outside of a friends house and called the owner of the vehicle to come and get his car that we had delivered about 5 weeks too late and that was now inoperative! We had put 7,000 miles on it on this marathon road trip but we were now in Anchorage Alaska.
Chair, Seward, Alaska Photo by Barry Epstein
Dick and I met some very nice girls and decided to rent this beautiful house in an upscale suburb of Anchorage that overlooked the stunningly beautiful Cook Inlet. The house was unique as it had a cylindrical glass fireplace that hung down from the ceiling. The fireplace was in a round living room with a 360 degree view. The fireplace was very efficient as it was a closed system that sucked air from the outside to burn the wood in the enclosed glass that heated the air in the house and the smoke was expelled. The landlord was incredibly nice and knowing that Dick and I were photographers, he built us a custom darkroom where I had my Bessler 23-C enlarger and other darkroom accessories. It was perfect and after exploring the diverse areas such as the Matanuska Valley, the Kenai Peninsula and the glaciers in Turnagain Arm to find the right photos, we processed the film and produced many black and white photographs. I was able to use my brand new medium format film camera- Hasselblad. I was able to exhibit my photos in an upscale gallery in Anchorage but no one bought any of my photographs.
We lived only about 30 minutes to the best ski resort called Mount Alyeska that we frequented. The weather in
Boats, Seward, Alaska
Alaska was highly unpredictable and I
Photo by Barry Epstein remember one day that Dick and I rode the chairlift together and the wind was blowing so fiercely that we were at about a 45 degree angle with zero visibility due to the heavy snow. We knew that at the top, was a ramp that we had to negotiate which we both fell down for quite a distance. Skiing at Alyeska was usually quite nice and the more experienced skiers could take advantage of heli-skiing that allowed participants to ski over 5 glaciers for about 15 miles back to the lodge. Dick and I were not good enough for this but it would have been an incredible experience and in retrospect, we should have taken lessons and became expert black diamond skiers. By the way, the girl that Dick shared the house with wound up having his child and later on they both moved back to New Jersey to live.
I moved back to Fairbanks and after more construction work that became routine and boring, I decided that I wanted to do something more aligned to my interests in science, biology and photography. I was sharing a house with my girlfriend who was the niece of my favorite scientific photographer- Lennart Nilsson who published a famous book
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