July 3rd:
We spent most of the day flying from Anchorage to King Salmon (where we circled for about an hour before finally landing due to fog) then on to Port Heiden.
The caldera from the air:
Coming from Jersey, I felt comforted by the fact that there were malls in both King Salmon and Port Heiden:
Once in Port Heiden we were greeted by Jack - a man who really made it all happend for us in Port Heiden.
He even gave us a lift to the end of the road where we started our climb to the caldera.
At about 3pm, after getting up at 4:45am in Eagle River, it finally felt like the trip had started:
We lost the ATV trail at the edge of the swap and just bee-lined it across:
We saw an incredible diversity of birds on this trip. Here are some cranes in the swamp:
On an ATV trail - a savior through the alders:
Posers:
East walking once we left the swamp and alders behind:
Brad described it to us as "walking on a golf course"
First view of the rim:
A wolf crossed our path on the way up.
The pass we were heading for is just to the right of the high point:
Although it looked like a pretty straight shot to get to the caldera, we ended up crossing a number of minor drainages along the route:
We opted to use Eric's Hilleberg tent fly without the tent. We had an amazing amount of space in this shelter and it weighed practically nothing. We did have to share this space with a fair number of mosquitoes every night, though. This made for some pretty fitful nights until we reached the coast.
