Exploring Anchorage

Anchorage is the largest city in Alaska, (Fairbanks is second). About two-thirds of the state's population live in these two cities. Of course, the whole state has fewer than 800,000 people, so it's not like we were in NYC or anything. However, it was the first time in a long time that we actually had some heavy traffic. I had almost forgotten what that was like.

We arrived early in the day, and found a spot in The Golden Nugget RV Park. It was a typical city RV park--a large parking lot, but on the positive side, it was near one of the city's many paved bike trails. The other good news was that it was across the street from Costco, and we were out of peanut butter. We are a Skippy Crunchy family and they only had Jiff, but hey, we were desperate!

We took advantage of a warm day and hopped on our mountain bikes and found the path. There are many miles of interconnected bike trails throughout the city. Our campground was on the outskirts of town, so we started on the Chester Creek Trail through several miles of wooded paths, passing small lakes and parks until we finally reached the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail that runs along the Cook Inlet and brings you closer to downtown.

We found the Visitor's Center, which was a small log cabin with a thatched roof in the middle of downtown.

A view of the street from the Visitor's Center














Lee is posing next to the bust of his childhood hero, Eisenhower. The monument is commemorating Alaska becoming a state in 1959, during Eisenhower's presidency.
















From the Coastal Trail, we connected with the Ship Creek Trail and started heading back to the campground. All I can say is thank goodness for Lee's great sense of direction, or we might still be pedaling!

The next day, we visited the Alaska Botanical Garden which has many different native Alaskan plants, perennials, wildflowers, and herbs.

Painted tongue

Foxgloves

Prairie smoke

Poppy

Pansies

Himalayan blue poppy

That evening we went downtown for dinner. We started out at the Crow's Nest at the top of the Hotel Captain Cook for a glass of wine and a beautiful view of the mountains. Then we headed over to Humpy's for seafood and local beer. Humpy's is named for a variety of salmon.

On our last day in Anchorage we decided to hike Flattop Mountain (elev. 3,510'), one of the most popular hikes in the state. You can see from this photo how it gets its name.

The hike started out on a nice wide trail. It was steep, but smooth. This couldn't be too bad! It got steeper, but they put in stairs. 

The view from here was great.

Wait, what happened to the trail? Rock scrambling time! How am I ever going to get down from this?

We made it! Great views of Anchorage, Cook Inlet, and the Alaska Range are in the distance.

Now to figure out how to get down so we didn't have to scramble back over those rocks. So we walked across the top of the ridge to look for an alternate route. Well, Lee looked while I took pictures!

The alternate route was a very steep and slippery slope down to the Powerline Trail below (See that tiny trail in the valley?), but no big boulders to scramble over, so we figured this was a better choice. Lee didn't want me to freeze hanging on to one of the rocks, which I was apt to do, so we forged ahead. It was very slow going.







I'm glad I had my monopod to use as a hiking pole! Lee's photo below shows how steep the mountainside actually was. Yikes!!!

Obviously, we made it down safely and lived to tell the story, but we put our hiking boots away for a couple of days! We left Anchorage the next morning and headed south to Turnagain Arm. More on that in the next post.