Seward. Most boring place on the peninsular.

The Kenai Peninsular is said to be the playground of Alaska. My directions for here are that when you are on the highway and the sign says keep left for Seward, turn right with all of your might.
Actually, although Seward itself has a packed RV park that consists of nothing more than a car park next to the water with no fire pits or grass, let alone trees, heading down that way is not so bad.

After deciding that we didn't want to stay in a place with nothing more than a bunch of shops for people on cruise ships to visit, Olivia was a bit upset that we weren't going to stay there for 2 nights.

We eventually headed back a few miles and turned off towards the "Exit Glacier". It was fairly impressive, but was actually the least impressive item of the experience.

After getting my usual pack mule training (Olivia did walk most of it), we arrived at a place where we couldn't even get to the actual glacier. You can see that she wasn't too impressed.

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Olivia and I decided that it would be a good time to do some bouldering. She did a few cool climbs with me spotting her before a Ranger came along and had a word to us.

"Cool climbing", he said.

Ranger Luke is just learning to climb and has done a little bit of ice climbing as well as his first multipitch. We spoke to him about climbing for a bit and then Olivia got a photo with him.
He invited Olivia to head down to the ranger station and become a junior park ranger.

After passing some tests in the book that we were not allowed to help her with, she earned her junior park ranger badge. As you can tell, she was pretty happy and the almost bad day was suddenly a great day.

 We stopped at a restaurant near the national park called the Salmon Bake. I had salmon. Olivia had chicken nuggets and fries, and Shannon had a burger with a McKinley sized pile of fries next to it.
I asked the girl if anyone ever actually has room for desert after eating such stuff and she said that they often do. Fishermen apparently eat a lot.

Now we are in a nice RV park near by, where we plan to stay for 2 nights. The rain has put the fire out and Olivia and Shannon are playing monopoly on the galaxy tablet in bed. It is 11 degrees. 2 degrees cooler than Sydney and 6 cooler than Brisbane. All we need now is for a grizzly bear to try to break into the RV and things would be just perfect.

Tallest Vs Highest

 If a midget is standing on a building, does that make him taller than a basket ball player standing on the ground?

Driving south, we spotted several mountains, which all looked pretty big but knowing what I do about big mountains, they were nowhere near big enough.  Then Mt McKinley actually came into view. Here was me thinking that from where we were, we might just catch a glimpse of a distant peak behind a host of other high peaks.

We decided that we should head up for a hike that Shannon found in the Milepost book. It was up into the alpine area on some hills across from McKinley.

 

 As we got higher, the view started to get better.

 It was a bit of a shock to come across a small lake, only to work out that it was actually a dam. A dam built by a beaver that we suspect heard us coming and hid in his house. Looked just like every beaver house and dam we have seen in the movies.

 At the top of our walk, we could see a great view of the "Tallest" mountain in the world.
At about 8848 meters, the peak of Mt Everest is the highest point on earth. At just over 6000 meters, Mt McKinley is actually the tallest mountain on earth from its base to its summit. Everest is about 13000 feet from base camp where as McKinley is around 17000 feet.
Luckily for Mt Everest, most of a big mountain's notoriety relies on its altitude, not its height from the ground.

After a short rest, Olivia was really keen to go higher, up to the snow. However, her legs got the better of her and we headed back down. My shoulders got a bit of a work out.

As much as this looks like Olivia is interested in me pointing out a rare species of bird up high in a tree, she is actually looking at the large piece of ice that I am launching into the air.

 By the end, we had gone up and down 245 vertical meters. Not a bad effort for the team.