Anchorage is located on a peninsula of relatively flat land surrounded on all sides by some sort of geographical barrier. To the west and southwest is the Cook Inlet, which stretched in from the Gulf of Alaska on the Pacific Ocean. The Cook Inlet separates into two branches or "arms"--Knik Arm to the north of Anchorage and Turnagain Arm to the south of Anchorage. The city itself lies on the peninsula of land in between them. To the east are the Chugach Mountains. The Chugach continue on the south side of Turnagain Arm as well. To the north of the Knik Arm are the Talkeetna Mountains (where I last went hiking) and to the west of the main Cook Inlet is the southern end of the Alaska Range. This has the effect of putting Anchorage in a "Bowl" with mountains rising up on all sides (even if some are across the water). You'll often hear the Anchorage area referred to as the Anchorage Bowl.
Above is a look down Northern Lights Boulevard, one of the main streets in town. Anchorage seems a lot like any other American town, despite its relative isolation. The city is very spread out geographically, but the main part of the city doesn't seem too big. Perhaps that's because there are only two roads out of town--the Glenn Highway to the north and the Seward Highway to the south. All the other streets funnel into these two roads eventually, so there's really only two directions to go.
There are a lot of trees, parks, and greenbelts in Anchorage. All of them have moose and bears so people are always being told to watch out. Two creeks--Campbell Creek and Chester Creek--run across the city flowing from the Chugach down into the Cook Inlet, and they provide the focal points for the two main greenbelts. The above photo is near Chester Creek as you are approaching downtown. The city itself is very nice and cool, lots of shade, minimal traffic problems. You can usually get where you need to go with no trouble. The only issues I have are with the construction and the "highways". It literally seems like, with all the construction and random road closures, the city completely rearranges itself every day, and you have to find different alternate routes nearly every time you go out. The second are these "highways". It appears that the city planners couldn't decide between limited access roads and roads with stoplights. The Seward Highway and Minnesota Drive (another major street in town) both alternate between having exit ramps at cross streets and having stoplights. I makes knowing which lane you have to be in a nightmare. But otherwise, no complaints...
Downtown Anchorage is planned in a grid with the extraordinarily easy to figure out (but dull to think about) street pattern where all the north-south streets are named with letters and all the east-west streets are named with numbers. So you end up going to the corner of C and 8th. Or L and 12th. I wish they were more clever. There are a smattering of tall buildings throughout the downtown area, but no real organized center of them on the ground (despite what you may think looking at the webcam images below). Most of the tall buildings are the buildings of oil companies. The tall brown building is the Conoco-Phillips building, for instance.
Really, most of downtown Anchorage looks like a very normal, nice town. When the weather's nice like today, there are scores of people out there, tourists and locals alike. Most were headed toward the same Artisan/Farmer Market we were, as that's the main event in downtown every weekend. Lots of people have bikes here and it's definitely a favorite mode of transportation. You can see the Chugach Mountains rising up behind the city in the photo above. The clouds hadn't completely cleared out yet, but it was still a very sunny day...
After finding a place to park, we headed for the Market. It was easy enough to find with the large number of white, pointy tents all grouped together. With the Chugach Mountains nearby and everything, it halfway reminded me of the Denver Airport with its tent-like roof trying to resemble the Rocky Mountains. I wondered if they were trying to do the same thing here. The market was far larger than I thought it was going to be.
There was a brass band, the "Alaska Brass", who were from the Air Force Base north of town, playing at the entrance to the Market. Ironically, as soon as I entered and turned to take the picture, they began playing a set of songs from the Rogers and Hammerstein musical "Oklahoma!" including the rousing finale song which is also our school song. Apparently I cannot escape Oklahoma, no matter where I go...
There were a lot of people there. And a lot of vendors. And a lot of tents. Here we see two of my roommates, Matt and Jordan, pausing to take it all in. The vendors had everything you would expect from Alaska...and some things I had never heard of before. There was an entire tent devoted to syrup, candy, and wine all made from birch sap. Another tent featured "Aurora Chasers" and looked exactly like the booths I've seen set up in Oklahoma by Tornado Chasers.net. They offer Aurora-finding tours and lots of photography. One vendor was selling wooden ties--neckties made out of wood. Another often-sold item were these Inuit-inspired knives called Ulus. They look like miniature axe heads, but with the thin-ness of a knife. They have a wooden handle where the butt of the axe-head would be. Apparently they're a big deal up here--everyone was selling them and a lot of people have them. They're supposed to be highly efficient for cutting and chopping all kinds of things. Wikipedia has an article on them here. I might be tempted to get one at some point...they're not too expensive...
One of my favorite tents was the "Alaska Pissin' off Texas" tent, with their wide variety of anti-Texas merchandise. Coming from Oklahoma, and knowing a lot of Texans, I was very amused by this whole thing...particularly because they had a whole tent. I may go back some week and buy a shirt or something. They had a bulletin board of all these reasons why Alaska is bigger and better than Texas that unfortunately isn't very readable in the picture I took of it. Still, very funny...
One whole "street" in this event was devoted to food. Lots of food. There had been many vendors elsewhere in the Market selling dried or packaged meat from the "exotic" animals up here--reindeer, buffalo, musk-ox, caribou--but here there were people selling the food cooked and ready to eat for lunch. In the first episode of the television series "Northern Exposure" (an excellent show set in Alaska that I am working my way through on DVDs) there's a point where someone offers to serve either Moose Burgers or Caribou Dogs. I thought it was exaggerating or trying to be funny in the film. Oh no...they do exist. And were sold in this row. We ended up going to a pizza place for lunch because some people in our group wanted that, but I intend to return here some weekend and sample some of their local cuisine. They also had the typical sort of fare for this kind of thing--popcorn, grilled corn on the cob, funnel cakes, chicken strips--along with the more eccentric stuff. Anyhow, good eats.
After spending quite a bit of time in the Market we headed back to go to the pizza place people wanted to go to for lunch. On the way back to the car we passed a few totem poles outside a government building. I forgot that this was totem pole land. Though that's more near Juneau and in that area of Alaska. I've been considering taking some of the money I make this summer and flying to Juneau for a weekend, just so I can see it. It's not too bad of a flight and you can't get there by road. Something to think about.
We passed a place that advertised glacial cruises out on Prince William Sound far east of Anchorage. That's another thing that several of the people up here want to do--go on one of those day-long glacial cruises to see the glaciers by the water. There's also supposed to be good whale viewing on those cruises as well. Anyhow, this place had a chunk of ice on a barrel out in front of it. The sign read, "This is actual, real, genuine glacial ice, taken from an iceberg in Prince William Sound." I just found that amusing...and wondered if they had their ships bring back a new chunk of ice every day. That ice cube is not going to last in the sun...
Finally, we just drove across Anchorage towards the pizza place. The mountains are always visible in every direction when you're driving (unless it's really foggy). When there's a very low stratus cloud deck but it's clear underneath, you just see this dark wall rising up into the cloud ceiling in every direction. It's almost enough to make you feel claustrophobic. But today was a partly cloudy day, warm and happy. A good day to be in Anchorage.
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