Alaska!

I recently took a trip up to Alaska to visit my mother-in-law, who is up there on business. It was quite an adventure - solo plane rides, midnight sunsets, permafrost forests, delicious dinners, moose, bear, killer mosquitoes, seals, birds, fish, and major jet lag. "Where are the pictures?!" you cry. They're coming, not to worry.

I took this picture out the airplane window coming in
to Anchorage. It's about 12:30 at night and, yes,
the sun is just barely setting.

*Quick side note: my seat on the plane was unexpectedly
changed to the emergency exit aisle; when asked if I was
prepared to assist in the event of an emergency,
I responded, "I've seen all six seasons of 'Lost,'
I know how to survive a plane crash."

This is the view out my in-law's back porch.
It's about 10:30 pm.

*Side note #2: I decided one morning to hike out to the
lake you can see in the picture. I took two steps into the
forest and decided against it. The ground in Alaska is permafrost,
which means it's rock-hard most of the year and thaws to
a degree in the spring and summer. It was like walking on
textured, bouncy foam - the strangest sensation ever!

My mother-in-law and I drove into Anchorage
from Big Lake where she lives almost every day.
One evening we were there, we went to a restaurant
called The Brewhouse, a very fancy shmancy place.
We both ordered this dish: grilled salmon on baby spinach
and garlic mashed potatoes, topped with tomato basil butter
and sprinkled with fresh tomatoes and cucumbers.

Salivating yet?

On my last full day in Alaska, we drove down to Seward,
and the view was spectacular!
This is the Cook Inlet and the Chugach Mountains.
I never got over how enormous they were!

 

What are those white specks, you ask?

Bugs. Dead ones. I took this through the windshield. :)

It was a little windy!

While we were driving along the Seward Highway,
my mother-in-law would point out the window and say,
"Look, they're going net fishing."
Finally, I said, "What's 'net fishing?' Do you just stick your
net in the water and hope something swims in?"
"Yes," she said. "O-kay," I thought, "Optimistic folk,
these Alaskans are." But that's exactly what these people in the
picture are doing. The groups seemed to be families mostly.
The dad would put on waders, grab his net, and walk
not 6 feet from the shore and plop the net in the water.
After twirling it around for a few seconds, he would bring it up,
and at least 10 fish would be inside!
These people could fill up one of those white
food storage buckets with fish in about half an hour!

"That's my kind of fishing," I thought.

I went down to the shore to get a closer look
at the process, and to stick my toes in the Alaska water.

It was SOOO cold! Wow. I took off my shoes,
put my toes in, took the picture, and got out.
The sand was very strange, too: it was dark gray,
sparkly, and extremely compact. This was not a beach to take
those romantic couples "two footprints side-by-side pictures"
- my feet made no impression whatsoever in the sand.

We stopped at an animal refuge on our journey to Seward.
Most of the animals here were found injured or
otherwise incapable of surviving in the wild and
are being rehabilitated, or are there to rebuild their population
because they've been all but eradicated in the wild.

*Sidenote 3: Lest you think that the only moose in Alaska
are in fenced enclosures, I did see two, real, wild, Alaska moose;
they just weren't nearly as close as these two.

Musk ox, against those incredible mountains.

A very friendly brown bear...

...who also acted a little like a dog. Just kidding.

She had been trained to sit and stick out her tongue

so the vet could check up on her.

Caribou/Reindeer. I was surprised to see how

fuzzy their antlers actually were.

*Side note #4: the place was swarming with mosquitoes.

I got over 24 bites on my face, neck, arms, and feet,

and my body has a really bad allergic reaction to bug bites.

I've been home for almost a week and they're still

not gone and haven't yet stopped itching.

When we got to Seward, we visited the aquarium.

It wasn't a large one, but it had great exhibits.

 

 

 

 

 

They had a large, open enclosure full of Alaskan birds as well.

 

This funny little bird, a rhinoceros oclit, was

raised by researchers, so he loves people.

He would splash around to get your attention,

then swim right up to you, trying to escape.

They also had two seals, and a huge stellar sea lion.

We were looking in the enclosure for him when he came

thundering around the corner and dove into the water with

a huge splash that would have drenched us

had not 8-foot plastic walls been protecting us!

 

Beautiful Alaska sunsets (again, around 11:00 pm,

and, sorry, more dead bugs).

It was a great last day to spend in Alaska, because the last night was terrible. My plane was scheduled to leave at 1:55 am, but was running (flying?) late and wouldn't be there until 2:30 am. By the time it got there, they got everyone off, cleaned it (we all yelled, "We don't care if it's clean!"), loaded us and our luggage on, I switched seats again, we didn't leave until 3:30. We got in to Salt Lake around 9:45, and it was 11:00 by the time I finally got home and promptly collapsed for about six hours.

*Last side note about Alaska: people do not live in igloos or drive a team of sled dogs to work. They do not live solely off of what they can kill and cook over an open fire. They do not always have subzero temperatures. They live in normal houses, drive cars, shop at Walmart and Target, pick up their prescriptions at Walgreens, eat at Red Robin, and go into the city on the weekends to shop at the mall. Alaska is, in short, not at all primitive and highly civilized; it's just incredibly vast and amazingly beautiful to boot.