Chris Visits from Zambia - part 2 (part 1 still to come): Packrafting in the Brooks Range

My friend Chris has been living in Southern Africa for the last 8 years or so. He's currently living in Lusaka, Zambia working for a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) doing aide work. I've been over to visit him in Africa a few times, but he just made his first visit up to Alaska (about time you bastard). Chris and I, along with my roomate Ed, did a packrafting trip up in the Brooks Range in Northern Alaska. This was my first time to visit this part of the state and I was really impressed. The mountains are amazing and had a timeless sense about them. You could almost imagine dinosaurs wandering around, and Fred, Barney, and Dino too.

We couldn't hold back our enthusiasm to reach the arctic circle.

Or this big outcrop of rocks.

Or to be excited that my car made it up the road.

Or, to be excited about Chris's superpowers.

Or Ed's for that matter.

After our excitement qwelled for a moment, we began our hike away from the road. This is looking back towards where we parked our car.

The mountains are amazing of course, this photo shows a little scale.

We found a waterfall and were very excited once again.

The water poured out through a hole. Pretty amazing. Ed and I ducked under the water for a cold shower.

Ed brought his "bush buddy" stove with for boiling water. It's pretty cool. You just need a small pile of twigs and you can quickly boil water. It's very lightweight and convenient as long as you can find dry twigs.

Ed and Chris were very excited about the good weather.

We had to climb up high to get through the valley and were excited to get to the top.

Then we had to climb down.

And back up again.

Here is the rare... the elusive... the ferocious... Chrisabou!

We did have some river crossings to do.

Chris and I got very tired after 12 mile days, but Ed just kept on going. He makes the energizer bunny look like a fat kid with a mullet.

More hiking up and down and up and down.

Here some ice protruded up from just under the surface. It was a huge chunk of ice. I'm not sure what caused this to happen, but it shows what lies underneath the surface.

Here's Ed's new online profile pic. Ooooh.

We were excited to find a fantastic campsite up high with great views.

Then we were excited to swim in Elusive Lake the last morning of the trip.

We finally got to where we planned to inflate the rafts we had carried with us up and down and up and down through the mountains.

Giddyup!

We were excited to get started with the rafting.

The river was pretty tame overall, but was pretty fast. It's the Ribdon River which flows down on the North side of the Brooks Range towards the Arctic Ocean. There were some fun little bumps along the way, but overall was a relaxing and beautiful float.

Our friend's Dea and Ben moved my car along the highway to near where our trip finished. It was only a short hike along the road to get back to the car to drive back to Fairbanks. Overall, a great trip, and of course it was great to have Chris visit and to see an area of the state that very few people see.

My virgin packrafting trip

Ed, Ann, and I went out to Beaver Creek in the White Mountains last weekend. This was my first packrafting trip with my new boat. It is awesome! I'm excited about future possibilities for the pack raft.

Ed already made a really good blog post for this trip, so I'm not gonna duplicate the effort. See Ed's Blog for photos and details.

Here's what you've all been waiting for... Mating Lions - yea baby!

My friend and I came across these lions one morning. A male and two females. We pulled the truck up close and then climbed up through the sunroof and sat on the roofrack watching them. All of a sudden, one lioness walks across in front of the male and it's ALL ON!

We learned that lions will mate for a few days straight without eating or really doing anything else. They mate every 10 to 20 minutes!!!! So, of course, we just hung out on top of the truck drinking beers and watching the lions. Then we'd go away and look for other stuff and then come back to this same spot and they'd still be at it. It was awesome!

Here's the approach.

Here's the foreplay.

There's a lot of biting and growling, just to keep things interesting. You can kind of understand, after a few times per day, things might start to get a little on the dull side.






Oh yeah!


And the dismount. Well done!

First Few Days of the Kalahari Trip (more to come)

My friend Chris and I completed a drive of about 2500 miles through the Kalahari in South Western Africa. The Kalakari is a huge desert that spans through all of western Botswana, much of Namibia, and into Northwestern South Africa. The green line on the map below shows our route through the Botswana Kalahari.

We went from Lusaka, Zambia south to Victoria Falls. Crossed into Zimbabwe breifly to see Vic Falls with some Dutch friends from Lusaka. Then we continued on down into Botswana to the Central Kalakari Game Reserve. We camped for four nights in the CKGR, then headed south to the Kgalagadi Transfrontier National Park on the boarder of South Africa for another four nights of camping. Then drove on to Johanesburg for the last couple days before I flew back to Alaska.

Here is one view of Vic Falls from the bridge across from Zambia to Zimbabwe. Vic Falls is one of the largest falls in the world. It is 1 mile long and 360 ft high, which forms the largest sheet of falling water anywhere in the world. It is called "The Smoke That Thunders" in the local language since you can hear the falls and see the "smoke" from a long distance away. Another unique aspect to Vic Falls is that it falls into a gorge. I think this adds to the "smoke" appearance of the falls from a distance and certainly gets you very wet when you walk up to the edge of the gorge.

Here we are on the bridge with Vic Falls in the background. This is Chris and I with some Dutch volunteers that we traveled with briefly.

These pics are from the Zimbabwe side of the Zambesi River.

More jumping pics. These are very fun if you've never tried. Actually, the ones that don't work out right are even funnier. I'll have to make a blog of those sometime too.

We all went out for a nice lunch. Actually, this lunch was on the Zambia side. The Zimbabwe side is kinda messed up at the moment. They have the highest inflation of any country. There are bread lines and no one has any money. They just started printing million dollar bills there. Many stores aren't even open and the ones that are only accept foreign currency. It's a pretty sad situation there.

I got an artist to do a jumping pic with me. This guy was really cool. He and his friends were very good artists.

From Vic Falls, Chris and I left our Dutch traveling companions and drove off into the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. There was some fun 4 wheeling to do, and check out some of the animals we saw:

This is a Gemsbok, aka Orynx, not sure why the two names, maybe it has something to go with the mugger coloration on the face. Only a mugger needs two names, right? Actually, these guys are pretty amazing animals. We saw herds of them.

This is a lilac breasted roller, which is one of the most colorful birds we saw. It's really beautiful.

This Leopard Tortoise was super cool.

You're not technically supposed to be out of your car, but we couldn't resist this tortoise, he was so cool.

Here's another jumping pic we did while having our lunch when we were driving around looking for game. Soon after this pic, we came across 4 lions chilling out in the shade.

That's a nice yawn!

Here's our campsite. This was a pretty sweet spot. Good views from here and good sunsets too. We camped here the first few nights. It's kinda crazy cause you see lions and then drive about 10 minutes to here. no fences. no nothing. which is a little creepy, especially after the sun goes down and you know the lions are out hunting (cause they mostly hunt in the evening/night/morning when it's not so damn hot out).

This concludes the end of round one. More photos to be posted soon from this trip, including those of the mating lions. Ooooooo... mating lions. That's right.