Moose!

I was very upset when I missed seeing my first moose because I was singing along to "Like A Prayer" too loudly to hear the grad student in our lab tell me from the backseat when we drove past one. Luckily a few days later I was in the car when these three burst out of the woods and ran right past the car, and I finally saw my first moose. And three at once! I couldn't be mad at Madonna for long anyway. In this one you can see the trees in the background are still all burned from the huge forest fire they had there a few years ago. There were actually several forest fires when we were there, too, but they weren't as bad.

Kashwitna Lake

This is Kashwitna Lake, which we stopped at on the way back from Talkeetna. This is just about the darkest I ever saw it get in Alaska, it was about 12:30am when I took this. Plus I was underexposing to get more cloud detail, so it was lighter out than it looks in these images, especially the first one. It was just such a striking lighting condition! I can't wait to print out the panoramic image really huge when I get back to the printer that can handle doing it for me. It was my first time trying to stitch images together, and it was a lot easier than I thought it would be, although it did take a little bit of fixing afterwards. Hopefully the trouble areas aren't too apparent!

Talkeetna

This is in Talkeetna, a small town we drove to for a day trip, stopping off at a bunch of lakes on the way there and back to make collections and do a little observation. There was almost nothing there except a few shops, a few restaurants, and a place where you could take horseback rides. None of us rode the horses, but being fresh out of other things to do we spent some time with these two. They were the only ones free in their little paddock, and not saddled up. Maybe they were particularly temperamental? In any case, Jana had had very little contact with horses before and clearly had no idea what to do when this one reached out and blew in her face!