Calendar August

OK, here is the story behind the airplane photo.  As I mentioned earlier we were photographing a wedding in Talkeena, Alaska.  The bride's uncle is a professional pilot and is affiliated with the Alaska Aviation Heritage Museum.  So as a wedding present he took the bride and groom on a flight around Mt McKinley in this fully restored 1943 Grumman Widgeon.  Wanting some PR photos of this event, the museum sent a float plane to carry the photographer.  That happened to be me! After an hour flight and about 300 photos, I could almost do a calendar on just the flight.

The scerery there was incredable!  What you can see behind the plane is part of a place called the Amphitheater. It's kind of like a bowl on the side of Mt McKinley where a number of smaller glaciers flow into one very large glacier called Ruth Glacier.  This bowl is so large that when we first arrive both planes were flying around in it and we couldn't spot each other.

The enormous size of everything here is hard to comprehend, even when you see it in person.  I'm sure it's even harder to see in the pictures but I think this one might help.  If you look close near the center of this photo you can see the blue plane.  I told the bride and groom that it had looked like they were flying very close to the rocks.  They said they weren't close to the rocks at all and they thought that we were.  I never felt like we go close to the rocks either.  Everything is just so large.

The Widgeon is an anphibious plane and it can land on a runway or water.  They took off from the airport but when we returned they landed on the lake where my float plane had landed so we could have some more photo ops including this one.  It was quite an experience for me as well as for Jeremy and Danielle.