WLC and Valdez trip

Well after a long 30 days at the Warrior Leadership Course I guess they decided that I had become a Warrior Leader capable of leading troops. Hmmm. So they went ahead and let me graduate. Oh yeah and I had the highest PT score out of the 70 of us there. So I got recognized for that. You better recognize...Fool. Lisa came to the graduation without the boys....I love you guys (Benson and Jack) but we had a nice break as you will see.

After the graduation we drove down to Valdez. On the way there we stopped to feed and visit with our prehistoric friend the MuskOx. He was glad to see us but after a short visit we had to say goodbye and continue our trip to Valdez. The next day we went Sea kayaking with Pangaea Adventures. It was an 8 hour excursion. They taxied us by boat out to the ice fields of the Colombia glacier (the fastest receding glacier in the world.....I hope that you enjoy driving your big SUV's....I bet the polar bears wish they had SUV's so they could drive to some food....but no they have to swim and guess what, sometimes that can't swim that far....so what are they supposed to do....evolve and adapt you say.....that's crazy) where we got in our kayaks and cruised through iceberg's and then had lunch on bird island. Then we cruised around the shore of the Prince William Sound until we came to a beach where our boat picked us up. I had mentioned to the captain that he had better find us a whale and sure enough he did. It was amazing (Please enjoy the video). We saw lots of wildlife and cool sites on the boat ride there and back. We saw where the Valdez oil spill happened (the site where many animals lost there lives because you just had to have all that oil to fuel your big SUV's....I bet those birds wish they had SUV's so they could have gotten the hell outta there before all that oil spilled out of the boat).

The next day we did an 8 mile hike on an old pack trail that the U.S. army built a long time ago. It was great until we got lost. We won't get into the details of it. Suffice it to say that we got lost because of my stupidity and we made our way back thanks to my skill and courage and bravery and many other adjectives describing positive characteristics.

On the way back we stopped off at a fish wheel that our friends where using. For you non-Alaskans a fish wheel is a big stationary wheel that is positioned in the river and it catches the salmon that are headed upstream to spawn. We were hoping to see it scoop out salmon but they had only gotten 8 fish in the last ten hours. The people next to them had got a bunch of salmon so we watched them slice and dice those little fishies up so they could eat them (again, driving an SUV would have been a lot easier for those salmon than swimming upstream against the current for hundreds of miles plus they probably could have avoided all those fishwheels). It was a great trip and as a result I have decided to head up a project to provide SUV's for some of the Alaskan wildlife. I bet Algore would fly up here in his huge jet and support my project.