I Hope I Don't Make a Bad Joke About Hope . . . Darn it.

Hi, Everyone!

Sorry for the delay in writing this post, but we got temporarily sidetracked with Iditarod stuff.  For people who are still interested, Lance Mackey had to send home a few of his top dogs, and he has dropped from 3rd place to 9th.  It's looking like there is little chance of him winning.  The current leader, John Baker from the Alaska town of Kotzebue, just left Kaltag and is heading to the coast.  We're nearing the end!

Anyway, 2 weeks ago we joined Steve's co-clerk Aesha and her boyfriend Dario for a skiing weekend out in a cabin in Hope, Alaska.  Hope is an approx. 2 hour drive south of Anchorage (it's on the Kenai), though most of that drive time is because it is on the other side of an inlet . . . and there is no bridge crossing the water.

The cabin was a ton of fun.  It was a small cabin with benches on the first floor for sleeping and a loft on the second floor with some mattresses.  It was a dry cabin, like Sheep Mountain, so we had to use the outhouse outside.  And there was no electricity in the cabin, so we were lit by our battery-powered lantern all evening.

The coolest part of the cabin, though, was that there was no electric or gas heating.  Rather, the whole place was kept warm by a giant stove in the middle, in which we had to build a fire.

Of course, when we got there there was not a fire because people hadn't been there in a while.  We got one started and within a few minutes the place started warming up.  What we didn't realize we just how warm it would get.  We kept putting logs in throughout the evening, and by 9p or so we probably had the cabin to 70-80 degrees.  It was really really warm; like down to t-shirts warm.

Anyway, we went to bed and woke up around 3a to find the fire had gone out and we were sans heat once again.  After Steve stoked a new fire, the place heated up again until 8a or so, when we re-awoke to find the fire dead.  It was a really interesting experience to self-heat a place using chopped firewood, and to see how quickly the cabin would change temperatures depending on the length of the time the fire had gone/gone out for.

We also did some awesome cross-country skiing around the area.

It was really scenic out in Hope.

The trip was awesome and we loved the company.  Much thanks to Aesha and Dario for planning it!

As a side note, this week has been a bit of a bucket-list buster for us here.  On Thursday, we decided to check out the Midnight Sun brewery in Anchorage, which is the only commercial brewery in the city.  The beers were delicious and we loved the tour.

Then that evening we got a call from Henry letting us know the Northern Lights were out.  We quickly drove about 30min outside of the city, and got an amazing view of the green bands stretching across the sky.  Sadly, we couldn't get any good pictures, but hopefully we'll have another opportunity.  And, as Steve says, he can no longer sing the Phish song "Farmhouse," for now he has seen the Northern Lights.

For those keeping track, here's what the bucket list looks like now:

• Catch a salmon and eat it
• Ice climb (likely happening this summer on Matanuska Glacier)
• Snow machine
• Fly an airplane
• Skydive
• Visit Midnight Sun brewery
• Ice skate on a lake
• Go on a 3-day backcountry trip
• Sea-kayak by glaciers
• Ski at Alyeska
• Hike in Denali
• Go dog mushing
• See Northern Lights
• Hike Flat Top (a hike near Anchorage)

More to come soon!  Be well!