Glacier Area Photo Shoot

After a successful morning of cleaning and organizing our apartment more, it's starting to feel more like home. All we lack is a bed frame and some decorations for the walls, and we're good to go! To reward ourselves for all that hard work, we drove back out to the glacier to get our daily dose of nature. I had never seen a glacier until we moved here, and this one, the Mendenhall Glacier, is truly magnificent. I could never get tired of looking at what an amazing thing mother nature has created on this planet.

One Gorgeous Evening

As you all know, I love mountains, snow, nature, and everything else having to do with anything outdoors. Since moving to Alaska, I've seen some amazing, I mean freaking AMAZING scenery. Yesterday evening, I finally broke down and bought a good camera since I was sick and tired of all the crappy quality photos I was posting. I love my GoPro, and it's awesome quality for action shots, but with zero zoom, it's hard to really capture the mountains and landscape as well as I'd like. My iPhone takes decent photos as well, but as soon as you start to zoom, it looses quality fast. The camera I finally decided on is the Canon Powershot sx260hs. It's got 20x zoom, 12.1 megapixels, and a ton of settings and features that I'm still learning how to use. There's a self-portrait setting so all you have to do to take the photo is wink at the camera. It works, I tried it. Pretty cool in my opinion. It also has GPS, full HD video, and a dozen other cool features that I have yet to 'discover'. 

Anyways, here are a few pics from this evening.

Mini Ramps & Fresh Seafood!

Mini ramps are fun, even though I pretty much suck at riding one. All I can really do is just pump back and forth with a revert every couple pumps, occasionally reaching the coping. I'm still not very comfortable trying any tricks on the coping, which will hopefully change soon. After about 10 minutes of constant riding, my legs are burning, which is a good thing! I love skating mini ramps because it's a great leg workout, and it helps get your balance back in tune for snowboarding. We stopped by the skate park today and I had some fun on the mini ramp for about an hour. 

My new skateboard... Winter approves :)

Then we picked up dinner...

Meet Mr. Dungeness 

He was a lively one!

Crab, shrimp, and Alaskan = a good night!

The finished product... Old Bay seasoned crablegs and a spinach salad with shrimp,
cranberries, feta, and almonds. YUM!

Best thing about this meal... it was cheap! Well, way cheaper than getting a meal like this out at a restaurant. One pound of shrimp was $7 and that whole crab was just $12. I guess that's one perk of having so much awesome, fresh, local seafood readily available! We plan on making this meal a twice a week deal :)

Pre-Season Shred!

Today was a BLAST! We woke up early, packed some lunch, scraped our freshly waxed boards, and hit the road to Eaglecrest, which is only about a 15 minute drive from our apartment. We figured it would take us a good hour to hike to the top. Afterall, it is over a 1,500 ft elevation gain with 20lbs of backpack and board on our backs. After several rest breaks (big smack in the face to how out of shape we are haha) we finally made it to the top of the Ptarmigan lift in a little over an hour. 

We ate our lunch in the warming hut at the top, then set out to explore the terrain. Lets just say, I will be in complete heaven when that mountain gets some more snow. It really wasn't deep enough to go bombing down the mountain. It was only about 6-8 inches with some deeper drifts here and there, but it was enough to have some fun thanks to our backcountry shovel! Dustin packed snow onto a piece of wood in front of the chairlift to make a box to slide. I shoveled a little booter, but the snow was too fluffy and as soon as I hit it, it just exploded. Everything was still so much fun though! We played around at the top for about an hour then decided to head back down the mountain since the sun was going down. 

We rode down the service road a.k.a trail to the top. There was enough snow packed down on the road that we rode a pretty good ways before it got too rocky. I didn't think to bring my rock board so I had to be super careful and not put any new gashes in my base. Thank god for chairlifts, because if I had to hike that every day with my board(which I totally would if it came down to that!) I would either be in pain or in really good shape! haha.

Warning: LOTS of photos! :)

Rainforest Trail

When we woke up and looked out the window and saw this...

...we realized that it was such a beautiful day that we had to do something outside! We decided to check out a new trail, Rainforest Trail. It's on North Douglas and wow, it was a beautiful (but short) hike! The sun was shining, the temp was nice and cool, and we saw some wildlife. Here are a few pics...