So wow ... we've not been around in a long time ...
Because the Alaska summer is too short to be shooting weddings every weekend, Bear and Penguin Photography has slowly retired out of wedding photography. Instead, we get to have adventures of our own in our beautiful home and share them with all of you (when we remember to post.) Scott is currently in Japan so I'm trying to take advantage of absolute control over the laptop to get some photos edited and blogs posted...because I'm apparently terrible ... terribly busy enjoying other things not involving photo editing.
How embarrassing ... these photos are from September 2016 when Scott's bro David and his amazing wife Nicole came up to AK for some backpacking. We hit up Lost Lake in the Chugach National Forest. As is *almost* always the case with Scott, we had beautiful weather. Looking back on it, the entirety of summer 2016 was gorgeous - this year, not as much. Also on our trip were Cascade and Nikki, our diehard canine hiking companions.
We started from the Lost Lake Trail Road trailhead about 7 miles to the lakes. Lost Lake can also be a through hike of ~15 miles and some people do this as a trail race all the way through. With a blue bird sky, Resurrection Bay was gleaming behind us and we kept having to turn around to take in the sweeping views - almost makes you want to walk backwards but with a 40-50 lb pack and trail to follow this is generally not recommended.
One of the cool things about backpacking in early fall is the ability to catch the Northern Lights if the conditions are right. We had looked up the Kp level prior to leaving and knew we had a chance of seeing something. So Scott and I set our alarm for around 2 or 3 am. We peered out of our tent in time to see the aurora borealis sweeping across the sky and reflecting off the lake.
One of the bad things about taking this long to *ahem* edit and blog photos is that the memory starts to fade. I just remembered why I don't have any photos after our first day. Unfortunately, my camera decided to freak out and my spin dials completely stopped communicating with my camera. So there weren't too many aurora shots that I could salvage in the end. Super happy that there were at least a few that I could save! I have a vague memory of either having to guess on my settings or being stuck in one setting but can't remember exactly what was wrong with my camera ... though I'm fairly certain my camera started working again when I got home. This was also a trip where Scott didn't carry his DSLR with him .... which reminds me of why we always bring at least three camera bodies with us to every wedding we shoot!!
