Leaving Anchorage

Rita hiding in the Hobbit hole - inside a hollowed out section of an old Cottonwood tree along the Iditarod hiking trail.

Usually when I schedule a one week stay someplace it's with the assumption that we'll pretty much exhaust everything there is to do by about day 4 or 5, and the last few days will be revisits to favorite places. Not so in Anchorage. It really is a terrific city with plenty to do. Their Chamber of Commerce describes it as an "urbanized wilderness" and we found that to be true. Bordered on one side by some of the prettiest mountains you'll ever see and on the other by the waters of the Cook Inlet, the town sits in a picturesque little bowl. We enjoyed it very much and never ran out of things to do, but finally had to depart on the 15th to drive to Whittier, and from there catch the ferry over to Cordova. Here are some last looks:





One of our last outings was back to the Coastal Trail (where we saw the moose), but this time to rent a bike for the 11 mile ride. Didn't see any moose this time, but did have fun pedaling for a few hours. Turns out that the area now occupied by the coastal trail used to be housing developments before the Good Friday earthquake of 1964, which nearly destroyed the city and which literally liquefied the land the the houses sat on. The bluff collapsed towards the inlet, losing about 15 feet of elevation in the process. When the time came to rebuild the city planners decided to rezone the entire area as urban parkland...resulting in one of the most attractive features you're likely to find in any American city.



Here's the view from the window of our little apartment. Wish the weather had been this sunny all week.


We got an early start and since we didn't have to check in for the ferry until 2 PM we decided to stop enroute at Portage Lake - located just before the tunnel that leads to Whittier. Glad we did. Found a neat little hiking trail leading up to one glacier, and booked a short boat tour across Portage Lake to the foot of another glacier. The day was gorgeous as you can see, although the wind coming down the pass and over the ice field was pretty chilly.

After spending a few really delightful hours on and around the lake, we hopped back in the car for the transit thru the tunnel to Whittier. The tunnel is single lane and shares duty with the train coming out of the port of Whittier towards Anchorage, so they meter traffic according to alternating 15 minute schedules...for 15 minutes traffic is cleared to proceed into the port, and then traffic reverses for another 15 minutes. Problem was that just before we got there the signaling system apparently went down due to some sort of mechanical malfunction which stopped everything for over an hour while they called the duty Alaska Railroad Engineer to come in and fix it. That finally done, we motored in to the ferry landing and got checked in without further hassle.



The view from our hike up to Byron Glacier.




Portage Glacier - our destination on the boat trip.



They maneuvered the boat right up to the face of the glacier...hoping that a section would calve into the lake. No luck with that, but it made for some nice photo ops on a sunny day.




Rita looking pretty in front of the ice.




And the view across the lake from the visitor center. Those are the ubiquitous Fireweeds in the foreground. Really made for a pleasant stop along the way.




There are a lot of pretty little towns in Alaska...but Whittier isn't one of them. It's basically a port and a rail hub to get stuff from the ships to the inland cities. There are apartment buildings for the local workers that the railroad apparently built many years ago, and which look like something you'd expect to see in North Korea - sort of prototypical Third Reich . Trust me, unless you need to come here to catch the ferry to somewhere else, let this photo be as close as you ever come to actually being here.



The ferry crossing of Prince William Sound was quite enjoyable, with scenery like this unfolding around every headland. Even saw a pod of Orcas along the way. The ship was a catamaran and much more modern than the boat we came up in from Bellingham. It was doing 37 knots across the Sound and got us into Cordova about 20 minutes earlier than scheduled.


Here's Rita's video of the big moose we saw on our first day's hike.