Alaska - Day 11

This day was spent preparing for our sea kayaking trip that started the next day.  We did have a little extra time in the morning so we pulled off the side of the road when we saw a trail head marker. It was the original pack trail that led miners to the Alaska interior from Valdez.  It was so green and lush and reminded us a lot of the hiking around Skagway, Alaska.  

 If you ever want to do a guided or unguided trip out of Valdez, we highly recommend Pangea Adventures.  They were great right from the first time we called them with questions.  They don't do a lot of equipment rentals to people going out on their own and it is a big liability so they make you go out to the harbor and demonstrate that you can do a self rescue first.  So we donned our dry suits, flipped ourselves out, and then looked a lot like beached wales as we did our self rescue.  We were clearly very proud of ourselves and triumphant.  Turns out is is really easy to do in a calm harbor and dry suits.  Luckily, we never had to use this skill on our trip.

 We spent most of the afternoon getting cleaned up and packed for our trip.  It was unlike anything we had ever done before so it took us a lot of time to figure out what we really needed and how to squeeze it all into dry bags that would fit into a kayak.