Hi everyone,

Still having a wonderful time here in Seward. We will be leaving today to head up to Talkeetna, where we will be going with Andrew and Theresa (we met them in Delta Junction, Alaska). Andrew has arranged for us to borrow an ATV Rhino and head to Cache Creek mining camp. It's about 60 miles in the back country and "grandma" fixes meals for us. More on that later.

Today is another beautiful day in Seward. A few days ago we checked the weather and it was supposed to rain for 3 days...so far no rain!!

Here is the view from the hike we took. After attempting Mt. Marathon we headed north on the trail looking for a water fall. We got to this point and after 3 miles still couldn't see or hear the water fall and decided to turn back. The view, scenery and potential bear sightings was worth the straight up climb.

This is Mt. Marathon. The runners run straight up from the lower left of the picture to the upper right of the picture along the very small trail you see in the center of the picture and then straight down again. Two and a half miles pretty much straight up with an elevation gain of 3,000 feet. The fastest guy has a time of 43 minutes and the fastest woman is 1:02. Since it took Vern and I an hour to go a third of the way up we figured we weren't ready for the run this year!!

At the Sea Life Center we saw all the things we had seen in the wild, but maybe not this close. We wouldn't have wanted to get this close to a male sea lion weighing 2,000 lbs.

We had so much fun watching the otters. They were right in front of our motor home. Each day they would come back at the same time to feed. They were very entertaining.

They would go down and get clams and then come up and float on their backs to eat.

Seward is the start of Iditarod dogsled trail. We walked several miles of this famous trail.

We saw this Puffin on our glacier cruise. It was hard to get a picture as they can scurry along the top of the water really fast and they could dive to avoid us.

On our sea kayak excursion, we checked out the tide pools and saw these prehistoric looking things called Chiton. I'm not sure of the name of this type of Chiton but it was about 3" long.

These were called Leather Back Chiton. They have a hard exterior and a clam like interior, they are almost impossible to get off the rocks.

Huge star fish. When we went kayaking the tide was down so much (24') it gave us wonderful tide pools. This star is about 24" across.

Josh (our kayaking guide) showing Vern how to hold a star fish. The star fish was very soft. It was okay to touch all the sea life as long as we put them back where they were.

We have to go for now but will try to post more in a few days.

Thanks for looking,

Vern & Sue