Nathan helped me pick wild flowers for a special dish.
June 2017 started off with a bang for us. Typically, there really isn’t much going on for most Alaskans’ Summers until Memorial Day weekend. It really is true that summer doesn’t start around here until the last weekend of May.
The regularly accepted gardening rule is to ‘never put anything in the ground until Memorial Weekend’ and it is strictly adhered to by many hard core gardeners. It’s funny though because I have seen mid day temps in the 70’s°F during the first week of May and then we have years like this in which it has barely reached the 60’s for the entire month of June.
Then there is summer camping. I’ve heard lower-48ers comment that “Memorial Weekend in Alaska is like the frik’n Fourth of July! EVERYONE goes camping. The whole state shuts down.” If you want a camp site that weekend you have to go out either Thursday night or early on Friday morning. Don’t waste your time after mid-day on Friday.
Now, camping for me usually starts with the tradition of a birthday camp-out. This goes all the way back to around age 10 when Casey ate her first mosquito in ice cream and the neighbor hood boys surrounded our tent with flaming sticks. After that it was a reoccurring blow-out on the banks of the Copper River. Finally I moved to Anchorage and we started heading to the Eagle River Campground so all the friends could come and go to work as needed.
The problem is that my birthday almost ALWAYS falls during the big camping rush for Memorial Weekend. We had to start planning it for the next weekend; the beginning of June. This year was no exception. It just so happened to be the same weekend of our Great Strides walk so it really made for a full weekend. I’m glad we took a couple days off!
Great Strides Anchorage
Nathan with his fantastic Pulmonologist, Dr. Dion Roberts, who stopped in to Great Strides on his bicycle.
For those who don’t know Great Strides is a fundraising walk to benefit those living with Cystic Fibrosis. In our case our son. Here it is a beautiful 5K walk on the coastal trail followed by hotdogs and hamburgers and games for the kids. It’s a little interesting in that those whom it benefits can attend, but they can’t be near each other. With CF there is a huge issue of cross infection. So much so that the CFers wear special shirts to help distinguish one another from everyone else so they can keep the mandatory 6 foot distance. (This is also the story behind the ‘I’m a Fighter’ shirt that you might see Nathan wear often. The purple looks really good on him.) Because of this they also have all the prizes for the kids prepackaged in separate baggies to take to separate tables, and even have the bean bags for the toss in ziplock bags so they can be disinfected between each child. If you didn’t know before, CF can definitely be an isolating disease.
For me, the hardest part of CF is making friends with the other families. Not that they are disinterested, but your best connection to each other would be clinic staff who know who everyone is and their like-mindedness, or who might have answers for your more personal questions….. but patient confidentiality blows that completely. Attending these fund raisers can be one of the only ways to meet other families here in Alaska. We’re just all so spread out, and there aren’t very many of us, so even with the amazing online options we have now it still comes with difficulty. Our Great Strides isn’t very big but there are usually a few new faces and old friends to be found.
This year we have begun working on our YouTube channel more, and Nathan was given a headcam for Christmas so we can share his adventures with family. Great Strides was one of the first times we got to really try it out. The video below isn’t particularly great, especially since Nathan didn’t want to actually wear the camera until the end, but that did make for a great grand finale. Check it out if you’d like, (I suggest skipping around in it,) or just scroll down for our camp out to walk on the magnificent Matanuska Glacier.
Road Trip to Glacier View
For anyone who has been around Alaska for very long this video will probably be of little interest. However it is a beautiful drive. I videoed the highlights, a lot of Matanuska River and the magnificent valley it charges through, as well as Long Lake. The video of our camp out, and especially our walk on the glacier itself, are in the next video below this one.
Tenting at the Glacier View Campground
~And Camping with CF
Let me make it known right now that the Glacier View campground is very small. Less than 20 sites. Don’t arrive in the afternoon during peak season. You might not be as lucky as us in getting the very last site.
We have a very specific camp set-up tradition. Mommy does the tent. Daddy does the fire. Nathan helps with both of those, especially unloading gear and hauling firewood, and then he and Mommy do CPT while Daddy gets dinner going. Yup, CF doesn’t take time off for camping. Not even if you’re tenting it.
This trip we didn’t have to do pulmozyme. As a once-a-day treatment we simply did it in the morning before we left, and then with only a single night out, we did it again the following evening when we returned. If we camp for 2 nights we have to bring a power supply to plug the compressor into, and the one we have now is only good for one treatment before it needs to be recharged, which takes many hours. On our next camping trip to Denali we will get to do some new figuring-out for that situation. There is also the need to sterilize his neb cups, which again we didn’t need to do for this trip, but that can often times be accommodated by bringing several sets and boiling them all when we get home…. for now it was simple, manual CPT in a camp chair while watching the fire. There are worse ways to spend time with your child.
Chest Physio Therapy in a camp chair. Nathan found himself a long stick for poking the fire.
We had hotdogs and hamburgers. It gave us a pretty solid rain for being Alaska. Nathan went out and practiced using his BB gun. It was a pretty simple camp-out. Below are a few photos. I hate to say that there really isn’t a lot to say about our over-night, but there are more pictures and shorts in the video that follows so I won’t spend a lot of words on it here.
Getting to Walk on Matanuska Glacier. AWESOME!
There is a lot of talk in our household about what we really want Nathan to experience in his childhood. I looked around Alaska and all the wonderful things that I have had the opportunity to do …minus what he has already gotten to do, including but not limited to Kayaking out of Whittier, going to the Reindeer Farm, and visiting the Alaska Sealife Center, and I decided that the 120 mile drive out to Glacier View and the $60 cost for the three of us to drive down to the terminus was worth it for Nathan to get to walk on a glacier! (That’s right, it was “entirely for Nathan.”)
It was a full weekend already with Great Strides and the overnight camp-out. Getting CPT done in the morning, and breakfast, and the camp packed up was just more to do. Finally though we had gotten through all the prefaces and were on our way down to the glacier. A real glacier. We were going to walk on a real glacier!!!!!
I’m not going to lie that we were not all enthusiastic about this adventure. We all know that Mommy loves glaciers. Nathan doesn’t necessarily, and Andrew wasn’t particularly excited about a rainy day of walking on a pile of ice. But you know what? It turned out to be a really good time.
It being cloudy made the glacier’s blueness really standout and it was neither wet nor cold. The walk looked really daunting from the parking lot but Nathan was a good sport, without any arguments, and it was really easy going and well marked. There were plenty of nooks and crannies to explore without being in any danger, and that blue… did I mention the blue? The best part was the way that Nathan viewed the rivers and valleys we drove past again coming home. He had a different understanding about why they are shaped the way they are, and how they got that way.
In some ways it might have been a very quiet and simple trip but I know that Nathan will remember it for a long time. He even ‘dumped’ it on a friend as soon as they walked in the door, “I walked on a real glacier!”
There are other options for ‘road side’ glaciers in the state, Worthington and Exit Glaciers to name two, but I would suggest this trip for almost everyone. Nathan was only $10, so if you have a family with lots of kids it won’t add up too fast. They do have guided trips for a much pricier cost but I can say that these will offer a TON of information. Plus, the use of ice cleats and safety gear mean you will get to explore WAY more of the glacier than we did. Do the math and decide for yourselves, but I felt this was good pick for an easy day trip, resulting in a great adventure and fantastic learning!
This video shows both our camping trip and our actual walk on Matanuska Glacier,
plus some education information about glaciers in general:
Post a comment