A Trip to Alaska

I spent last week in Alaska on family vacation. My brother has lived in Anchorage for 7 years and this is the first time I’ve been up here to visit. I’m sorry that it has taken me so long because it’s absolutely beautiful, even though the weather has been pretty darn crummy.

We went for a float down the Kenai river to go fishing (my brother’s most favorite activity in the entire world). Unfortunately, it was very cold and raining so, instead of camping and continuing the float for a second day, we had to cut it to a single day.

The banks of the Kenai river were lined with dead fish. The salmon come up the streams to spawn and after spawning, they die.

We stopped by my brother’s work to drop off some of the gear he borrowed for our float trip and ended up playing on the climbing wall. The first time I tried, my very first time climbing, I got up about 6 feet and then got terrified and came down (I’m desperately afraid of heights). I waited a while, gathered up some nerve, and tried again. The second time I made it all the way to the top! I am very, very proud of myself.

I had to take a photo of myself with a musk ox. Knitters may know that musk ox produce qiviut, one of the softest (and most expensive) wools in existence. This was inside of Gwennies, a restaurant in Anchorage that was the perfect mix of tacky and lovely. And, like everywhere in Alaska, they served gigantic portions. (My mom and I split a pretty darn good chicken fried steak.)

We hiked up to a glacier on the National Forest Byron Glacier Trail. Wonderfully enough, the sun came out and the rain stopped for the short hike. It was pretty odd to have my brother be able to shove snow down my neck in September (don’t worry, I retaliated). His girlfriend was telling me that she made it a goal to go skiing every month of the year.

We saw eagles everywhere. In the wild, I also saw a lynx (run across the road in front of us) and a bear (on a hillside a ways away). A moose wandered into my brother’s yard, but I wasn’t at the house at the time, unfortunately.

We drove through the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center (in Girdwood, near Anchorage) where I got to see a ton of animals, including this baby moose! They had black and brown bears, lynx, moose, musk ox, caribou, and wood bison. They provide permanent shelter for animals that would be unable to survive in the wild (like the two lynx rescued from a forest fire as babies) and have a breeding program to bring other animals back into the wild (like the wood bison, extinct from Alaska for over 100 years).