Glennallen to Delta

We are now 10 days and 350 miles into our Tour de Alaska and just having a ball! The weather and the views have been absolutely amazing! Since our last post, we left Glenn highway, that bordered the north side of the Chugach Mts, and entered into a landscape of rolling, permafrosted, black spruce forests with numerous lakes and meandering salmon-filled rivers. With the clear blue sky that we have been having we could see huge mountains in all directions in the distance: Chugach Mts to the south, Wrangell Mts to east, Alaskan Mts to the West and North. We past Paxon and climbed over Isabel pass in the Alaska range into Delta. The mountain views throughout the Richardson Highway of the mountains have been unbelievable: snow covered mountain peaks rising over 10,000 feet from where we stood, swollen rivers coming off of glaciers, salmon schooling in the rivers, lakes covered in ice and moose standing on the side of the road. This is the land of the midnight sun and it has led to some interesting phenomena: we are completely cooked on one side of our body because the sun goes around the horizon and not up and over, we stay up very late because the sun is still shining in our eyes at midnight, we have to put our tent in the shade because it heats up in the sunlight until sunset at 12:30, it is as bright as day ALL night so we have to cover our eyes and set an alarm to make sure we sleep in since the sun officially rises at 3:30. That said, we had our hardest day yesterday despite descending 1500 feet due to in-the-face head winds. We got out of the winds by eating lunch at a 5-star resort lodge.  Luckily, no guests were there at the time because they told us that we would not have been allowed to dine in our attire. Little did they know that we hadn't showered in 5 days and were wearing chamois that hadn't been washed in 10 days of riding!