Edelweiss

In the summer of 2000, my mother and I spent 2 weeks in Alaska. For 5 days, we were on a little ship that visited Sitka and Glacier Bay and other astonishing fjords, where one night this family from Mississippi entertained us with their version of The Sound of Music. It was right up there with the other musical highlight of that trip: the drunk Australians in a Juneau saloon singing "Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie."

Nobody goes to Alaska for the music.  Among the non-musical highlights: a grizzly bear nursing her cubs,  5-foot-tall rhubarb plants and 2-foot-wide dahlias in Fairbanks, a nice greenschist rock outcrop in Juneau accessible by elevator in a state office building, musk oxen, people catching salmon in a creek under a freeway in Anchorage, and the deep blue crevasses at our feet in Mendenhall Glacier.