Last weekend Josh and I ventured into the Mat-Su Valley for some fishing and camping.  Josh selected the small town of Sutton for our destination in hopes of avoiding the Independence Day crush that was inevitably heading south (to the Kenai Peninsula) for the long weekend.

The drive was gorgeous - the Mat-Su is positively lush with trees, which should not have come as such a surprise, as it is some of the most fertile farmland in the world.  We even saw a cow!  Alaska is certainly beautiful but I miss the deciduous wonders of Upstate NY; birch trees leave something to be desired in the fall.  As is often the case here in Alaska, the journey was almost more satisfying than the destination.  We stopped at an overlook to take some pictures of the valley carved from a glacier during the Holocene.

The river is the Matanuska, and it is a braided stream.  A braided stream is wide, shallow, and consists of many changing channels - changing sometimes daily.  They occur as a result of drainage from the melting of glacial ice.  The rocks in a braided stream are coarser than say, the Mississippi River (a meandering river), and as you get closer to the glacier the deposits are coarser in size than those further downstream.

Here's Josh - I feel safe in saying he is probably contemplating the Holocene.  I was contemplating the cow I saw on the farm across the street from the parking area.  COWS!  I can't believe I miss them.

Arriving in Sutton we found a practically deserted campground and found ourselves a lovely, private site on which to pitch the tent.

We set out with our fishing poles to Granite Creek but the fast running waters were not overly kind to our efforts.  We lost about $20 worth of lures in an hour.  We had a lot of fun anyway!

Here are some tracks - most likely Dall Sheep or mountain goat.  As long as the tracks don't have five toes and claws, I'm good.

We headed back to camp, fishless, and enjoyed a night reading by the campfire.  I finished Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer while Josh worked on Big Russ and Me.

We headed back to Anchorage the next day to get ready for our trip to Willow for some king salmon fishing.  More on that to come.

Here are a few random photos from the trip back to Anchorage.

Arctic Wintergreen

Dwarf Fireweed

Birdseye Primrose

Arctic Lupine (I was surprised to see this usually tall plant growing in a "dwarf" form, like fireweed, near the river)

Field of wildflowers next to the Glenn Highway

Pond lilies