Starr Treks: alaska trip Tuesday 6/23/15 Anchorage

STARR TREKS Monday 6/22/15 Anchorage AK

We left Valdez a little after 8 am — another overcast day. We drove back up the Richardson Hwy to catch Highway 1 going to Anchorage. If you keep going north on the Richardson, it goes to Fairbanks. We passed Bridal Veil Falls again — quite a bit bigger than our Bridal Falls in Fresnal Canyon. As we got past Thompson Pass, we went thru extreme fog, to sunshine! It was generally a pretty boring day of driving 302 miles— a lot of the highway had frost heaves, and became narrow and windy — not fun for Larry to drive on. We stopped at Willow Lake for lunch — the kind of water that mirrors the trees on the shore. We got to see another glacier along the highway— the Matanuska— it is 2 miles wide and 27 miles long! We drove on to Palmer and stopped briefly at the Visitor Center — just an interesting history— its economy has always been agriculture. In the 30’s, FDR was trying to get people off the “dole”, so recruited about 200 families of Scandinavian descent to move here from Michigan, WI, and Minnesota. Their descendants now grow the giant vegetables that you read about— it was too early in the season for anything in their garden nearby to be gigantic.

We used our GPS to find the RV park— the Golden Nugget. Again, not cheap— $42 a night, based on 7 nights and 8th night free. The other park I was interested in closer to downtown was even more expensive. The sites are pretty tight and Larry had to back in — he started backing into the wrong site, so I caught him, and another man helped guide him in. It is warm and sunny here— in the 70’s! We drove downtown to the Visitor Center to get info on hiking. It is supposed to be nice weather for the next few days, then rain is predicted. So we figured we would hit the museums at the end of the week. The lady at the Visitor Center was very ditzy — had never been to several of the museums I was interested in. She had been on some of the hiking trails, so that helped. Anchorage is pretty big— population almost 300,000, so there was a lot of traffic downtown. We will come another day to walk around some more.

We GPS’d to Costco, and it is actually across the street from our RV park. We just restocked on fruit for now. So for supper, we had leftover pork chops, green beans, oranges, green salad, and watermelon. We took a walk around the RV park and talked to a couple from Denton TX, saw several other motor homes from TX, a few from NM (they weren’t outside, or would have talked to them), one from Massachusetts, and several from Florida!.. The people right behind us are from Illinois— I am amazed at all these old people traveling so far in their RV’s.

Anyhow, we are not enjoying our long driving days much, even when there are glaciers to see along the road. It will be hard to make that long journey home again. We are enjoying AK, but for us it will be a once in a lifetime trip. (Even my photos are boring today.)

STARR TREKS Monday 6/231/15 Anchorage

We got up to sunny skies (we actually went to bed last night around 11 to sunny skies too!). We drove down the Seward Hwy just before 8 am — traffic was all going the other way toward downtown, so it did not take us too long to get to our trailhead — maybe 30 min. We wanted to go to one of the most popular hikes in the area called Flattop trail in Chugach state park (this huge state park lies to the east of Anchorage). It is only 1.5 mi each way, but elevation gain is 1300 — quite steep. We took a short 1/2 mile paved Anchorage Overlook trail first and had a great view of the whole city and coastline. Then we started Flattop trail. It was a steadily uphill climb, and then we got to the part that said it was “strenuous”. We kept going and rested often. A lot more hikers were showing up. We got to the first wooden station, climbing a steep rocky area to get there. Larry decided that his new glasses were making him dizzy to climb such a steep trail, so we “aborted” our plans. I told him just to take his glasses off going down, and he looked like a blind man feeling around with his stick! So when we got down to the strenuous sign, we opted to take the Blueberry Hill loop trail which only had little ups and downs. There were lots of blueberry bushes, but berries are not there for picking till August. I had picked up a Berry Picking brochure at the visitor center— sounds like the people of Anchorage all go up the mountain and gorge on 50 kinds of berries! Anyhow, the views from the trails were lovely.

It was only about 10:30 AM, so we drove to another trailhead and hiked a mile up Hemlock trail— this one was mostly thru the forest, so no particular views. I wore my bear bells and we clicked our sticks a lot as we walked, and I sang some of the time — no bears seen, but that does not mean they weren’t there. We had our picnic lunch at a table at the trailhead— just lovely weather. We had noticed the Alaska Zoo along the road to the trails, so decided to stop there. It was not real big, but it had a lot of native Alaskan birds and mammals— otters, harbor seals, moose, caribou (never did run into them along the road), muskoxen, porcupines, etc. It was a nice little zoo and we’re glad we went— it would not have been worth making a special trip to it later in the week like we probably would have.

We heard from our friends, the Everetts, that they would be in Anchorage tonight. We stopped at Safeway to get some stuff and will have dinner here with them tonight. They got here around 5:30 and set up their little A frame pop-up camper quick and fast. They are just around the corner from our site. They brought their schnauzer Daisy over and we enjoyed dinner together. We played bridge till 10 pm— it was still very light out! They are heading south tomorrow, on the route that we took north. So glad we finally crossed paths. We gave each other tips on where to stay and what to see.