Date: 15 June 2001 (Friday)

Start:

End: Black Spruce Travel Camp, Ft Richardson AK (0 miles)

It was 47f with very few clouds when I arose. Visibility was unlimited. In the late afternoon, the temperature reached 73f - a beautiful day.

I got up at 5:30 am because the stupid alarm clock went off a half-hour early. That’s because I realigned the hands on the darn thing by a half-hour because one couldn’t tell whether it was 8:30 or 9:30. My fix enabled me to tell the time but confused the alarm. I think a new clock, perhaps a digital one, would be a good thing.

I had a leisurely cup of coffee, then tiptoed out of the park (can you imagine tiptoeing with that diesel pickup?) with the truck to the service station at Elmendorf AFB to get some periodic maintenance done (transmission fluid flushing). They start work at 7 am. However, they didn’t have enough 7176 transmission fluid (the one I require), so they had to send off-base for it at 8 am. The work was done by 10:30, not too bad. The price was certainly nice.

Dolores, in the meantime, had a quiet morning reading the paper and waiting for me.

When I returned, we went to the Alaska Zoo. This zoo is much less formal than most, essentially hacked out of five acres on a suburban street. The first animal inside the gate is the orphaned brown bear, five months old. She’s going to a Mexican zoo in a few weeks.

The animals are ones normally found in cooler climates, including wolf, coyote, musk ox, caribou, moose (including six orphaned young moose), Siberian tigers, and so forth.

The highlight of the zoo is a pair of bears, one a brown bear, the other a polar bear. They share an enclosure, as they have since they were babies. The brown bear wasn’t very active today, but the polar bear put on a show in the pool. Unfortunately, we couldn't get pictures through the glass.

The seals and sea lions were also entertaining. So was the orphaned musk ox they’re saving.

Then we went up to Glenn Alps State Park and the Flattop trail above the town, very close to the zoo. There’s an overlook there that provides a wide panoramic view of Anchorage.

Today was unusual. It was so clear that we could see the taller mountains in Denali National Park. The two prominent ones were Mt McKinley (20,000+ feet, tallest in North America) and Mt Foraker (14,000+ feet). The distance to them from the overlook is approximately 137 miles.

The thing that makes these mountains so much more spectacular than the ones in Colorado is that they rise from ground essentially at sea level, but the ones in Colorado rise from a high plain.

The view of Anchorage is outstanding, of course. You can identify all the major landmarks and orient yourself from them to find others. The international airport really stands out.

Then we went down the hill, across town, through the airport parking and out the other side to Earthquake Park. The park commemorates and provides information on the part of Anchorage that suffered most visibly in the 1968 earthquake. The extent of the land movement at that point is still easily seen. A whole neighborhood dropped 35 feet and slid sideways in doing so when the earthquake turned the clay soil into something very fluid. Four persons died there. Information panels show the effects of this worst quake in North America on other towns and the railroad.

I was getting tired by this time, so we returned to the little house in the army woods for steaks grilled outside but eaten inside (the mosquitoes have appeared and are getting to be a nuisance). Accompaniments included baked potato, salad, and an Australian merlot.

I’m typing this after dinner so I can get lined up to send e-mail in the late morning. About noon, we’ll pick up the prints and CD’s from the first fourteen rolls of 35mm film we’ve exposed. If any of them are worthwhile, we’ll send a very few as attachments in a small file format like jpg later.