Philip & Allison Nelson

Here are some pictures from our road trip to Yosemite, Crater Lake, and the Redwoods:

Looking west from the bridge over Nevada Fall (5907 ft) on the way up (~3 miles into the hike):

Almost to Quarter Dome, a few hours and a few miles later.

The most intimidating site of the hike--looking up at the Half Dome cables from Quarter Dome. We waited here for an hour while we waited for an older man to be helped down. It was quite crowded here, as you can see:

Allison on the cables (she is standing straight up; note relative angle of rock face):

Allison on top of Half Dome:

More pictures from othe top:

Looking west, down into the Yosemite Valley:

Panorama taken from the top, looking East toward Clouds Rest (9926 ft, center)

Looking north from the protrusion on top of Half Dome at Tenaya Canyon:

A sure-footed marmot:

Another view of Quarter Dome, with Half Dome behind, taken on the way down:

Looking upstream at the Merced River, not far from the bridge:

Nevarda Fall, and a tired Allison leaning on the rock wall:

Liberty Cap and Nevada Fall:

Looking down on Vernal Fall (5044 ft):

Shakespeare theater in Ashland:

Crater Lake, taken from a stopping point along the rim drive that Grandpa Gardner helped build with the Army Corps of Engineers:

Philip Wading in Crater Lake after hiking down near Cleetwood Cove to the boat landing:

View of Cleetwood Cove from the hike back up to the rim. This is the best picture for showing the deep blue appearance of the water:

Allison leaning against the snow still covering part of a parking lot on July 3rd!

Allison using her spy glass to look for sea life near Crescent City:

Allison attempting to eat a banana slug found among the ferns below the redwoods:

Philip near the roots of a fallen giant redwood:

Golden Gate Bridge seen in late afternoon from the Marin Headlands as we drove in from the North:

We went to see Muir Woods after meeting up with the Mosleys who happened to be in San Fransisco the same day:

We've been scanning some of Dad's slides with a batch scanner we borrowed from a friend. Here are some from the first two carousels:

And here are some of Allison's Dad, Elder Ricks, on his mission in England:

Philip, Halloween 1979

Go here to see a pictorial rendition of "The Trees."

Plume of smoke from the Fall 2007 Fires, seen from work; Allison freezing berries picked in the 'wild'

Pictures of our hike to the red rocks in a near by canyon

Two views of our main floor study, newly improved with Ikea furniture

Another view of the red room; Christmas Tree

Cosmo and Bryan Kehl after the BYU v. SDSU football game; Philip wearing BYU blue at the game

Philip on the way to the BYU v. Long Beach State BB game at the Pyramid

Allison's garden, fall 2007

We had a great Nelson family reunion in early August this year (2007). Sam and Marilyn let me borrow their camera, and people were good sports about having pictures taken. Also, here is the slideshow.

Have you ever heard of a "pet spa"? Neither had we! That was until the fanfare sounded for the Royal Pet Spa, when its procession came onto our street. What's next? Pet life insurance? Doggie day care? Pet play groups?

I formerly had a good view out of my office window. However, lately a large office-building has been built there. Here are some pictures of the construction, which some might find interesting:

First, they dug squarish, two-stepped footings around the outline of the building and in two central areas. Several long cement piles were driven into each of these holes by a loud pile-driver.

The footings were poured on top of each clump of piles, and the various footings were linked with cement. Iron beams were then connected to each footing and the skeleton of the building began to grow. (I may have missed some steps because I was away from the office at the trial for a month). Iron workers sometimes walked out along a beam while the crane was still dangling it, in order to bang its fittings into place on an adjoining beam.

Corrugated metal floors were laid down and screwed into place on top of the crossing I-beams. Cement was poured onto the corrugated metal to make each floor. Welders stood on the wooden platforms dangling from the side of the building and welded the beams together.

In August 2006 we had a great Alaskan adventure, thanks largely to Rob and Karen Timmins.

With only a few weeks notice of our proposed plans, Rob and Karen Timmins were very kind home-base hosts, and we enjoyed getting to know the Timmins family.

We hiked Mount Baldy with Rob. Greater Anchorage and the Cook Inlet are in the background:

John loves to watch anything having to do with jets, and asks very intelligent questions of the expert:

After helping improve a trail in Eagle River wilderness area, we tried out part of the trail to Crow Pass and were lucky enough to see baby black bears, a bald eagle, and a beaver dam. This is part of the historic Iditarod Trail, but I'm not sure if the race still comes through here.

Allison with some burls:

A bald eagle flies over the Eagle River:

Allison spotted two baby black bear cubs in a tree, but one climbed down before I could see it. I had been whistling and singing several loud renditions of "If you go down to the woods tonight..." in order to not startle any bears as we hiked, but it had the effect of calling bears to us. Luckily, the Eagle River separated us from the two bear cubs (and presumably their mother):

I got hungry along the way, and took a page from the beaver playbook:

Soon after seeing evidence of gnawing, we saw a couple great beaver dams. This one, for example:

From what we saw, all of Alaska seemed green and lush. Allison especially liked this spongy moss:

We went with Rob et al. to a Blue Angels air show. Rob is shown with John and Emily after exiting a modified Boeing 737 used for communications training. Allison is shown here near the monstrous C-5 transport, with its cargo hold open:

While we wandered among the parked aircraft (e.g., F-15s), several jets gave demonstrations, including this C-17:

I was pleased to see the famous AWACS, as well as the F-22, the newest U.S. fighter jet:

As we saw, F-22s are amazing--they can just "sit" on their jets, hovering and spinning on their tails as they point up into the air.

But of course the Blue Angels were the real draw. I hadn't seen them since July 4th in Provo many years ago.

Flying in a formation even tighter than their usual diamond, the lead and slot jets are up-side down:

A slow-motion pass by the two solo pilots, in a position similar to that needed for a carrier landing:

The announcer stood at attention, while his compatriot occasionally turned around to speak in his ear about what the jets were up to. His commentary was synchronized perfectly; time and again the jets would roar through and do a crisp pass or roll, break formation into a fleur-de-lis, or perform other precision maneuvers directly in front of us at "show center." Often, after executing the main maneuver, the pilots would do four crisp quarter rolls as they vectored away to set up the next pass.

We made an excursion down to Valdez. Not long after leaving Eagle River, near Palmer, we saw this nice roadside view, showing a nice "braided river," a very common Alaskan scene:

Accessible from the Glenn Highway is 27-mile long Matanuska Glacier:

This "bridal-veil falls" is very close to Valdez in a deep canyon along the Richardson Highway. (There is also a Bridal Veil Falls at Yosemite, in addition to the original one in Provo canyon.)

Here are some salmon attempting to push toward their spawning streams from the Valdez arm of the Prince William Sound. Their way is blocked here, but there is a fish ladder available just a few yards away. It was a roiling mass of frantic fish!

Here is a glimpse of the terminus of the Alyeska, trans-Alaska pipeline, with a tanker filling up. The pipeline runs underneath the road we were hiking here. Right before we arrived in Alaska, a BP pipeline from the North Slope developed some small holes and spilled a small amount of oil, but I think this one was still flowing when we were there.

On our way back from Valdez along the Richardson Highway, we stopped off near Hatcher Pass to see Worthington Glacier. Here was our first view of the beautiful blue color in the crevasses. We read that the visible blue is due to the absorption of the other lower-frequency wavelengths in the ice. I wonder if this is similar to the reason the sky is blue--Ross Spencer taught that it is because of the omega-cubed (or was it to the fourth?) in an iteration of maxwell's equations. It seems backwords, though--wouldn't there be more scattering everywhere BUT in the crevasses? In any case, linear change in frequency results in a highly non-linear scattering effect. Dad? Karl?:

Coming out of the Chugach mountains on the Richardson Highway, we got many views of the Alyeska trans-Alaska pipeline. Here is pump station number 16 (I think), with a couple versions of me superimposed, making for a strange expression:

Along the Glenn highway, we stopped at the roadside to take this picture of two distant glaciers coming together. Fireweed can be seen in the foreground. When it goes to seed, winter is about 6 weeks away.

Our next trip was to the west side of the Kenai Peninsula. Rob let us borrow some fishing gear, and we put it to good use in the Russian River in Cooper Landing.

Allison and I each caught and released several already-spawned red salmon--beautiful, but not good to eat. I also caught a nice big silver salmon but forgot to take a picture of it before I filleted it as Rob had taught me to do.

We hiked up to see a place where the salmon try to jump up a series of cascades. I couldn't catch any jumpers in a photo, but we did see a black bear come down to the water. My camera wasn't out in time, but five minutes later a young grizzly came along, and this time I was ready. Too bad the foreground trees caught the auto-focus.

In Ninilchick, we stayed in a youth hostel called "Eagle's Watch Hostel" overlooking a little green valley with this meandering creek. The valley was actually straighter than it appears in this spliced photo, but the river really did wind back and forth:

We fished for Halibut from a boat in the Cook Inlet off of Ninilchik. On the other side of the inlet is a series of relatively active volcanos, but they seemed far away because the inlet is so wide here. Halibut are quite strong and heavy! We learned how to recognize their bite. It is a periodic sawing feeling on the line.

We caught several good ones, but the three largest here were all caught by our fellow fishermen on the boat. Even so, we came back home with more than 50 pounds of halibut, now crowding our freezer!

The Kenai Peninsula is beautiful and mountainous, with lakes, glaciers, rivers, salmon, and bears galore. Possibly the prettiest part of Alaska:

We drove to the other (Eastern) side of the Kenai Peninsula, where Kenai Fjords National Park and the town of Seward are. We took a boat trip in to Kenai Fjords and saw a humpback whale. Here he shows his flukes. Later, he waved a long side flipper at a watching boat:

Here is a view of a glacier we passed, and some sea lions on the rocks:

Another side fjord with some glacier views. Allison is shown with Northwestern Glacier, named for the university of the scientists that charted and explored the area.

Northwestern glacier didn't do any major calving while we were watching, but even the few minor snow slides and (seemingly) small falling pieces we saw each sent rumblings echoing across the fjord toward our boat, revealing just what a monster this glacier is. A note about these panoramic pictures: the thinner it is on the screen, the bigger it is in life. This was so big, I couldn't even fit it in the camera from several hundred yards away! This is probably 6 or 7 pictures spliced together:

The next day we hiked up along "Exit Glacier," so named because some explorers mapping the area thought it was a suitable path to follow to come down off the Harding Ice Field, from which all these glaciers flow. It was rainy and cold at times, but as we got to the top and saw the Harding Ice Field, the sun came out and we got some good views.

I was just as wet from perspiration as I was from the rain. We were constantly adding or removing layers, and the weather changed between pleasant and cold about 10 times during the 6 or 7 mile hike. We also saw a photogenic marmot who didn't seem too afraid of us. Here, he strikes a regal pose.

Exit Glacier is HUGE! These pictures don't reveal its immensity. It is a half-mile wide, and flows three miles from the Harding Icefield to the Exit Creek outwash plain, moving forward about 2 feet per day.

And of course, compared to the Harding Icefield, Exit glacier is a mere minor appendage. The icefield is the source of over 30 named glaciers. Icefield and glaciers together cover over 700 square miles. The Harding Icefield receives at least 400 inches of snow each year, which accumulates and constantly presses down, forming ice underneath. It is one of only 4 remaining icefields in the U.S. Note the "nunataks" (Eskimo for "lonely peaks") protruding from the icefield. No one knows how deep the valley beneath the icefield is, or anything about the underlying topography. Of course, its probably different every day, thanks to all the ice.

Here I am at the top of the hike with the Harding Icefield, and again in the Exit Creek outwash plain after the long hike:

Allison showed her mettle through a strenuous ascent, knee-jarring descent, and a minor hand scrape on the wet rocks:

Our next trip was to Denali. A bridge was washed out at about mile 127 of the Parks Highway, so we had to drive about 600 miles the long away around, taking the Glenn and Richardson highways again, and going up through Glennallen, Paxson, Big Delta, North Pole (!), and Fairbanks before coming down the Parks Highway from the north. We stayed in John Hirt's family's home in Fairbanks, going the last 150 miles the next morning. Alaska is even bigger than it looks!

We were lucky that Mount McKinley was "out" that afternoon, and we got a rare (~once-a-month) view of the tallest peak in North America without its usual shroud of clouds:

Note that Mount McKinley (a.k.a. "Denali") is indeed very tall: the sun illuminated its slopes long after the peaks near us were in darkness. Allison thinks it looks like a molar:

The following day we took a bus ride into the park, the only way you can get past mile 15 of the highway. One highlight was seeing two large grizzly bears grazing on the mountain side. Through binoculars, this dark brown grizzly seemed to have a very long neck. The bus driver thinks it might have been a bear they call Herschel. The blond grizzly is hard to see in these pictures, and might be hiding behind a tree or in a ravine. They were probably eating soap berries. Speaking of berries, we ate wilde berries several times. The wild raspberries were large but tart. There were lots of realtively small blueberries that Allison liked to pick--in the tradition of "Blueberries For 'Al." Bears can lick berries off the bushes very efficiently, consuming as many as 15 gallons per day when they're in season.

Just before we left the park, we got a great look at some caribou on the road. As with all ungulates, Caribou shed their antlers in the fall and grow new ones each year. Mice and other tundra creatures gnaw on the discarded antlers for nutrients:

As we flew home, I got several good looks at mountain peaks, glaciers, and (maybe) the Harding Ice Field through the clouds. Note the stripe in the middle of the glacier at the right, formed when two glaciers come together upstream and their lateral moraines (side debris flows) are trapped between the two ice flows to form a medial moraine.

Note the glacier flowing into a lake or ocean at the bottom left and the glacier starting to flow down from an collection area or ice field on the right: