Monday, July 24, 2023: Bright colors in the city, blue in the ice and gold in the creek!
Info:
Anchorage is Alaska’s largest city with nearly 300,000 people and about 100,000 more in the surrounding area – in total, more than half of Alaska’s population of 736,000. It is equidistant from Tokyo, New York City and Frankfurt. The direct flight to Frankfurt takes nine hours.
In 1867, the U.S. Secretary of State, William H. Seward, negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia, for $7.2 million (today’s value about 100 million euros). What was dismissed by political opponents at the time as “Seward’s Folly” quickly proved to be a stroke of luck: in 1888, gold was found on Turnagain Arm, the fjord where Anchorage is now located.
For the construction of the railroad line, a tent settlement was established in 1915, which developed so rapidly that it was declared a town as early as 1920.
On Good Friday 1964, Anchorage was struck by a devastating earthquake measuring 9.2 on the Richter scale – the second most severe ever recorded. It is called Good Friday Earthquake. A crack went through 4th Avenue, the main street of downtown Anchorage, and after four minutes the northern part of the city was up to five meters lower than before. – In rebuilding Anchorage, it was helpful that oil was struck in Alaska in 1968.
In a country where 82% of communities can only be reached by boat or plane, air travel plays a completely different role than it does in Austria. Anchorage’s airport is central not only to Alaska itself, but also to global freight traffic.
Adjacent to Ted Stevens International Airport is Lakehood Seaplane Base, the largest seaplane base in the world with over a thousand aircraft and over 200 aircraft movements on normal days (sometimes over 500), where there are also runways for small aircraft. Alaska’s bush pilots can take off and land almost anywhere – the record for a landing is 9 ft 10 in (just under 3 m). For rough terrain, aircraft are equipped with large “bush tires” or “tundra tires.” The rent for a water site is US$1,500 per month, and you wait twelve years to get one.
At the same time, the port is very busy: more than 90 % of the goods needed in Alaska arrive by ship. And railroads also play an important role in freight transportation within Alaska.
Today there are tent settlements in Anchorage again. The city currently has no strategy for dealing with approximately 3,000 homeless people. From September it has sub-zero temperatures at night, in winter even below -30°C.
My opinion:
By the sea again! Even though the Pacific Ocean in Turnagain Arm comes across as very tame … I really liked it in Anchorage. It is an incredibly colorful city!
Since the campground was below a large public lot where most of Anchorage’s homeless have settled, I got a glimpse of the degrading conditions under which these people dwell: no water, no sanitation, often only plastic sheeting. During Covid they were offered a roof over their heads, but this spring the city government decided that they had to get out of these buildings. I am already curious if and how the problem will be solved. There are private initiatives, but they can’t feed 3,000 people, let alone provide them with decent housing. I hope something is done quickly.
Diary:
On the drive south from Denali National Park, you pass two points from which you can see Denali. When it’s not cloudy.
It was cloudy.
No problem. I saw and experienced so much in Denali National Park! Now I share the fate of 80% of the visitors who don’t get to see Denali. I don’t want anything worse to happen to me!
There is usually almost no traffic in Alaska. But the closer you get to Anchorage, the more is going on on the highway, which becomes a real freeway from Palmer on.
In the following two and a half days I spent in Anchorage, I walked from the campground to downtown at least twice every day and also to the Coastal Trail to get a breath of ocean air.
Much is reminiscent of the 1964 earthquake. People are aware that, due to plate tectonics, something like this can happen again at any time. To the south of the city, Earthquake Park is located at a site that was about fifteen meters higher before the quake. There, the earthquake lasted ninety seconds longer than in the city center. The waves of the earthquake can still be seen – sometimes up to five meters high! Of the 76 houses that stood there, nothing remained. People formed a chain and helped each other through the longest five and a half minutes of their lives, otherwise many would not have survived. Seeing the waves today, one understands that it borders on a miracle that there were “only” thirteen deaths.
The tectonics of the area is responsible not only for the height of the mountain, which I have not seen. There are hundreds of small earthquakes every day, but they are not noticeable. The tsunami alarm often sounds, as it did last week when there was a stronger earthquake in the Pacific. The volcanoes of Alaska were also formed by the pressure exerted by the Pacific Plate. And we’ll need our warm jackets for California vacations in the future: California is about to move north. Every year a few centimeters.
From Anchorage I drove along the Turnagain Arm towards Portage to the Kenai Peninsula. On Portage Lake I took a boat tour to see the glacier.
Why do glaciers look bluish? Glaciers exist where more snow falls in winter than melts in summer. Snow crystals are hexagonal – you can see this in the snowflakes. As more snow comes onto the glacier each year, the lower part is compressed by the weight of the upper. This pressure turns the snow into glacial ice, which means that the ice crystals are hexagonal. They refract light into the colors of the rainbow, absorbing all colors other than blue. That is why glaciers shimmer blue.
Thousands of years old ice … a look into the past. For me, it was an overwhelming experience.
Then I drove back a bit to Girdwood, where I spent two nights in the middle of nowhere at a former gold mine. Without shower. And guess what, it wasn’t that bad!
The original plan to take the cable car up a mountain was pointless because it was cloudy and the clouds from the sea were very low, so the peaks were not visible.
So I went gold panning in Crow Creek. You pay $25 and are allowed to keep everything you find. Last year, a tourist had a chicken-sized nugget in the pan. Some people from the area still get their living from the creek. It was really fun to try, and after a while I got the hang of it. First, make sure the material in the pan is clean, remove the larger stones – and then move the pan until the gold, which is much heavier than the stones, settles on the edge. Then suddenly something glitters there and something else and something else. I tried it out. A stone of the same size is much lighter than gold.
What can I say? I stashed my find in Annie Way’s overhead cabinet. And I never need to work again 😉
