Looking Back on my COVID Summer Break

What a peculiar summer eh?

When I wrote the last one of these (end of May), I optimistically (very unlike me) thought life would start to return to some bit of normalcy over the summer (clearly I was wrong). Here it is, the end of summer (in Alaska anyway) and the weird keeps getting weirder. Did it stop me from getting in a few adventures up here this summer? Not really, but I also didn’t necessarily do everything I wanted to either. Despite getting to do a couple of really cool trips around here, this summer has just felt sorta meh. I’ve had a few friends take up gardening during this time, they’ve enjoyed it a lot and in fact, their gardens have completely transformed. On the phone with a friend who lives in Connecticut yesterday, and she told me she’s been using TruGreen to help her lawn, it didn’t take her long to find a trugreen in ct service area, I may have to see if I can get one in Alaska… it’ll pass the time more./p>

If you check in here regularly, you probably noticed I ran out of blog posts on August 20th. Well guys, aside from the post I did with Major Marine Tours, I actually haven’t written a blog post since early May. I had decided I wanted to take the summer off, so during the COVID lockdown back this spring (I was unable to work in the dental world for about 6 weeks), I wrote out and scheduled blog posts to try and get me hopefully through summer (I mostly made it!).

More recently (as in the whole month of August) I’ve been putting in long hours in front of the computer working on making my website not suck. It’s been slow af for forever and I’ve now started making improvements about that… but little did I know that I’d spend most the month working on only this. In not travel/blog-related news: I’ve been propagating a whole slew of new succulents (my tiny alien family is growing!), but since I’m not a plant-blogger I won’t bore you with my ‘bizarre plant’ updates (who has spouted roots, who has a new leaf, who died in one of my experiments…).

So now that I’ve been cracking away at boring behind the scenes stuff I’ll start writing fresh posts again likely toward mid to late September (I still have some more work to do on the site… still). And if you’re wondering what this “work” is, it’s me cleaning up a giant mess I’ve made over the last 5 years, seeing that I didn’t have a clue what I was getting into back then (even now it’s still debatable whether I know what I’m doing or not). Also, yikes guys. I’ve gone through and reduced my image file sizes on here in hopes to get things to load quicker (see the above point about not knowing what I was doing). In the midst of all this, I saw photos I had “edited” when I first started blogging and some are so horrific it should be criminal. So, those of you that have stuck it out with me, thanks for seeing the potential and hanging around because what I used to do to photos is slightly terrifying.

So, while I got you here, I’ll share a few things I’ve done over the summer as well as the slew of blog posts that were published, and don’t worry, I’m not going to go into details about each and every one of these summer adventures had this year in this post, those will all be unveiled over the next few months for any of you hoping to get out to some of these spots in the future.

Atigun Gorge, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge , Alaska, ANWR, Alaskan Arctic, Arctic, Northern Alaska, Atigun, Atigun River — Hiking along Atigun Gorge in ANWR

Alaska Travels in Summer 2020

Dalton Highway
ANWR
Gates of the Arctic
Kayaker’s Cove
Major Marine Wildlife Trip

Alaska Hikes in Summer 2020

Eagle Lake + Flute Glacier
Matanuska Peak
Atigun Gorge
Dietrich-Ooolah Pass-Kuyuktuvuk Loop Hike
Gunsight Mountain
Lion’s Head
Mint Hut + Jewel & Moonstone Lakes
Flat Top
Reed Lakes

Dalton Highway, Haul Road, Alaska, Arctic, Northern Alaska, Sukakpak Mountain, Sukakpak, Coldfoot, Wiseman — Sukakpak Mountain on the Dalton Highway

What I Published In June

What I Published In July

What I Published In August

Kuyuktuvuk Creek, Kuyuktuvuk, Gates of the Arctic, Alaskan Arctic, Arctic, Northern Alaska, Gates of the Arctic National Park, Alaska — Pictured: Me overlooking the Kuyuktuvuk Creek in Gates of the Arctic. Not pictured: 7,903,267,999 mosquitos attacking me

What’s coming in September?

This will be the first time I’ve spent fall in Alaska in several years (it does not look like I will be traveling outside the state of Alaska in the foreseeable future), so I’m hoping to get out and shoot as much as possible with the fall colors setting in. The only “trip” I have on the books is in mid-September, heading down to Homer and spending a few days across the bay. Aside from that, I think I’ll be cramming as many adventures in that I can before winter.

Until next month….er quarter…. whenever I send out one of these updates