(Military) Family Life with the Mason's: May 11 2016

May 11 2016- My friends, Kinza, Talayna and I set out for the drive down to Whittier. Our plan was to hike a new trail, we hadn't hiked before.....we saw it posted on the FB page Hiking in Alaska....it was going to be an adventure, with us crossing two creeks. It wasn't a difficult hike, but a longer hike along the coast.

We caught the 10:30am tunnel, through the longest shared Tunnel (Auto and Train), it was a slower then normal tunnel drive as we had two big boats in front of us and they took their time driving.
So we finally made it through, and headed through the small town of Whittier, some thing it's a haunted town, it's small and isolated. We head past the Buckner Building, and find the road, we are to follow, a gravel road, we see signs to Emerald Cove Trail, and part of the cliff a long the road a give way. we continue, as the directions say, to find a road construction sign saying do not enter. Being our first time to this trail, we are not sure how much further down the road, the trail head is. So on the way we say another hike, Horsetail Falls sign, and I had seen it online, so be back tracked and heading out on this hike instead.

Horsetail Falls hike trail started on a road behind the old Buckner Building, we could see the back and roof of the building as we hiked the road to the trail. Another adventure in Alaska, finding the less travels trails....=)

This one started out to be a very nice hike, with wooded stairs winding through the forest, with shingles on the wood to make it less slippery, we hiked on, then we rounded a corner and started to climb the trail and we ran into snow. Deep slushy snow, we had some poles, but only had runners, and not prepared, we hiked a ways up the trail only to find more wood stairs with no snow, then hiked more and then we hit more snow, we hike though a bit of this then with wet feet and cold legs....it hurt to post hole with no pant legs to protect your legs. So we decided to turn around, but will defiantly hike this trail again, we will probably bring the kids on this one, didn't seem to bad the part we hiked.
https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/static/viewing/pdfs/whittier.pdf

On the way back, we meet two guys, one was going to make a camp, somewhere close, and was planning on staying a while.....I forget where he was from.

We then stopped at the Buckner Building, Talayna hadn't seen it close up....it's closed to the public, but you can look in some of the windows.

We then stopped at the one building a lot of the town lives in, it was my first time in the building, we stopped at the store and saw the post office and looked around. I will post a link about the town of Whittier.
http://www.whittieralaska.gov/
http://www.whittieralaska.gov/https://stories.californiasunday.com/2015-01-04/begich-towers-whittier-alaska/
Tunnel schedule:
http://tunnel.alaska.gov/schedule.shtml

in the winter the kids can go through a tunnel and get to school....very small town. The one lady we talked to loved it there....everything under one roof....=)

After our tour, we decided to hike the Portage Pass Trail, with wet feet, we decidied to just hike to the top and see how the trail looked, but with still a lot of snow and mud, we decided to come back in a month or so to take the hike to the lake.

It was a great day, here's a few pictures to share.