After about two and a half days of showers, the rain finally stopped, not that there is anything wrong with a little rain. The fishing guide had told me it hadn’t rained in 11 days and all the rivers were down and gosh, the rest of the country is in a drought, so I guess I was a little selfish hoping it wouldn’t go on for thirteen days. Rain, of course, provides great opportunities for photography, and accompanied by six other workshop members plus leaders Tom and Colby, it seemed like a sociable thing to do to wander along in my rain gear. It did take me twenty minutes or so to actually take my new, dry Canon out of the camera pack and try on the cheapo-cheapo rain cover I had bought hoping never to use it, which was a miniature version of the poncho they used to hand out at White Sox games on rainy April nights. If it wasn’t exactly a great thing to shoot through, at least it kept it dry. But there were nice images to be had of local flora and the town of Talkeetna, which is kind of classic Alaska not-quite-bush town, with the requisite front yards full of rusted trucks, discarded refrigerators and beached boats, combined with quaint inns and stores and lots of summer flowers. And lots of airplanes.

Yesterday the rain stopped, and the clouds cleared enough to offer some stunning views of Denali, which gave me occasion to break out the X-Pan, a panoramic film camera – this gives me that old-fashioned opportunity to wait a week for the results. The clearing skies offered an opportunity for a flight-seeing trip, which circled around the mountain and see the south end of the national park. We and landed briefly on a glacier field, so for about fifteen minutes I was in Denali, a mere transposition away from where I usually am.

Today we pack in for two days in the Back of Beyond, as Ed Abbey used to say. Stay tuned.