I’ll come clean. I have eaten Moose before. In Swedish Lappland. And whilst it was ohhhhhkay I can’t say I’m a fan – in fact I prefer my Moose in this version. In the wild, minding their own Moose business, levelling slightly disconcerting stares (or is it a Moose glare I wonder?) at the irritatingly noisy humans in those stinky machines. A Mama Moose doesn’t have the soft brown doe eyes of other ungulates like cows or deer or horses – rather her gaze is dark and steely with the distinct impression of keep the hell away from my kids. A moose expression can indeed speak a thousand words.

We went driving in a four seater ATV today – All Terrain Vehicle with a student from Serbia named Lucian. Lucian was a fairly young guy with not so bad English getting paid 10 USD per hour to take clients out on these tours offered by the Black Diamond Adventure Tours. We did something called the Treasure Hunt. It was probably more aimed at kids but still we managed to see Moose and even more of note, I found the “Treasure Box” first. 🙂 Scored ourselves some Alaskan Gold! (Think much like the Olympic “gold” medals they’re handing out) and I had the honour of being the victor in this treasure hunt which was more like drive round the backwoods trails of Black Diamond Mountain area. We did have a very nice cooked breakfast though – I tried Reindeer sausage – which was very tasty (so far much higher up in my favourite meat rankings than Moose which to be honest doesn’t even rank really) and biscuits and gravy. Which were not biscuit like or the least bit gravy like. If I was to call it I would have named them soft savoury white scones in some sort of white cream sauce. But apparently biscuits and gravy is what it is. Who am I to rename an American breakfast staple?

It was pretty cold but we were lucky in that the rain held off until we got back when it started to drizzle with a little more intent and was definitely hitting the annoyingly wet factor of things. Managed to grab a few landscape shots as well.

I felt the need to pay tribute to the amount of pretty coloured rocks there are in Denali. They seem ubiquitous. And I am constantly struck with this vague sense of disappointment that they are not being utilised in some way. They’re too pretty just to sit there like every other mundane dull coloured rock in the world.

Tomorrow we go on my first ever ride in a helicopter. I might just be a little bit excited for that. 🙂