1999: Alaska Railroad [FONT=Trebuchet MS, Arial, Helvetica] On this leg of the trip an Alaska RR Tail Car will be behind us. Our car "D" will be right in front of it... [/FONT]
Somewhere I have a video done by Pentrex, on the Alaska RR. I should dig that out and watch it again. It might help me get an even better sense of your trip.
1999: Alaska Railroad As like the first half of our train ride on the Alaska RR, one gan once again see how long the consist is in these shots I took from our back platform [FONT=Trebuchet MS, Arial, Helvetica] ... and the Motive Power way up ahead of us... [/FONT][FONT=Trebuchet MS, Arial, Helvetica] [/FONT][FONT=Trebuchet MS, Arial, Helvetica] [/FONT]
1999: Alaska Railroad Here is a look back at the Denali Lodge we stayed at that night before continuing on the train...
Darren, your Lodge photo brought back a long forgotten scary memory of the Denali Park airport, possibly on an island to the right of your photo. A fellow RCA engineer was supplementing his radar site income by bush-piloting with his Beech Bonanza. He asked me to fly right-seat ferrying a man to the Park, I with only 25 hours solo time, none of which were in Bonanzas. We dropped the man off on the runway which ran 2000-2500 feet from end to end of a flattened island in mid-river. The prevailing wind always comes down the river, so we had to take off directly towards a 100-200 foot high water fall about 1000 feet up river from the end of the runway. He advised that I might want to close my eyes..I stupidly did not. He gave the Bonanza 100% power with brakes locked, released brakes, attained flying speed, raised landing gear, held plane flat along the ground at max throttle, and said "Hang On!" He then yanked the yoke into his gut and the plane shot nearly straight up, barely clearing the top of the falls right at stall speed. :wideeyes: Fortunately I had packed spare underwear for my TDY assignment....:uhoh:
Dang Hank, that does sound scary in a Bonanza! Usually thos guys use Super Cubs, Cessna 180's or the newer Husky's and Carbon Cubs. I would never picture a Bonanza as a bush plane. Darren, How long were you in Alaska? That is such beautiful country.
I've seen videos of some places where those planes land and take off. Simple to arrive at the conclusion- those guys are nuts!
For this trip, we were there from late July to early August of 1999. We started off on a Land (Bus/Train) Tour heading North and then ended on a Cruises heading South...
While doing some work on getting the video ready to upload to YouTube, it looks like the tunnel has since been day-lighted...
1999: Alaska Railroad Once on the cruise, we did get in a little RR time too. Here is the Depot at Carcross, AK [FONT=Trebuchet MS, Arial, Helvetica][/FONT]
Boy, were you lucky with such gorgeous weather at Carcross, and I hope you had the same for the entire WP&Y journey.
Sadly on this trip the WP&Y was having issues so we decided to take a bus tour into the Yukon. Shortly after we left they got the WP&Y going to only break down again so we were actually lucky we decided not to take that train ride. With that said, we did get back to Alaska just recently and had a wonderful ride on the WP&Y with tons of video that I will share when we get to that trip. On this 1999 trip, the only day we really had rainy/bad weather was while on the Alaska RR Day #1 portion, the other days were quite nice...
