My friend Lee and her husband Mike live about an hour's drive outside of Anchorage. I visited them during the first week of July 2001.
Although Anchorage is below the Arctic Circle, it's far enough north that sunset was not until 23:30 or so (11:30pm), and it never got completely dark.
The Anchorage area has a lot of mountains, and there was a lot of green.
I also saw some interesting wildlife.
...and there were flowers everywhere.
| Summer is roadwork season. Mike was driving when I took this picture. He says the line of traffic went for about 15 miles. |
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We went for a short hike at Independence Mine State Park, which has a nice little lake at the top of a short but steep trail. Lee and Mike have two border collies, Sierra and Murl, who love going on hikes (anything for an chance to run around!).
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One of the tourist attractions near where Lee and Mike live is a musk ox farm. The farm has a gift shop that sells hand-knitted items made from the inner coat of musk oxen. Musk ox wool is soft, warm, and light-weight. Unfortunately, none of the photos I took of the musk oxen came out, because I had misloaded the camera. |
Another tourist attraction is day cruises. Lee, Mike, and I went on which went into Kenai Fjords National Park, down near Seward. There were great views of glaciers, and there was a park ranger on the boat telling us about all the wildlife, why glacial ice is blue (the weight of the ice squeezes out any air bubbles), and so on. Besides the sea lions and birds in the photos above, we also saw bald eagles, puffins, and whales.
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Little bits of glacier frequently flake off. This makes a huge racket, with crackling and thunder sounds, even if it's just a little bit of ice like here. |
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You know that old saw about how many different words Native Alaskans have for snow? Well, there's an incredible vocabulary for classifying glaciers, like whether they reach the water (this one doesn't), and I forget all the other things. The dark bands in this glacier are the rocks and stuff that the glacier has carried with it. |
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We got a little alarmed as our boat returned to Seward, thinking this might be a forest fire. But it was apparently somebody either burning trash or clearing land. |
Downtown Anchorage has a Native American Heritage museum, and there's a Native American Heritage Center just outside Anchorage. Inside the Heritage Center are some exhibits, crafts for sale by local Native craftspeople, and demonstrations and storytelling. Outside they have a pond and a loop trail, with samples of traditional Native Alaskan housing.
In the Aleutian islands and the North, the housing is actually mostly underground, and access is via a tunnel or via the smoke hole in the roof.
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Anchorage has an extensive and very nice trail system that runs along creeks and the bay. During the summer the trails are used for bicyling, jogging, etc., and during the winter they're used for cross-country skiing. The Coastal Trail has some great views of Cook Inlet. But don't go out onto the mud. Some of it's like quicksand, and you could get stuck.
Many parts of the trail system are heavily wooded, and you can almost forget that you're in a city.
[Mike's home page]