IN June 2022, my husband, Russ, and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary with a big adventure, a two-part birding trip organized and guided by Victor Emanuel Nature Tours (VENT): “Grand Alaska: Nome Pre-Trip” and “Grand Alaska Part II: Anchorage, Denali, and the Kenai Peninsula,” both led by super birders Barry Zimmer and Erik Bruhnke.
I’d never before gone on a trip run by a birding-tour company. We could have gone to the same places on our own for significantly less money, but after balancing the advantages of expert guides dealing with all the logistical hassles while maximizing the number of birds we saw, with the added perk that Erik is a close friend, we decided to go for it.
Russ and I had been to Juneau, Alaska’s Inside Passage, and elsewhere in the Pacific rainforest, and taken some pelagic trips off California. Between that and living in northern Minnesota, I didn’t expect many life birds on this trip, but VENT’s checklists suggested I had a good chance of 10, plus plenty of beloved birds I don’t often see.
This promised to be ideal for me, but what would Russ, who isn’t a birder, get out of it? Breathtaking scenery; good looks at caribou, musk oxen, and orcas, along with way more moose than we’ve ever seen near home. We’d visit the cities at the start and finish of the Iditarod and get
