Jarrett, Everett, and I went to visit Reece in Alaska.
Here's what we looked like there:

Jarrett, Reece, Everett, and me
in this moment, I held the assumption that my phone was in my backpack

Reece looks like this often since he is often in Alaska. Jarrett is clearly the only one not wearing a hat. I'm wearing my tree frog shirt because I heard that the Kenai Fjords National Park has rainforests. There are no tree frogs there; its rainforests are not in the tropics so they are not tropical rainforests with tree frogs and monkeys and things. They are a special kind of rainforest with glaciers, seals, bears, and white Christmases (the latter I have not witnessed myself).

If you are ever so lucky as to converse with Reece, he will tell you that his job at the Kenai Fjords Glacier Lodge is "to take old people on walks", where by walks he means death-defying kayaking trips across glacial ice fields; during these walks, he emits nature factoids at a steady pace and intriguing oracular cadence, eliciting an incessant background hum of ooohs and aaahs and distracting his guests from their proximity to instant demise.

Guide Reece pointing out common wildlife and telling people it's rare

I'm not at liberty to disclose exactly how much we saved on lodging with the Friends & Family Discount, but let's just say the experience was worth EVERY penny. Something I found really special about the trip was that we got to see how the staff live at the lodge — of course, we didn't have to work, but used the communal bathrooms, showers, and dining area and slept in a spare staff cabin. It's a privilege to have gotten such an unfiltered and intimate view of how these people run the lodge; to eat what they ate and hear candid stories about the guests. I always wondered what my friend's daily life looks like up there. It looks pretty good.

Looking out the window of the main lodge toward the lagoon

Our first major adventure was to Coleman Bay. This was really neat cause the staff don't take guests there. On the way over, I saw a big yellow jellyfish undulating effortlessly and a harbor seal basking on a rock. The Saddle is a short hike named after its topology which comprised 20% bushwhacking over a cliff and 80% scrambling over loose mid-sized rocks, sufficient to make me really regret being stuck in my 700-mile-old street running shoes. Jarrett fell and hit his head, his life saved by advanced protective headgear (a mosquito net).

Jarrett and Reece approaching the Saddle

Looking east to Porcupine Bay

Apparently we had really good luck with the weather for most of the trip, especially on Coleman day. The second adventure was to Abra Cove and Danger Beach on a rainy Sunday. The rain was very beautiful there, the faint resonance of tiny drops bombarding the still sea surface which Reece pointed out to us. There were many things that Reece brought to my attention: that sound the rain makes, the puffins' struggle to take off out of the water, the actual sound that a bald eagle makes, the glacial striation on the cliffs of Slate Island, the too-thin trails made by mountain goats, the identities of plants you can eat and those that are poisonous. Being a "city person", my understanding of the earth pales in comparison to any of the staff, and what I do know is purely academic¹. Their knowledge and passion for the environment are humbling.

Dusk on the trip back from Coleman

Danger Beach was my favorite adventure, a controversial pick due to the incredible weather we had for Coleman. This black sand beach brings you right up to the face of Aialik, where you can stand purely surrounded by the dense, lush rainforest, a monstrous wall of ice, and the glassy, iceberg-littered expanse of the bay. I'm inclined to describe this landscape as extraterrestrial. On second thought, the irony is that this place offers the most genuine earthly beauty I have ever seen, the most terrestrial landscape one could hope to witness, and my suburban entrapment makes it extraordinary. What is ordinary to me is separated from the raw earth by layers of manufacturing and processing, landscapes of concrete, plastic, glass, and air conditioning. Anti-terrestrial, perhaps. I realize that I had a coveted view of earth at Danger Beach and remind myself not to get used to the Quotidian Unnatural.

Aialik Glacier from Danger Beach

We stood here for half an hour, bombarded by cool wind off the glacier and a steady rain, and had our lunch of sandwiches and beer. Internal movements beyond the wall of ice mimicked thunder, each instance causing us to look intently in hopes to witness a calving, but most of this seemingly massive shifting was happening too deep within the frozen mountain to be visible.

Almost done paddling for the day... right guys?

After a day of paddling in the cold rain, the group was ready to get back to the lodge to eat and thaw, but I had something even better in mind. As I got into my kayak to depart for the lodge, my phone fell out of my PFD pocket... a fact I was not aware of until I tried to take a picture two and a half miles into the return trip. Since that leg is a total of 3 miles, we would have to nearly triple the distance in order to retrieve my phone. And, at the time, it was uncertain whether the paddle would be worthwhile — the tide was rising across the very gentle slope of Danger Beach, covering several feet laterally each moment. Or I could've unwittingly dropped my phone into the bay somewhere along the way. The group's average confidence in the existence of my phone was understandably pretty low, but I was able to convince them to turn around by offering² to buy their train tickets for the return to Anchorage. So, exhausted, freezing, and tantalizingly close to home, our trip progress dropped from 83% to 30% as we turned around for a second approach to Danger Beach.

I jumped out of my kayak and found my phone laying half-covered in sand about 10 feet from the water line, a distance Reece claims would have been closed by the tide in less than 20 minutes! With luck like this, I was sure to keep a closer eye on my belongings; not everyone gets a get-out-of-jail-free card.

The next day, I left my phone in my PFD pocket and didn't realize until the ferry back to Seward was packed and ready to depart. So Reece and the team mailed it to me, and over the five days it took to get back into my hands, I reflected on the trip; Earth, Reece & friends, the lodge, soreness from kayaking, and my fall from grace as a Responsible Person and Easy Traveler.

I conclude with a few of my favorite shots from the two rolls of film I burned through over my four days in one of the most beautiful places on earth.