Visitor Centre, Anchorage, 26 Jul 2014
Float plane, Anchorage, 26 Jul 2014
Captain Cook monument, Resolution Park, Anchorage, 26 Jul 2014
Chris, Corinne & Jak, Crush, Anchorage,
After a prolonged night’s sleep we awoke to a gloriously sunny day and a forecasted maximum temperature of 19C which was duly attained later in the day! Following a very relaxed start to the day we wandered for a kilometre or so into the centre of Anchorage and found a pleasant old-world coffee shop where we partook of brunch. A visit to the Anchorage weekend market was next on the agenda and somewhat reminiscent of Salamanca except for the numerous stalls selling souvenirs made from carved moose horn or walrus tusk. We bought a bag of delicious strawberries which were the size of golf balls and beautifully succulent. There were few vegetables for sale but those that were on display were of extraordinarily large size. Anchorage with its 19 hours of summer daylight produces massive vegetables with broccoli, pumpkin, carrots, zucchini and cabbages of spectacular size. The record cabbage we were told was 1.5m across and weighed in at 40 kg. The market was attended by many over-sized humans too who seemed to be partaking of questionably healthy foods such as reindeer sausages, funnel cakes, fries, popcorn and giant corn on the cob. A stall holder selling such fares told us that “calories don’t count in Alaska!” Our visit to the market was supplemented by a very noisy but impressive fly over by air-force jets involved with the local air-show which unbeknown to us was on today. A gentle wander led us back to the Visitors’ Centre where we climbed on a bus and spent an hour seeing the highlights of Anchorage. Anchorage is the biggest town in Alaska but not the capital. Its population is around 300,000 and has thrived as a result of the revenue gained from the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the 1970s and the subsequent sales of oil. On Good Friday 1964 Anchorage and surrounding regions experienced a cataclysmic earthquake of magnitude 9.2 which was the largest ever recorded in North America and the second largest ever recorded on Earth. The city was virtually destroyed with sections of the city dropping in some places as much as 4m and the subsequent tsunami causing massage further destruction. We visited a park area just outside Anchorage where a demarcation zone was clearly visible where this dramatic subsidence had occurred and now a 4m cliff occurred right through the middle of a conifer forest. The clear blue skies and the balmy weather was a great improvement on our introduction to Anchorage yesterday and the with the lofty Chugach Mountain range now clearly visible across the waters of Cook Inlet we visited Resolution Park. This is a memorial to Captain James Cook who visited this area in 1776 in search of the Northwest Passage hoping to link the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. He reached a point in the narrowing inlet where the 12m tide differential caused him so major a navigational hazard that he was forced to retreat. We later visited the Public Lands Information Centre where there was a most informative display covering the natural history of the region. We then stayed on and viewed a short documentary covering the disastrous earthquake of 1964. Having finally made contact with Chris Penhall (from South Australia) who’d been kayaking here for the last month, we enjoyed a great meal of sockeye salmon and Californian wines together. With the sun still bright at 10.00 pm we headed back to the hotel to prepare for our trekking adventures into central Alaska starting early tomorrow morning.