Our Alaska trip

Back in 2005 when Leah and I got married we took an Alaska cruise. I would never have expected to enjoy a cruise, but this was different. First, we flew to Anchorage, from where we took a train ride into the interior of Alaska for a few days. We got to stop along the way at a few interesting places, and then we went back to Anchorage and boarded the ship. The ship traveled mainly at night, stopping at several small towns for us tourists to do our thing. We thought we would share some of our pictures, a few at a time.

The plane trip had two legs. The first was from Atlanta to Seattle. We flew over Mount St. Helens just before we reached Seattle. The captain pointed it out. I might or might not have recognized the mountain otherwise. A few years earlier I had driven with some friends up to Mount St Helens, but it was so foggy we couldn’t see anything. This was actually quite a good view. Click on the pictures for larger views.

Mount St. Helens through the window of the airliner as we neared Seattle.

We spent one night in Anchorage before boarding the train for our trip inland. This was in late May, so the nights were not long. The hotel had really thick curtains to darken the room. It was broad daylight when we went to bed.

The mountains viewed from the train.

The train trip was fun, even not including the side trips for sightseeing. But we always knew there was one great, big sight awaiting at the turnaround point of our inland trip. I’m cheating a little here, because I could take pictures only out the side windows or from the last car, looking back from where we had been. So the only way I could get this shot was to take it as we left to return to Anchorage.

Denali, the Mountain formerly known as Mount McKinley

The highest mountain in North America is every bit as impressive as you might expect. This is a view from the lodge where we spent the night before a bus ride into the park for a closer view. We got closer, but close is a relative term in Alaska.

We’ll put up some more pictures later. I hope you enjoy them.

Friday Felines

Will he smile?

We finally got caught up enough to post a Friday Feline on Friday.

Smokey seemed confused that morning. Or did he think we were confused? I kept expecting him to disappear, all but the smile.

Friday Felines on Sunday

Before and After

Zoe is a long-haired Persian. Or something. We really don’t know who his daddy was, or his mother for that matter. That makes him a bastard, a condition he strives to live up to. When he grooms himself, he ends up with furballs, the only kind of balls he has now. Later, of course, he throws them up dramatically.

His hair was perfect

We give Zoe a buzz cut in the summer. The groomer leaves long hair on his head and tail, which gives him a kind of leonine look. Or possibly a punk look.

Cool, eh?

He is rightly embarrassed.

We have dozens, scores, hundreds of pictures of Zoe, so we thought it would be easy to find a picture of him standing up with long hair to have a direct comparison to him standing with short hair. But it turns out that Zoe spends virtually all of his time lying down. We think he was standing up in this picture because the floor was cold.

Sunrise Christmas Eve 2007

Sunrise, Christmas Eve, 2007

Sunrise, Christmas Eve, 2007

Christmas Eve dawned clear back in 2007, unlike this morning. We are finally getting some rain.

In this shot, the low-lying fog in the hollows is the result of a temperature inversion. In the lower 40,000 feet or so of the Earth’s atmosphere, the part called the troposphere, the temperature normally decreases about 3.5 F for every 1000 feet increase in elevation. That change in temperature with altitude is called the temperature lapse rate. We often see the effect of the normal lapse rate when we drive up the mountain to our house. We are about 600 feet higher than the valley below us, and the temperature at the house is often a couple of degrees lower than down in the flatlands. That’s consistent with a lapse rate of 3.5 F per 1000 feet. But on a clear night, the lapse rate reverses close to the ground as the surface radiates heat towards space and the ground cools the air nearby. The change in lapse rate that occurs then is called a temperature inversion. In a temperature inversion, the air gets warmer as you go up. Since the cool air becomes denser, it wants to sink. The ground, of course, stops it. Up on the mountain, however, the cool air can slide down the mountainside to pool in the lower elevations. So at night, as we drive up the mountain, the temperature sometimes gets a good bit higher. We have seen temperature differences of 5 F between the bottom of the mountain and our house.

If the air near the surface cools enough, it drops below the dew point and fog forms. That’s what happened in this picture. As the sun rises, it will heat the surface, and the air near the ground will start to get warmer and less dense. The air will begin to stir, mixing into the air above it, until the inversion disappears, taking the fog with it, and restoring the normal lapse rate.