Nature Pictures Added July 18th, 2007

Here's my first arctic grayling, about 8 inches long. I was just thrilled to have caught my first grayling; I had no idea I would go on to catch 25 more (mostly larger), and that the next day would make this one look slow!

My dad's first arctic grayling.

My dad went to great lengths to place a good cast above this high spruce sweeper into a little back slough where he saw a grayling rise. The cast was good, he assures me, but the grayling did not take.

Here's a little bigger arctic grayling from my first day fishing for them.

Another entry into my "dad dropping a fish" series. Here he's dropping his first arctic grayling back in the drink. It was still on the hook, so we got a better picture shortly.

My dad walks back to the car after a few hours catching grayling.

Here my dad's fighting a very nice arctic grayling, and this photo caught it mid-jump at the end of his line. This one eventually shook the hook, but we both caught many more in the same size range.

This is probably my largest grayling to date -- it's about 18 inches.

My dad nets a grayling.

Pretty grayling fins.

My dad fighting a grayling.

Two major forks of this grayling stream come together in this pretty pool.

What a great place for a fly line to be!

These caches are used by Alaskan natives to store supplies for pike-harvesting season in this network of sloughs and lakes. That's a raven on top of the left one.

A cow moose with her calf clamber out of the slough we were fishing for pike.

My first Alaskan northern pike, around 21-22 inches long.

My dad's first Alaskan northern pike.

My dad was messing around with this pike for about 10 minutes with various goofy weedless lures with mediocre hooking quality, and he kept missing it. Finally he threw on the only lure a spin fisherman ever needs, the Heddon Lucky 13 (my favorite for many years before I started fly fishing), and he caught the fish on the first cast. Not only did he hook it--he also snared it.

This is one of the nicer pike my dad caught on this trip, around 30 inches.

My best pike of the trip taped out at 30.5".

Out in this pike slough we made an interesting fine, a long-decayed moose carcass. Against my protest, my dad lifted the skull out of the water as a potential souvenir. However, it wasn't quite broken down to nothing-but-bone yet, and it smelled horrible, so it went back in the river.

I took this picture after midnight, when the pike fishing was still hot.

This sky was the perfect scenic complement to the wide-open marsh where we were pike fishing.

Talk about a bad hair day. This chartreuse/everglow deceiver had been through about 15 northern pike already.

This is the first grizzly bear I've seen. It's in Denali National Park. People with long-range binoculars, plus the view through a couple spotting scopes the park installed at this stop, verified that the little light spot my arrow is pointing to is, in fact, a grizzly bear. This is the closest view I got.

This golden eagle is soaring through Denali National Park.

Dall Sheep in Denali National Park.

A large caribou walks through the bed of a glacial river in Denali National Park.

A Dall Sheep ram sits atop a mountain in Denali National Park.

In this "close up" of a grizzly bear laying down on an alpine hillside in Denali National Park, you can almost tell it's a bear.