Talkeetna with a side of McKinley

There's a mountain around here that you may have heard of before.  It goes by the name of Mt. McKinley.  It can be seen from miles and miles away (like from Anchorage and other locations on the Kenai Peninsula) if it is not covered in clouds.  (And since it's so tall it creates it's own weather...so it's in the clouds a lot!  Maybe it's just shy...?)

Today Luke and I decided to drive up to Talkeetna.  It's about 100 miles north of where we live.  It's the base for the majority of the mountaineering expeditions to the Alaska Mountain Range/Denali National Park.

As we were driving, just outside of Willow, we saw a massive mountain in the distance.  We couldn't believe how big it was.  We decided it MUST be Mt. McKinley.

Then we went around a corner and saw an even more massive mountain and we realized THAT was it!

Pictures don't even do it justice.  But here are our attempts to capture it.

From Willow:

It's only a mere 20,328ft tall.  (Oh my!)

From driving outside of Willow:

From an overlook outside of Talkeetna:

What an amazing mountain!  We felt so blessed to see such a magnificent sight!

Talkeetna is an awesome little town.  We loved it!  Everyone was really friendly.  And the mayor of the town is a yellow tabby cat named Stubbs (we tried to meet the mayor, but we couldn't find him...)

There are a lot of flight seeing companies around the town.  We thought this was funny:

I choose flying!  One day we would like to go on a flight seeing trip around the huge mountains.

Here are some more pictures from around the town:

We went to the Chocolate corner (bottom right) and bought delicious European chocolates and the best ginger candies ever, and we had pizza by the slice at Mountain High Pizza Pie (bottom left).

The chocolate store had this funny sign:

The brewery in town had a good quote written on their board:

On our way out of town we stopped at an awesome bakery:

And if you are ever traveling anywhere in Alaska you need this:

We took ours with us today and it was very very very helpful/insightful!!!!

And as we drove back through Wasilla we stopped by some of my dad's property and did some exploring.