Generalizations about people who live in the place you're going to based on who's waiting to board the flight with you are bound to be unfair and usually wrong. Having said that, it was hard not to notice that people on the Portland to Anchorage leg of our flight to Alaska, were looking rugged and large and I'm talking Cinnabon large. When a loud guy, sitting a few rows back, finished a story with “and we were catching 50 pounders”, I knew this wasn't the flight from Newark to West Palm for Passover.
Lori and I just got back from a ten day visit to Alaska, in a 2003 Jeep, on a loop from Anchorage, to Whittier, Seward, down the Kenai Peninsula to Homer and then north through Anchorage to Wasilla and then to Denali National Park.The original plan was to drive to the town of McCarthy in Wrangell St Elias National Park where the big rental car companies wont let you drive because the road is so bad. As a result we, and by we, I mean Lori, found Stanley of A-1 car rental in Anchorage. When Stanley picked us up at the airport he proudly asked how we liked the job he did duct taping the missing driver side rear window. Before we pulled out of his lot, with the broken down trailer office, Stanley went into a junk filled storage hut and came out with a prospector's pan - just in case.
Anchorage is a small scale city (pop. 300,000) , with a half a dozen plain looking six story office buildings, a few large hotels, parking lots everywhere and a distinctly uninspired hulking symphony hall downtown.
The tall brown buildings in the back are the Captain Cook Hotel where the President stayed a few days before we got there. Met a guy who said he was in the gym when Obama came down to work out.
From Anchorage we drove south, on the Seward Parkway, along the shores of the Cook inlet - an eye popping introduction to Alaska's uncommercialized beauty that just keeps coming and coming.
The first stop was Girdwood and a night in the Alyeska Hotel. They have a mountain top restaurant at 2,300 feet accessed by gondola and some amazing, large, smooth textured gold oysters.
The only land route to our next stop, Whittier, on the western corner of Prince William Sound, is a one way 2/12 mile tunnel built for military trains in the 1940s. It was adapted in 2000 to allow cars and trucks to drive on top of the rails through the tunnel into town. They let you drive in on the hour and back out on the half hour.
The town, which has a land that time forgot, science fiction quality, gets an average of 30 feet of snow in the Winter and has a population that swells to around 200 in the tourist season. Most of the town's residents live in one large run down apartment building that was built to house US troops in WWII. The good news is that the main hotel in Whittier is a nice place with terrific views of the water.
We took a five hour tour out of Whittier on the Prince William Sound with the added delight of
fluking whales, eagles, harbor seals, a fleeting glimpse of a bear family on the shore and a breath taking glacier.
After Whittier we headed south down the Kenai peninsula to Homer, and the Homer spit, 226 miles southwest of Anchorage at the mouth of the Cook Inlet. Homer, which looks like it was a 60's hippie destination, was built in the late 1800s as a mining camp. In a frame on the wall of a tiny Homer City Hall, is the 1898 Constitution and By Laws of the Kings County Mining Company formed by a group of gold seekers that sailed from Brooklyn at the turn of the century around Tierra del Fuego up the West Coast of North America into Cook Inlet.
We arrived in Seward a few days before the President got there. At Exit Glacier, where the pres was to have a photo op, we were chatting with a ranger when a beefy looking guy with a short hair cut flashed a badge. The ranger stepped aside to let him into a back room.
We had some great food with first prize going to Little Mermaid on the Homer Spit.
On a 9 hour cruise our of Seward on Kenai Peninsula Fjord tours a family of orca whales encircled the boat just as we got under way. With our captain/naturalist enthusiastically sharing his wealth of knowledge we were treated to eagles, orcas, humbacks fluking, tufted puffins and a noisy rookery against a backdrop of glaciers.
On the drive north towards Denali National Park we stopped in Wasilla, 40 miles north of Anchorage. This town, which is a strip of highway with a few shopping malls, launched the career of Ms. "drill baby drill ubetcha", the right wing cartoon character who in 2012, John McCain decided should be a 76 year old heartbeat away from America’s nuclear arsenal.
At Denali National Park we took a day long bus tour run by the National Park Service. Our funny knowledgeable driver, "Kat", a big woman, who drives a Fairbanks school bus in the Winter expertly drove our National Park Service school bus 85 miles into Denali Park, We slowed down to check out a few grizzlies off in the distance, a bull moose moving quickly in the woods and an elk. Kat expertly navigated hair pin turns on switch backs around snow covered mountains as we all took in the 6 million acre, forever wild, treasure.
The bus turn around point was about 20 miles from Mt. Denali which loomed ahead of us through the clouds at 20,000 feet.
We did have one dangerously close wildlife encounter. They say you don't want to get between this big fellow and a free sample at Costco.
The back stories of the folks who work in the Alaska tourist business usually start with wanderlust to be in one or the most unspoiled parts of the planet. September is the end of Alaska's tourist season People were a few weeks away from leaving and tourist venues were getting ready to shut down for the Winter when there is three hours a day of sunlight.
Highway crews were racking up overtime, working until 10 PM as they raced to finish road work before Winter sets in. A flagman, at one of many highway stops, who had been an army medic and was still an RN, told us that he was making better money on the road crew than he would as an RN. He and his wife, who is also an RN, would soon be heading to the North Slope, where he expected to find good paying work in construction or the oil business.
The tourists in Alaska come in a variety of categories.There were lots of camper vans with retirees. , a few hardy souls who have driven from the lower 48 and families from the US and Europe who rented campers when they landed. There were guys on booze fueled fishing trips eating at local restaurants that will clean and cook the days catch as well as bus loads upon bus loads of older folks and families on bucket list cruises. Princess Cruise lines appears to have cornered the market and has its own desks in hotel lobbies.
The Alaskans we met were charming, friendly people who more than once, expressed appreciation for the chance to be in such an extraordinary place. College age seasonal service staff were anxious to leave for home in the lower 48 as well as eastern Europe - Serbia, Hungary or Lithuania. A few were heading for winter ski resort jobs.
We met a young woman from Bulgaria on her only day off in the last 3 weeks
She had been misled by a company that imports Eastern European young workers by luring them with false promises of opportunities to see Alaska, charges them a fee, and then sticks them in kitchens working long hours with few days off. We tried to convince her to file some kind of complaint, or at least make it public on line to warn others, but she declined.
There was also strong evidence that folks up there have a good sense of humor.
Even now, after the influx of new people that followed statehood and has attended the building of the Trans-Alaska pipeline and the supposed oil based bonanza, there are fewer people in all Alaska than there are in San Jose. The central paradox of Alaska is that it is as small as it is large - an immense landscape with so few people in it that language is stretched to call it a frontier, let alone a state.
