Keeping things light today, with a two hour trolley tour around the Anchorage area.
Blessed once again with a retired teacher as our tour guide and driver, Donna has at least 17 years (that we can figure) of experience educating visitors about Anchorage. She’s a storehouse of the region’s history and a great storyteller.
We’re at Captain James Cook Monument. In 1778, this chapter of the great explorer’s adventures had he and his crew looking for the Northwest Passage between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. They didn’t find it, but the 180 mile long Cook Inlet now bears his name.
At 5:36pm on Good Friday, March 27th 1964, an earthquake hit Anchorage. Estimated at magnitude 9.2 when it let go, about 600 miles of the underlying fault released 500 years of stored energy. It was the second most powerful quake since modern seismology was developed.
As the nearly 5 minutes of ground/shock waves hammered the region, large areas of land “liquified”, literally sinking whole neighborhoods. We’re standing in one such area in this pic, now about 20 feet below street level. Prior to the quake, there was a large field of grain at the head of the Knik Arm. After, the entire area had liquified and sank, no longer usable farmland.
Paraphrasing Buzz Lightyear: Planes! Planes everywhere! General aviation is big here. We’re at Lake Spenard, adjacent to the international airport. Venturing a guess, I’d estimate several hundred small planes are parked here, on land and in boat plane slips.
Moosance! In winter, the moose diet leans towards willow trees. They’ll eat the bark from large willows, but devour small trees like this all the way to a stump, wherever they can be found. Like in the city. So, the city builds these cages to discourage grazing there.
Moose are part of life throughout Alaska. In the early 2000’s, a moose named Bruce frequented resident’s yards in the winter months looking for crab apples, and occasionally left with souvenirs like kid’s swings and Christmas lights tangled in his antlers.
The thing about the crab apples was that by then they had become fermented. So, yeah, like moose aren’t unpredictable enough when they’re sober. Residents even had a website where they tracked this tipsy moose in real time, to predict where he’d show up next. By then, Bruce had a well-earned nickname: Buzzwinkle.