Alaska Land & Sea 2011 with Phil & Carol Swartz 
White water rafting on the Nenana River
| The road from Fairbanks to Denali leads you from the interior of Alaska into the mountains of the Alaska range, from an arid climate (Fairbanks gets less rain per year than Phoenix) to an area that gets massive snowfall each year, from a city complete with red lights and everything to an area that completely shuts down and has a population of almost zero in the wintertime. When you arrive at Denali National Park, you know you're in a while different world - a world where nature and wildlife rules, no man.
| The visitor center at Denali is a great place to get acquainted with the area. There are park rangers available to answer any questions and lots of visual displays to satisfy your curiosity. Later in the afternoon, we really the early evening at 6:30, we all headed out on a white-water rafting adventure. This was a 12-mile run down the Nenana River that runs just outside the park. The water in the Nenana is a murky brown. This is the clue that tells you that this is a glacier fed river. As the glaciers are slowly sliding out of the ice fields high up in the mountains, they grind rocks to a very fine powder. The powder, or glacier flour as it's known, is picked up in the glacier itself and carried down until it's deposited in the river. This is what gives the river its murky brown color. Now the fact that the water in which we are rafting was ice just a few short miles higher up in the river tells us it's going to be cold - really cold... 36 degrees cold. So most of us preferred to stay in the raft for the trip down the river. They gave dry suits thank goodness, and we quickly found out why. We soon had waves of icy water flying over us as we hit the many rapids. The dry suits, of course, don't cover your hands or head, so we ended up getting more than one "glacial-facial".
| The rafters after their adventure
 Dave & Matt enjoy an 11 pm dinner after a hard day
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Sunset at Midnight
| We ended our rafting at about 10:30 in the evening and then went to a place called the Salmon Bake restaurant for dinner where we had some very good food. As we walked back to our hotel at quarter till midnight, the sun was just setting and we were treated to a gorgeous sunset over the mountains of Denali National Park.
| In Alaska, ice crystals in the atmosphere form a circular rainbow around the sun
|  | Holiday Cruises & Tours
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