Anchorage

Russ outside the downtown Visitor Center.

We are near the end of our ten day stay in Anchorage. I am looking forward to getting back out into the wilderness although it has been nice to have the amenities readily available (especially cellphone and internet.) Anchorage is not a large city, so touring it was pretty easy.  I have blogged about some of the highlights already, so this blog is a collection of photos from the other places we visited in Anchorage.

The downtown section is very compact and touristy.  There are beautiful flowers in the parks and at the tourist center though.  We enjoyed walking along the streets and people watching.

Beautiful begonias were everywhere!

The colors of the flowers were brilliant.

The Anchorage Museum is very nice, especially its section on the history and culture of Alaska.

One of the art carvings in the museum.  There were many!

We spent an afternoon out at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. Saw dancing and heard some talks about the different native groups.  They have a lake in the back of the center with representative houses for the five different native groups situated on a path around the lake.

They have a program where they are teaching the high school kids their native culture, including dancing.

Inside one of the native houses.  This group lives in the Southeast part of Alaska.

Another example of a native home.  This group lives on the west side of Alaska.

Russ went on a short sled dog ride while at the Heritage Center.

Took a drive out to Eklunta Village and Lake.  This is the site of one of the oldest Athabasca communities in the Anchorage area.  The Russians had a huge influence in this area, and converted many of the natives to the Russian Orthodox religion.  The lake is a water source for Anchorage.  There is a very nice packed earth/gravel walk along the lake. 

This small Russian Orthodox church was built in 1972.

This is the original church, well over 100 years old.  It was in use until the new one was built in 1972.

The inside of the new church.  There are no chairs, everyone stands during the service. 
There were beautiful woodcarved stands.

The natives place small houses over the graves, so the departed have a place to stay. 
These are called spirit houses.  The colors indicate the family.

Ekluntna Lake.  It was getting ready to rain on us.

After Russ took his floatplane ride, he walked over to the Aviation Museum and spent an hour or so looking around.

A Grumman Goose.  Interesting to us since we worked for and retired from Northrop Grumman.

Anchorage has some very nice spots, especially along the south side. The houses are built in the “Alaska” style which means that every house is different – there is no dominant style anywhere. There are a ton of parks with some having very sophisticated trail systems that are used for cross country skiing in the winter. We spent a couple of hours one afternoon walking along the coastal trail that starts near the downtown area and runs for about 13 miles along the Inlet. They also have a planet trail where the Sun marker is placed downtown and the planets are placed along the trail proportionally to their distance from the Sun. We found the Pluto marker (the trail was done before Pluto was demoted) clear out in Kincaid park which is many miles from downtown.

A view of Anchorage from the Coastal Trail.

I am looking forward to a dinner at the Sourdough Mining Company tonight.  Then we head north to Denali.  The weather the past couple of days has been rainy and they are forecasting rain for the rest of the week.  So that means we are unlikely to see Mt. McKinley while we are in the park.  But we are planning on spending several days in the Denali area after we leave the park, so hopefully the weather will clear up and we will get a good view. Don’t know when I will have internet access out there, so the next blog may be several days away.

Corrigan visiting the sights of Anchorage.  This is a monster Inutshuk.

Corrigan visiting a reindeer, which is a domesticated Caribou.

A Drive Along Turnagain Arm



View of Turnagain Arm.

We took a day trip heading south out of Anchorage along the Seward Highway.  Our destination was Portage Glacier about 40 miles away.  The road runs between the 3000 foot mountains of Chugach State Park and the rocky edge of muddy Turnagain Arm. The Cook Inlet stretches 180 miles from the ocean to Anchorage and Turnagain Arm is a branch of the inlet.  It was named by Captain Bligh (yes that guy) on an expedition led by James Cook to find the Northwest Passage.

First stop was Potter’s Marsh where, purportedly, lots of birds reside.  With our usual luck we didn’t see very many on our walk along the boardwalks situated out over the marsh, but the day was beautiful and it was a pretty place to walk.

Pretty much the sum total of all the birds we saw.

There were lots of pullouts to view the scenery.  On our way south, the tide was in, so the inlet was beautiful. On the way back to Anchorage, much later in the day, the inlet was a muddy flat.  There are lots of warnings about walking out on the mud as it behaves like quicksand. Didn’t see any boaters but there were several windsurfers along one stretch.

The Alaska Railroad runs right next to the road.  This track goes from Anchorage down to Whittier, where the cruise ships come in.

We took a boat ride out to the Portage Glacier.  The glacier has retreated significantly in the past 100 years, to the point where there is now a substantial lake where the glacier used to be.  Gold rush stampeders used to travel over the glacier (where it once stood) because it provided a portage route between Prince William Sound and Turnagain Arm and shortened their travel time.  That can’t have been very easy, given all the fissures in the ice, not to mention that the ice is darn COLD!

This glacier is receding about 18 inches a day.

This ice is only about 60 years old, so no old mammoths are going to be popping out of this ice!

One of the many ice floes floating in the lake.

We stopped by a beautiful hotel, Alyeska, where they have a 60 passenger tram you can take up for a view of the area 2300 feet above sea level.  Lots of black diamond trails at the top.  During the summer, people can walk the mountain like billy goats.  We took the tram instead.  The views were magnificent.

An interesting statue in front of the hotel, depicting a trapper making his way down a steep slope.

The 60 person tram we came up on. It took less than 7 minutes to get up to the top.

Some of the black diamond trails are on this slope.  They can get up to 900 inches of snow a year!

A view of Turnagain Arm.

The mountains on the other side of Turnagain Arm are part of the Kenai Peninsula.

Seward Highway is in great shape.  The thing is though, the road is only two lanes and the speed limit is 65 mph.  It is more than a little spooky whipping along this narrow road with no divider between you and the on-coming traffic.  And getting back onto the road after pulling off for one of the scenic stops is a bit hair raising. You have to get from 0 to 65 is like no time. Later we heard that the traffic was extra heavy because the salmon are starting to arrive in the Kenai Peninsula rivers and when that happens, Anchorage empties out to go fishing.  They call it “combat fishing” because folks actually get into fights about their favorite fishing spots. The folks up here are serious about their fishing.

Look…In the Sky! It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, No Wait! It’s Russ in a Floatplane!

The floatplane!

As many of you may know, Russ is an aviator.  He has flown in and has flown many types of aircraft, but he confessed to me that he had never been in a floatplane.  So up he went for a glacier and wildlife tour and a landing/takeoff on a wilderness lake. I declined to go, as I’ve been up on a small plane that landed on a glacier in New Zealand and that pretty much maxed out my thrill factor.

Lake Hood is the world’s largest floatplane airport.  The lake is surrounded with floatplane docking areas and there is a waiting list to get one.  Russ chose to fly on Rust’s Service which has been around a while (so we figured it was pretty safe.) 

On approach to the "landing strip"

It was a beautiful clear day, just perfect for flightseeing. The pilot had a degree in geology and gave some great information on why the glaciers look the way they do. And while they did see alot of glaciers, no wildlife!  I think they are all on vacation on the "Outside".

The black lines are not rivers, they represent the debris boundaries of the various glaciers as the glaciers blended together.

The glacier lake the plane landed on.

Alot of ice in the lake. The pilot got out on the floats and snagged a small piece to bring back to the airport.

A hanging glacier.  These do not flow into a river. 

The Knik River.

To finish off the tour, Russ and I drove up to Eagle RiverNature Center and saw some of the same glaciers he toured on his floatplane trip.  For Russ, this floatplane adventure was a highlight of our Alaska trip! If the weather is good while we are in Denali, he is planning on taking another flightseeing trip to see Mt. McKinley up close and personal.

A view of some of the mountains that Russ toured on his floatplane trip. 
This picture was taken at the Eagle River Nature Center.

The happy travelers!