From the big cheese: Once in a while everyone needs to get away on vacation, even a certifiable workaholic like myself. It's been a wonderful but brutal schedule since Derby and at last I am taking some time off.

This year I will be traveling with my good friend Dan Obelatz from Alaska. After being dropped off in the middle of the 4 million acre wilderness called Lake Clark National Park we will try to complete an 80-mile traverse of the Southern part of The Alaska Range. The trip will take us over four mountain passes, from Turquoise Lake to Two Lakes. It is a full on mountain adventure that will require fording glacier rivers, bushwhacking endlessly through alder jungles, and climbing over steep glaciers. Sounds like fun, right?

Alaska is truly one of the last untouched wilderness areas left in the world. The mountains are young, born of massive and active tectonic shifts. It is a rare opportunity to travel through places that mark the beginning of life, and see it the same way as the great explorers did over a century ago. When the glaciers receded 5000 years ago, the earth reclaimed the scared land with cryptogrammic crust, and lichens that are the building blocks of plants, and then all of the region's other eco-systems.

The landscape and scale of Alaska are enormous, and each mile of it comes painfully slow, but the rewards are spectacular. Imagine waking up one morning and opening your tent to find two thousand Mulchanta Caribou grazing, or taking a nap one afternoon and waking up to find a black bear licking your head, or staring at the huge mountains of the Revelations with spires, and towers, and glaciers hanging over pure granite mountains that soar to over 8000 feet, then you have some sense of the wonder that is Alaska and the real life adventures I have enjoyed in the past.

Don't worry though, the deli will stay open during my absence, and I think our wonderful staff has been trained to keep the Corned Beef & Pastrami flowing even if I never come back. Who knows they may even name a new sandwich after me. Could it be "The Grizzly Diaries"?

Keep me in your thoughts,

Mark Stevens