Beautiful Alaska. I have been waiting to come to this place for many many years to work a summer job and when I got home from my mission, I decided I was finally going to make it happen. I applied for a summer internship at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center in Portage AK. Though I didnt get accepted to the internship, they DID offer me a job working at the gift shop and ticket booth which I readily accepted. So here I have been, looking at some beautiful views, going on some amazing trips, meeting really cool animals, and most of all, meeting some really wonderful and amazing people and learning a lot of good life lessons a long the way.
This is Jade, our fox kit that was found by a jogger in Anchorage. We believed he was a girl for the first few months of his life, so now he kind of has a girly name. But he is still so cute. Here at the center, we take in any animals that are orphaned or injured and we try to rehabilitate them and re-release. Some of my favorite animals are the musk oxen, the bison, and Jade.
This is my roommate Stefanie. She left early after one of her good friends died in a tragic accident. This is us on the glacier quest tour that leaves out of Whittier. We got to see goats, eagles, whales, otters, seals, and of course some really cool glaciers and glacier capping action.
This is my "days off crew" that I spend most of my days off with. We have gone on a lot of adventures together. Mostly hikes, but others ones too, like gold panning, road trips, shopping and movies, and everything in between. Its not so much about what we did, but that we had such a great group of people to do it with. We all bonded on these trips and I feel like we became best friends. These people get me and I love each and every one of them.
This picture is from our "White Trash Bash" party at the "crack den" where some of the interns live. We all dressed as trashy as we could and had a real good time. This is my friend and fellow worker Pete Corkey on the gator and one of the maintenance workers posing as a white trash family. Pete has been such a good friend to me because he really helped me get over a lot of the sadness I was feeling when I was trying to get over Aaron.
This is Grace the baby beaver. By far my favorite baby animal we had at the center... she died shortly after we got her. We still cant figure out what happened to her, but thats just how things go sometimes.
This is me, pete, and Erin at a restaurant called the Salmon Bake. We were on the best road trip ever to go up to Fairbanks and Denali National Park. It was seriously the funnest road trip I have ever been on. There were so many inside jokes had and pranks played. The group that went on this trip became very tight knit. We went camping in Talkeetna, then stayed in a dry cabin in Fairbanks where we met cute huskys and new friends. We swam in rivers and camped in Denali. After we ate at the Salmon Bake, I drove everyone (drunk as skunks) through Denali to look for moose and bears. We ended up singing "Rock me mama like a wagon wheel" as loud as we could and peeing in the bushes. We laughed so hard and even caught some of it on film.
This last picture is of Aaron and I up in a small town called Willow which is about 2 hours north of Anchorage. We were at a YSA camp. He decided that he simply could not live without me in Hawaii and flew to Anchorage and surprised me. I definitely was surprised! We have spent a lot of time up at his lake house going tubing, jet skiing, and wake boarding, shooting guns, going four wheeling, and riding around on his motorcycle. I have had a great time getting to know him better as a friend and having time to really understand how he thinks and also getting to know his little quirks. I leave in a week and a half (and im sooooo sad about it) to go to graduate school at Southern Utah University, so I dont know what will happen to us. I have been praying a lot to know if we should stick together, and honestly have not felt one way or the other what is right. So I guess I will update on that later. I have learned so much from the people I have met here. I have learned how to love deeper. I learned to NEVER judge anyone for their actions. I learned how to stand my ground on my beliefs and what I will and will not do. And I learned how important it is to share the love of God with others in the form of the gospel. I have tried my hardest to plant these seeds in the hearts of my friends and I can only hope that one day I might be able to see those seeds grow.
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