Final Weeks: Seward, Swamp, State Fair

I've been putting off this post because, well, I don't want to acknowledge in writing that the year is over.  But it is.  Alaska: it was my honor and privilege to live here for a year.  Thank you.

One of my roommates had two friends in town, and we all went down to Seward for a day trip.  This was at a stop along the way.

Seward.

The harbor in Seward.

Exit Glacier.  While in Seward we also went to the Alaska SeaLife Center, which I loved.  I think aquariums are cool in general, and this was an aquarium plus aviary plus baby-walrus-refuge.  I loved seeing the walrus, and I didn't get flesh-eating bacteria after a bird splashed some dirty bird-water in my eye, so the trip was a great success!

Salmon!

So I called it a swamp in the title because I wanted to alliterate, but it's actually a marsh.  I had passed this marsh and its boardwalk so many times this year, but I finally stopped to check it out and saw salmon and this lovely view.

Last but not least, The Alaska State Fair:

Huge cabbage and cucumber.  (Where the heck are the huge gourds?!)

Terrifying vegetable lady.

I know it's blurry, but I really like this picture of a pig.  I think it captures the pig's essence.  "Hello there!" says the pig.

The lumberjack competition!  First up: log sawing!

Pole climbing start.

Pole climbing again.  Look at those manly men climb those logs.

Log rolling.  You can see the remnants of the ax-throwing portion of the competition in the background.  You can also see a minivan, the preferred vehicle of lumberjacks everywhere.

Fairbanks, Denali, North Pole (and a little bit of glacier thrown in for good measure)

With only five weeks left up here, things are getting down to the wire, but this past weekend -- just in the nick of time! -- I made it to Fairbanks.  One of my roommates has relatives in Fairbanks (OK actually his relatives live in North Pole . . . OK actually his relatives live in the suburbs of North Pole), and we decided at the last minute to invite another friend and take a trip up there.

 

That's our view of Denali (the highest peak in North America) on the way up.  Once we arrived, my roommate's aunt and uncle were SO hospitable.  His aunt Dana made us homemade fish and chips -- fresh caught and fried halibut and salmon, and fresh French fries -- delicious!!  Then we had cheese cake for dessert.  I'm spoiled, I know.

It just so happened that someone else we knew was having a BBQ/picnic out at his lake house that weekend, so we all had the chance to eat eat eat at that as well.  There was fried turkey, salmon, and homemade ice cream and pie.  Pictured below is a close-up of the lake, followed by an overall view of the festivities.

We also made it out to Chena Hot Springs, where the warm, brackish water gave me a mild case of flesh-eating bacteria, but then the water's healing powers cured me.  It was a close call, but I'm out of the woods now. (Note: I didn't actually get flesh eating bacteria.  I'm just irrationally terrified of it.)  I don't have any pictures of the springs, but I did get a cool shot of the open road on the way back.

Finally, we took some time to check out down town North Pole, as well as a nature preserve in Fairbanks.  You won't have a hard time telling which of the following pictures were taken at which of those two stops.

 This parking is only for the disleighbled.

Pretty sure I do NOT want to be on this guy's list.

I call this one "Squash In Repose."

On the way back to Anchorage we stopped in Talkeetna for lunch (home of the infamous Wilderness Woman Competition and Bachelor Auction).  The food was so yummy and the town was so cute that I've decided to take my parents and sister on a day trip out there when they come to visit next week. 

In conclusion, here's a cool pic of some sun peaking through the rain on the drive back to Anchorage:

 

P.S. Several weeks ago some friends and I took a trip out to Matanuska Glacier.  I now present the photographic evidence.

The Top of the World

Warning: this post contains an excessive amount of pictures.

I was on top of the world this weekend -- almost literally!  A few friends and I made the trip up to Barrow, Alaska, which is the northernmost town in the United States.  I was so excited about this trip, both because I couldn't really imagine what to expect, and because I knew we'd get the chance to go to Point Barrow, which is the very northern tip of the country: I couldn't wait to look out into the abyss.

To get to Barrow we had to stop first in Prudhoe Bay, and I saw what kind of landscape we were in for (so THAT'S what tundra looks like . . .) and I saw the airline loading and unloading the front of the 737-Combi jet we were in.

The airport, lying in wait . . .

The airplane was a 737 set up such that the front half held supplies, which you can see being loaded in the above picture.  The back half of the plane is where we were seated.

The view from above.  Those are bits of glacier.

More glacier pockets.

About to land in Barrow.  That's the Arctic Ocean you see frozen there.  OK actually it's the Beaufort Sea, which is a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean.

The Barrow airport is the smallest airport I've ever seen.  It's one room, one terminal, etc., and you can walk to it from many parts of town.  After we checked into our hotel (to which we had walked, of course), we had dinner with a lawyer friend of a friend who was nice enough to host us that evening.  She made venison tacos from a deer her husband had shot, and crab cakes.  Very Alaskan.  We learned from her that in order to order alcohol in Barrow, you have to have your own personal liquor license and pick up your beer or wine shipment from a central booze depot. 

Now, for those of you who know me well (and, let's be honest, who else is really reading this blog), the next part of this story might alarm you, or you might think I'm making it up.  But I'm not.  It happened.  After dinner, one of the group gets a call from her friend who is in Barrow that weekend.  That friend tells us that she ran into another friend who now lives in Barrow, and they're waiting for us outside with a pickup truck to go for a ride.  In other words, I'm being asked to cram into a truck with six other people, and that truck is being driven by a friend of a friend of a friend, and we're going to go cruise around Barrow.  I think that's how the first episode of CSI: Barrow starts.  But heck.  What happens above the Arctic Circle stays above the Arctic Circle, right?  And what do you know!  No one got murdered!  Instead, our new friend Jessie drove us out to Point Barrow that very evening.

A whale carcass.  Yes really.

A severed caribou head.

It's not what it looks like.  No really, I can explain.  That's just me in front of a whale carcass holding a gun.  Totally normal and exactly what I expected from life.   In all seriousness, though, the gun was unloaded (I saw this myself), and was owned and carried (by someone else) solely for protection from the local wildlife.

Infinity.

The abyss.

Barrow: home of the Barrow Whalers.  Check out those links for more details, but I was shocked to learn that the Barrow high school has its own outdoor football field.

A shot of the town.  No paved roads.

Me under some whale bones.

After taking note that the sun really never sets, and in fact never seems to move at all, we packed it in for the evening in time to get a few hours of sleep before our 5am (official) tour.  When the alarm went off at 4:45am, I was wishing we had canceled the tour, since we'd seen most of Barrow the evening before.  But I'm glad we didn't because . . . holy crap we saw some gosh darn polar bears!!!

Not the best picture, unfortunately, but there is it!

Paw print: the finger marks the heel, and you can see the claws.

The polar bears are saving some whale meat for later.

More abyss.

The northern-most totem pole (topped by the northern most toilet, which was installed to poke fun at a picky military man who lamented the lack of a flush toilet back in the day), and a long range radar site.

A whale skull.

The red flag means a whale has been killed, and lets everyone in town know that whale meat is on the way.

Underground storage.  It's where everyone in town keeps their meat, and it's kept cold by the permafrost.

After our tour, we went back to the hotel for a couple more hours of sleep, then we set out for some more exploring.  In a town of about four thousand people, that meant going to the local stores.

Need some animal skins?  We've got you covered.

Need a PB&J?  I hope you're a millionaire. In case you're curious: bananas were $2.99/lb, Ben & Jerry's was $8/pint, and cereal was $7/box.

I forgot to mention earlier that Barrow is incredibly windy.  The air temperature was about 32 degrees all weekend, but the wind was blowing at about 30-35mph, straight down off the north pole.  So walking around was unpleasant, to put it mildly.  As we left the store to go back to our hotel, we'd walked just long enough to start feeling sorry for ourselves, when . . .  Jessie!  He dropped us off at the hotel, where we made some apple cider (which we spiked with bourbon), and warmed ourselves up before making our way back down to our lives below the Arctic Circle.