Part 10 in a series about our trip to Alaska in late June through mid-July, 2011. 

On our first day in Alaska, we were driving to Eric and Meggan’s house when a float plane flew right in front of us, probably just 50 feet in the air, headed for a splash in Lake Hood. I smiled and thought “Welcome back to Alaska”.

Outside of Alaska, float planes are probably not very common. When your wife’s family lives less than a mile from Lake Hood (the largest and busiest float plane airport in the world), float planes start to seem as common as city buses. One day we took a walk over to Lake Hood to check out some of the planes and watch them take off and land (do you still call it that?)

So you may be wondering why there are so many float planes in Alaska. As far as I know, there are just a lot of places in Alaska where the only convenient place to land your plane is in a body of water. Basically, if Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes, then Alaska could be called the land of 1,000,000 lakes. Open up googlemaps and zoom in on any part of Western Alaska and you’ll see what I mean.

People have various iconic images they think of when they think about Alaska. Float planes are definitely one of them for me.