Flying Moose not Squirrel

From Talkeetna

We left Healy and headed on down the road to Talkeetna in the rain. Our hope was to take one of the flight seeing tours of Mt. McKinley including a glacier landing. Well, it continued to rain for the next three days. We were grounded. The town of Talkeetna is a funky little town rumored to be the inspiration for the old TV show “Northern Exposure”.

Two of its restaurants were featured on "Dinner, Drive-ins and Dives". We ate at the "Roadhouse" for breakfast – yummy. Fun little town and worth the trip even if you do not plan on doing a flight. Still we were getting restless waiting on the sun. Tuesday the weather finally cleared enough for flights to resume and we were scheduled for the 5:00pm flight. While we were waiting for our flight, we were informed that one of the planes was stuck on one of the glaciers. Yikes! Turns out the weather can turn fast and it is possible for the fog to roll in fast and ground the pilot. They are prepared for this type event - food, sleeping bags and tracking device in the planes. Plans were changed and we were assigned to another pilot and a smaller plane. Smaller plane!? Hope we don't end up like the moose!

Our new pilot explained they would not be doing the full tour and no glacier landing. I was disappointed but we opted to do it anyway. It was amazing! The pictures really do not do justice to the scale of the mountains and glaciers. So wish we could have done the full tour with the landing but even still it was well worth doing. We even got to do fly over of Sarah Palin’s house near Wasilla but I didn't see Russia.

We stayed at the RV park in town. The spaces were a little tight but walking distance to everything in town. This time we had railroad tracks and an airport next to us. Fortunately, the trains were infrequent and the planes were grounded. We left on Wednesday for Anchorage and it started raining again.