Travel Thursday Hatcher Pass Alaska Photos

 Continuing on with the Alaska travel series of photos taken outside of New England, today I am happy to share with you some images taken at Hatcher Pass. Hatcher Pass is a mountain pass through the SW part of the Talkeetna Mountains. The cities of Palmer and Wasilla are approximately 12 miles to the South, and Willow is 26 miles to the West.

The initial drive heading up to the pass..

We headed up to the pass on day 5, in the early evening. I wanted to catch the late day light up there, and it did not disappoint. This area basically can have a few different micro climates, due to the tall mountains and changes in elevation. We were very fortunate to have witnessed some different weather patterns with some areas of rain, some fog, several rainbows, and some blue skies with sun. It's an evening I won't ever forget and I felt as though I was on top of the world.

Before we went all of the way up to the summit, we stopped to photograph the Hatcher Pass Cabins down below.

As we were increasing in elevation, we could see storm clouds to our South with a rainbow forming. I was able to make this dramatic photograph of the amazing sky and mountain tops.

After many switch backs and very steep turns, we made it to the summit. 

We did some walking around up there. There were many hikers, but for the most part, we didn't go far into the trails. The scenery was breathtaking.

Notice the blue car on the right hand side of this next photo as it is rounding one of the curves

As I was looking at some cell phone shots that I took, I noticed I had caught the blue car on it's ascent up the hill. I did not even realize the car was in either of these photos until I started processing them!

Summit Lake at the summit of the pass with beautiful light and shadows.

We got more dramatic skies with rainbows as we made our descent back down to the bottom.

I believe we saw four different rainbows this evening. 

Day 6 will be featured in the next Travel blog post, but in the meantime, I will be out photographing Fall foliage in VT so stayed tuned to some upcoming blog posts featuring VT as well. As always, thank you for viewing!