We left Healy AK, 12 miles north of Denali NP and headed south towards Anchorage.  Anchorage is a little over 325 miles from Denali, so it was a short day for us.  At milepost 169 and then again 134 we stopped to try to get some pictures of Mt McKinley aka as Denali.  I’ve included pictures from both.  There’s a book Milepost Alaska that we have that tells you all sorts of interesting stops, things to see etc at the various mileposts along the major Alaskan highways.  That’s how I knew to stop at 169 and 134.  At 134, Roger got out his spotting scope and I played with our little camera some more.  At this stop there was a lady who had a Timothy-like camera that was kind enough to share a grey filter that helped with my snapshot.  All in all, Roger and I had a successful mountain viewing day going south.  We also drove through Houston on our way to Anchorage.

 Milepost had a quilt shop listed in Wasalla, but it’s no longer open.  This was only 1.6 miles out of the way, but who’s counting--- Roger.  Roger was successful at his stop at O’Reilly’s Auto Parts and picked up our second replacement plug for the Igloo plug in ice chest.  So far the original and first replacement part have failed.  We’ve no idea why the part keeps failing, but considering that the O’Reilly part was less than $3 we’ll take such expenses.  Hopefully this one will work and we’ll have our drinks cold again.

We got to Anchorage about 2 and checked in at the RV park.  It was a smart thing to do, because when we came back this evening the park is full.   After we got our space for the night,  we headed downtown.  I had originally planned on going to the Visitor Center, but the RV office had all the information that I was after, so we went straight to the Summertime Weekend Festival.  The festival is a bunch of vendors downtown in about a 3 block area.  Lots of tourist stuff and we noticed that Alaska is very proud of being a lot bigger than Texas.   

I bought a caribou polish hotdog and shared it with Roger.  It must have been good, because Roger’s half was gone before I could return with the napkins.  Of course Roger didn’t want one when I said I wanted one.  He helps me in so many ways.

The festival wasn’t crowded at all.  I guess that was good for us, and bad for the vendors.  In fact one of the ladies we talked to in Chicken said her business has declined from 20% from May 2010 and May 2010 was her best month in 2010.   It’s amazing how the economic woes have such an overall national impact, as we’ve seen business closed everywhere we’ve been.  But I digressed.  After the festival we walked to Sheep Creek to the salmon viewing place, that is talked about in Milepost as something very worthwhile to do in Anchorage.  We didn’t see any salmon. 

We then started walking back and saw a guy fishing, so we stopped and talked with him.  He told us that the salmon don’t run upstream until they have the use of low tide coming in.  He also told us that the best place to see the salmon was closer to the mouth of Sheep Creek.  So we walked downstream a little over a mile towards its mouth.  There we then came upon an Army couple, who were there getting ready to salmon fish.  They told us all about salmon fishing on Sheep Creek, but that right now the snow melt has been too fast so the creek is way too muddy to see the salmon even if they were running up stream. We were about an hour too early for the change in the tide.  I think tomorrow we’ll go to the salmon viewing place about 7:30 pm just to see if we can see any jumping up the salmon jump.

Tomorrow we plan on bike riding.  The weather was really nice today and tomorrow is predicted to be the same.  Then the rain returns on Monday.