, but they were all from really far away, and my photos came out so blurry, I'm all, "Is that a sheep?  It might be a sheep.  It's kinda sheep-shaped."  I therefore spare you the photos, remind you that if you ever go on the bus trip through Denali to take some damn good binoculars, and show you a couple of landscapey shots from Denali instead.

(I particularly like this next one, 'cause I was doing all that "composing the photo" stuff by getting that little bush in the foreground.)

Oh, and there's also this one, from the rest stop, where they had some discarded caribou antlers and encouraged you to hold them up and take the "Hey, I'm a caribou" picture ...

And... that's about it for Denali.  We end the photo essay with a segment of the Trans-Alaska pipeline from Fairbanks ...

And, given my penchant for collecting photos of unusual warning signs ...