Mt.McKinley Glacier Landing by Arvind Mani

Hi! My name is Arvind and I’m helping my mom (Ladha) do her blog. Yesterday my friend Sooraj helped.

So, on with the topic, today we vacated our very nice house (in my opinion) at 11:00 AM. We drove for two hours until we got hungry. So we went to Big Lake around 1:30 PM. Around 45 minutes passed and we went on with our adventure. We stopped in an area and the kids got Ice-Cream! 🙂

After one hour (Finally) (I’m not a patient guy) we got to Talkeetna Air Taxi Center! My family and my friend’s family went to check in at their lodge. After we checked in everyone but 4 people, me and Sooraj’s little brother named Jayanth and our grandma’s and grandpa went to go get coffee

While we played Angry Birds Space together at the lodge. It took an hour for them to get coffee. I thought,” Why does it take so long to get coffee :-).

When they got back we were getting ready to go to the glaciers. We put on Glacier boots and they offered sunglasses but we said no. We are stylish in our own way or at least I am. Once we put on our equipment we got on the helicopter. Our Single-Propelled Plane Pilot/Guide told us that since we have 10 people one of us could sit in shotgun which I thought was a sick idea. The parents thought the kids should sit in shotgun but Sooraj’s brother is too small so it was between Sooraj and I. Each person either sat in shotgun going there or coming back. I said I don’t care either way but Sooraj insisted me to pick so I picked to ride first. Honestly, I only did that because it would be more fun at the start. If I ride on the way back I would already know how it feels so it would probably be boring.

It turned out to be great! We got great pictures of the beautiful scenery. I didn’t really understand how the machinery worked in the plane but hey it was still a lot of fun even though I was dumbfounded. The height was 20,320 feet also in meters it was 6,169! First we flew to a glacier 27 miles long and 3 miles wide !

We landed on it and we saw landslides beginning on the mountain. We couldn’t actually see the rocks which kind of sucked but we saw its dust trail and the place it landed. For some reason that I don’t know whenever someone goes just a bit away from us they look so tiny. It’s hilarious to see how small they are and also unbelievable. Also the snow was soooo deep it was so hard to walk in it. We took a few pictures and climbed back on board.

We saw a lot of great scenery on the way back. I was surprised when I saw a helicopter crash on the road and cars had to stop and wait (it must have been dreadful for the car owners to wait :p). The passengers and Pilot was not hurt because of their pilot’s excellent driving. He used the emergency landing switch and landed a perfect landing in the freeway. I’m pretty sure I saw our pilot talking to the news channel guys about this helicopter crash. Hey maybe I’ll get famous :-)? So then I smelt gas from the helicopter. I couldn’t stand it, luckily I didn’t throw up . We finished our mini helicopter adventure and went to dinner at a pizza shop called Mountain High Pizza. If you work there,… man your pizza is so AMAZING! Cheers man, quick service, remarkable cooks, and very nice waiters.

We finished eating dinner at 8:30 and heading toward Denali. See you tomorrow folks! Bye