Road Trip to Chitina - 6-19-2016

Fireweed, Willow Lake, and the Wrangell Mountains

After we had taken a drive to Tok just for lunch, we decided the following Saturday to drive to Chitina (pronounced Chit-na), just to say we had.  While Jeff gets out and about and seeing a lot of things in work, I don't, so on this drive Jeff kept pointing out things that I had never seen before...  It was nice.

yep, we have a selfie-stick now...

fireweed

Thunder Falls

 Thunder Falls is a very small little area, not room for a whole lot of vehicles, and you can see the beautiful falls from the road.  If the mosquitos hadn't been so bad, we might have walked up to get a different vantage point of the falls.  Maybe in August...

Finally we got to Chitina, no pics of the town though, and we got to the point where Jeff had never gone past before!  Finally, a place we could go together where neither of us had been!

The road past Chitina, where you would drive to get to McCarthy, is just one lane.  There's a place to pull off and wait for vehicles from the other side (like the viaduct in Mendota...).

On the other side of that cut in the rock is the Copper River.  There are very few places where you can cross the Copper River, and this is one of them.

Fish-wheels in the Copper River, harvesting the world-famous Copper River Salmon, with Mt. Drum in the background.

panoramic of the river, south of the bridge
Do you see the dip-netters?

This guy is out in the Copper River with his dip-net, looking for some salmon...

The water level was low when we were down there, so these guys were able to use this gravel bar as a rest stop.

I watched this bald eagle after I was done photographing the river.