Paradise Lake

Today was amazing. I wish I had better adjectives to describe it. I guess I'll have to settle for sharing these photos although they just don't do it justice.

Today we went out to Paradise Lake which is in the complete wilderness, in a extremely remote glacial valley somewhere in the Kenai Peninsula. Katie stayed at home with Grandma.

Here are Clark and Emily and Blake before getting into Grandpa's plane.



Clark took this awesome photo of me. Notice the fireweed in the pocket of my flight vest and the hipboots. Sweet.



The kids climbed into the back seat and donned their earphones to protect their ears from the noise. They are wearing their life jackets because you have to in a float plane.



Here is my father untying the plane so we could leave.



I took this little video as we took off.


Shortly after taking off we passed over Anchorage (and my parents itty bitty house) and then we were flying over Turnagain Arm which you can see below.



This photo below shows the highway in the top. That is the highway that we traveled on our way down to Homer last week.



This video is of our landing on Paradise Lake.



So, the plan was to fish where the little stream leaves the lake but the shores were pretty rocky there so we docked the plane a bit away from there and then had to hike. Oh my goodness the brush was SO think. We were laughing about how it was taking us forever to move just a little ways. We fell down a lot:



Then we got to the stream and Blake promptly caught a Grayling. We weren't keeping them, it was just catch-and-release for fun today.





Clark was fishing on the other side. The photo is the first one that begins to show the intense beauty of this place. It is truly one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, maybe the very most. Those are glaciers on the tops of those mountains.



The fishing was only so-so at this location so we headed back to the plane for lunch. Here is another shot of the lake and the glaciers:

Time for lunch:

Grandpa tried for some more Grayling by the plane while Clark and Emily cooled off their feet in the lake.

Of course Grandpa got one (Clark kept asking me how he did it and I would just say - because he's Grandpa and he is just really, really good at getting fish) and let Blake reel it in:

After lunch we taxied across the lake to where a stream enters the lake. This was a better spot. Here are a few shots of our fish:

Okay, so this is the only fish I caught that was bigger than 3 inches. I'm not such a great fisherwoman, I admit it.

We saw beavers splashing around in the lake and ventured down the shore until we found their lodge. Here is Blake on top of it. He kept asking me if they were inside - yes.

Here is where things started getting really silly. It was a pretty warm day and the kids had inevitably gotten water in their boots throughout the day. It was only a matter of time until they decided to just go ahead and swim. It started with Clark and Emily daring each other to go deeper and deeper.

After this picture I just told them to take their clothes off and go for it. I took a few photos but we won't be publishing those on the Internet of course! They were laughing hysterically. It was quite a sight - skinny dipping with their boots on. Speaking of boots, Emily walked into a deep area and lost her boots. I thought they were gone for good but my dad went in with his chest waders and "caught" them with a hook on his fishing pole:

This made the kids laugh even more. It was a really fun day.

Here is a video of our taking off:



On our way home my dad wanted to scout out some areas to see if there were any mountain goats because Mark wants to go hunt one later this year. I saw the only one but it wasn't in the right area. We did see some amazing glaciers though:

The kids were only seeing the back of their eyelids:

It was one of those magical days that you can hardly believe happened. Thanks Dad!