One of the first things I realized is that it might have been a better idea to rent a car than to rely on Uber: the fare to get from the airport to my Air B&B was ridiculous. I guess it's not a great surprise, considering the gasoline prices around here seem to be around $5.70 for a gallon of regular unleaded. But once I had reached my lodging Thursday evening, I resolved to save all such worries for later, because at that moment what I needed most was SLEEP. I got my bearings in the apartment, grabbed a quick shower, and bedded down. And I proceeded to sleep very well. I woke up for a brief while around 3:00 AM (at which time it was no darker than dusk outside--thankfully my bedroom was equipped with blackout curtains), but otherwise got a solid eight hours.
Once I was up Friday morning I went about the business of learning my surroundings a bit. I was pretty sure that Anchorage would not be a particularly cosmopolitan town, and indeed it is not. It looks like a place that's frozen solid for quite a bit of the year. Outside of the small core city, it's spread out and car-centric and not very walkable. It took me a lengthy walk on a couple of stroads to find a place that served breakfast. (If you don't know what a "stroad" is, this video explains it.) But one must look only at the beautiful Chugach Mountains west of town to know that some incredible wilderness is out there, and that would be the biggest challenge of this trip.
I had no delusion that I could truly "do" Alaska in two days. You need no less than a week for even a modest wilderness adventure around here. I'd gotten no shortage of advice from everybody I'd talked to--"You gotta get outside of Anchorage if you wanna see what Alaska is really about!"--and all I can say is, yeah, yeah, I get that. But in the end I decided to stick with stuff in or near town that any old tourist can do.
Yesterday I did a hike to the top of Flattop Mountain just outside of town. Flattop is both the most-climbed mountain in Alaska and the most popular day hike. One of the main reasons I decided to do it is I stumbled upon a local bike shop that offers a daily shuttle out to the trailhead and back. The shop was downtown, not a bad walk from my Air B&B. I'd looked into taking an Uber from my place to the trailhead and found that a one-way fare would be around $36, but the bike shop's shuttle was a mere 24 bucks for a round trip, complete with a really nice guy named Pete for a driver. Pete gave us passengers all kinds of pro tips for the hike, not to mention a bit of Anchorage history as we made our way out of town.
The hike itself was doable for any able-bodied person, but strenuous nevertheless. The heart of it involved walking up hundreds of railroad-tie steps, and as I neared the summit I found myself doing not quite pure rock-climbing, but closer to it than I'd expected on this hike. In any case, I made it to the top and beheld some gorgeous views:
As you can see, it was not a clear day. I don't think they see too many crystal-clear blue skies in this part of the world. And it was chilly and windy atop the mountain. But I took the time to take it all in. The water stretching to the horizon in the left half of the photo is the Cook Inlet. The city of Anchorage occupies sort of a peninsula defined by the Knik Arm coming in from the right and the Turnagain Arm coming in from the left. The downtown core is over in the right side of the photo. On the left you can see Fire Island, and it's not to be confused with the one off New York's Long Island: I don't think there's much on it besides a wind farm. In the foreground you can see the trail system that I hiked to get to this place.
The hike back down was less taxing than the hike up, but it was tough on my toes as they kept getting shoved into the fronts of my shoes. I had to take it slow to avoid blowing out a knee. By the end of the day I was feeling the hike's effects in all of my leg muscles.
I slept well again last night. For two nights in a row I've gotten eight good hours, something I rarely manage at home. I had breakfast and considered what I might do today. I explored every possibility for paddling: long-time readers of this blog know that I have a goal of paddling a boat in every state. But in the end my lack of a car and my short window of time were obstacles too big to scale. The truth is that I'm going to have to dedicate an entire trip to some kind of longer paddling tour, and there are better places than Anchorage from which to base it--Seward or Whittier, for instance.
I'd had such a good experience with Pete yesterday that I decided to patronize his business, Downtown Bicycle Rentals, again today. For a very reasonable price I was able to rent a road bike and get lots of good advice on where to ride in the greater Anchorage area. The main part of my trip took me on the Coastal Trail that runs along the shoreline around the Anchorage airport, affording great views of Cook Inlet and the Knik Arm. I covered some 40 kilometers in several hours of mildly intense riding. During that time I managed to take exactly one photo:
That's part of the Alaska Range in the background. Large mud flats seem to border the entire waterfront here, and I'm not familiar enough with the tides here to know how often they're submerged, or how deep. One interesting piece of area history is that the bluff I was standing on to take this photo used to extend farther out, but collapsed into the sea during the massive earthquake of March 27, 1964. Centered near Valdez, this earthquake was the most powerful ever recorded in North America and the second most powerful in recorded world history.
Well, that's all for now from Alaska. I have to be up in the wee hours of tomorrow morning to catch a 5 AM flight back to the Lower 48. The next stop is Portland, from which I'll make my way into the Columbia Gorge and resume the main topic of this blog, canoe and kayak racing. With any luck my sore leg muscles will be ready to go when I pick up my rental boat Monday.
For more information on what this blog is about, click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment