July 14 – We headed to Talkeetna, AK to K2 Aviation to do a flight around Denali and a glacier landing. We stayed at Talkeetna Camper Park for the night. We really enjoyed speaking with the current hosts. They had a ton of information on what to do in the area and they also recommended some ideas for when we reached Homer, AK.
Talkeetna is a small quirky town of less than 900 people. If you do decide to stay here make sure you eat at Latitude 60 which has excellent food. We ate here for lunch and dinner and we weren’t disappointed! We also had breakfast at the Roadhouse in town. They serve sourdough pancakes as big as your plate. Even Pat was stuffed after eating one!
I do have to say that we have been totally spoiled on tour guides after our flight with John with Talkeetna Air Taxi. We flew with K2 Aviation in a much larger airplane with 3 other people. Our pilot was very mechanical with talking about the different peaks and general information. We didn’t expect him to be a chatty Cathy but we did expect him to make an effort. Our other two pilots were very friendly and very professional. We all realized they needed to concentrate on the flight and that any information we would get would be secondary. I think by having two excellent tour guides we may have expected more than we should have.
The other aspect about our flight was cloudy weather. Pat didn’t get to join the 33% club as it was too cloudy to see the peak of Mt. Denali (aka Mt. Mckinley). One last disappointment with our flight was that we were unable to land on the glacier. We did get a refund, but after the disappointment with the bland tour guide and barely seeing the mountains, the glacier was the last hope to save the day. At least we did get to eat dinner at Latitude 60.
Later Y’all
