Back from the Frozen North

Well, Anchorage isn’t exactly frozen, but coming from a DC-style summer, being in the mid-50s and needing a jacket feels pretty chilly. I got back recently and am taking a leisurely morning before I head into the office, mostly because my time there was pretty intense and tiring. (Of course, this didn’t mean I was able to actually sleep in. Dammit.) The last couple weeks have been a total whirlwind, and I am pooped, I have to say.

I had been working furiously up until the day I had to leave, at one point not being able to sleep because I had so much to do and my brain wouldn’t quiet down. So I got up at 2:30 am and turned on my computer to get some things done. Sick and wrong, I know, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. By the time Wednesday morning rolled around, our 4 am wakeup seemed kind of brutal. Fortunately I’d packed the night before, so getting ready to leave didn’t require anything more than usual, and since traffic was also very light at 5 am, we didn’t have any problems getting me to the airport in plenty of time. The flight to Chicago was uneventful, and although I didn’t get an actual seat assignment until about 20 minutes before boarding because the flight was so full and they essentially waited until the end to find a place for me. Fortunately, that still left enough time for me to go get some food, since there would be nothing except for complimentary beverage service on my 6 ½ hour flight. And those two glasses of free water weren’t likely to be sufficient to tide me over. (Call me greedy if you must.)

I was seated between a nice older gentleman and his son, both of whom were heading to Alaska on a fishing trip. I eventually asked if they’d like to sit together so they wouldn’t feel the need to talk over me, and ended up with a window seat. (I really was just trying to be nice, but I wasn’t sad to lose the middle seat, either.) I wasn’t sure what we’d see from the sky as we headed over to Anchorage, but it ended up looking remarkably like flying over the Alps, only much wilder and more rugged. Mountain tops burst through the cloud cover, looking as though there was a whole other landscape that started at cloud level, covered in snow. I’m not sure exactly what we were flying over some of the time, it had to be a mix of Alaska, British Columbia, and Alberta, but the view was incomparable. Once we descended below the clouds over Anchorage, I was shocked to see so much agricultural land. I never really associated Alaska with farming, but when you think about it, 20 – 23 hours of daylight over four months actually does give you plenty of sunlight and adequate temperatures to grow quite a lot of produce, as long as it’s okay with cooler temperatures. We looked across the water, and the man next to me pointed to an airstrip visible from the left side of the plane and said “I guess that must be the airport!”. As we began to descend to a very low altitude and were nowhere near the airstrip in question, I sincerely hoped that he was mistaken or else we were likely to have a very bumpy landing – plus I’ve heard that it’s frowned upon for commercial pilots to buzz the tower.

It turns out that we were looking at the airstrip for Elmendorf Air Force Base, which is around the bend from Ted Stevens International Airport, thank goodness. We landed smoothly, and I deplaned in a bit of a daze, having received four voicemail messages from my client about a meeting that we were to have that afternoon, asking me when I would be arriving. I called him back to let him know I’d just landed, and that our 4:00 meeting time should allow me sufficient time to get to my hotel, put my stuff down, and head out to his hotel. I did, however, stop to notice that the airport in Anchorage includes, among its list of "odd-sized checked items" firearms and large animals. Interesting. When getting my rental car, I was informed that I could upgrade to a Ford F-150 for free. I said that I appreciated the offer, but that the compact car I’d reserved would be just fine. So I climbed into my little red Ford Focus and headed into Anchorage.

Anchorage is a fairly small city, with a population of less than 300,000. That population, however, makes it the biggest city in the state by a healthy margin. Alaska may be the largest state in terms of land area, but it’s one of the smallest in terms of population. Despite the myriad one-way streets, navigating through Anchorage was a fairly simple task, and my hotel was centrally located. It was overcast, and would remain so for the rest of my time there, but the Chugach Mountains were off in the distance, surrounding the city. After a couple hours of meetings, wherein I got to meet some new colleagues, we broke for dinner and went to a place called Humpy’s. I am not making that up.

As may seem obvious, the seafood in Alaska is delicious, so I ate quite a bit of it starting with the horseradish-crusted halibut I had that night. Sadly, I’m not a big salmon fan, since that’s the other major offering. Although it’s like not eating cheese in Wisconsin, I didn’t get any salmon while I was in Alaska. I was practically falling asleep by 8 pm (midnight on the east coast, thereby making for a 20-hour day so far), so I headed back to my hotel, stopping to call a friend who moved to the west coast a year or so ago since we were much closer in time zones than we had been for a while. We chatted until I couldn’t hold my eyes open anymore, and I went to sleep less than 30 seconds after we hung up.

I woke up early (around 4 am, local time) to get some work done that morning, including some rehearsing for the 2-day training program I was going to be giving. Fortunately, one of my newly-introduced colleagues was going to be presenting with me, and was very experienced at it. Having him there was such a relief for me, since he was able to provide context specific to the audience that I couldn’t provide. The first day went off quite nicely, the audience was engaged and asking questions and there was a great dialog going. That evening we went out to dinner at The Sourdough Mining Company, a barbeque place that had not only the most delicious corn fritters served with honey butter - so delicious that I actually almost forgave them for calling them "korn fritters", but that also had some really, really good ribs. And they weren’t joking when they said it was a pile of ribs. I had to get some help, and ended up leaving some on my plate. Once again, the evening hours had me struggling to stay awake, so I went back to my hotel, prepared some more materials for the next morning, and hit the sheets. I woke up later than planned when I got a random call on my cell phone at 5:30 am – much as I’m sure it was some variety of telemarketer, I was actually grateful to them since I had set the time for my alarm, but neglected to turn it on. Whoops.

I arrived at the conference room with a few minutes to spare, delighted to see that everyone who was there the previous day had actually returned! Hurrah! It couldn’t have been that bad if they came back!

I was feeling much more comfortable the second day, and we plowed through, able to wrap up early. The feedback that I received was very positive, and given the lightning-fast pace with which everything was assembled, I was very, very happy. Normally these things take weeks/months to prepare, and I had done it in less than two weeks. So, we did what needed to be done and that it was well-received. Yay!

With an entire afternoon stretching out in front of me, I decided that I should get out a little. I had been on a plane for enough hours to get me to Europe, and if all I saw was the inside of a couple of hotels, I would not consider that to be a good trade. So on the recommendation of a colleague, I set off to have lunch at the Moose’s Tooth (mmm…pizza and beer…) and then took off down Seward Highway to Portage Valley. To get to Portage Valley, you drive down Turnagain Arm of Cook’s Inlet which is kind of a hybrid of what I would think that Norway looks like, combined with the Alps. Having never been to either, this is purely hypothetical, but holy crap was this place beautiful. I couldn’t tell if the clouds were too low or the mountains were too high, but the clouds could never clear the top. The road hugged the water as I drove down the road, with mudflats extending out from the banks into the water. After leaving Anchorage, it wasn’t long before I was in Chugach State Park and then Chugach National Forest. I would periodically stop and hop out to take pictures, quickly hopping back into the car since it was actually quite a bit chillier now that I had left Anchorage and I still had just the one coat. As I drove into the valley, I was driving closer and closer to the glaciers. There were multiple places to turn off the road and step out, and it was impossible not to notice the color of the water – the streams were very, very clear, and the water was a very cool, muted aqua color. It was ridiculously picturesque, which may explain why I took 80-some pictures of the same landscape. Everything just looked new and different.

I drove up a little bit further and came upon Portage Lake, at the other side of which rests Portage Glacier, which is a permanent glacier that rests on the Kenai Peninsula. (Well, it’s been shrinking rapidly thanks to global warming [grr…], but it’s considered to be permanent.) It’s a valley glacier, meaning that it winds along a valley floor, and it’s surrounded by a few hanging glaciers – glaciers that hang down the sides of mountains. Portage Lake actually contains icebergs, which I also hadn’t seen before, although I think I was there at the time of year during which they are least likely to be impressive – what I saw looked more like ice chips in comparison to what was hanging off the mountains, and certainly didn’t look capable of sinking the Titanic. And by the way, in case it wasn’t really obvious, a lake that is formed from glacier water is frickin’ cold.

I wandered around this completely foreign environment for a little while, just kind of in awe of the scale of it. Then I saw a sign telling visitors that there were bears that had been wandering around lately that had become used to being fed by humans, followed by the request that people not feed them.

I decided to hop back into the car, in case they would be okay with feeding on humans in lieu of a different kind of snack.

The drive back to Anchorage was punctuated with similar stops to take pictures, some of which involved veering perilously off the highway to a small turn-in, and zooming back out, attempting to come up to highway speed while apparently really pissing off some guy behind me who was dragging a big boat. (I couldn’t see him dragging the boat, just that he was in a truck, so I had no reason to think that his stopping capability would be compromised since there was adequate room otherwise. Whoops. Well, no harm, no foul.) It had been largely overcast for most of my time there, but as I headed back to town, the sun started to peek through the clouds at certain points, providing some fantastic natural lighting – or at least, the kind I always like to take pictures of. It wasn’t sunset, though – sunset doesn’t really happen in summer, it’s more like a few hours of twilight between 2 and 5 am. I rolled back into my hotel and I remember feeling so very tired and hungry. I wandered around downtown Anchorage a bit then went back to my hotel to get dinner. I finally headed up to my room to pack and prepare to get up early yet again the next morning. I was once again struck by how surreal it is to look out the window at 11 pm and see it as bright as it was at 11 am.

I was on my way to the airport and saw a lovely photo opportunity to my left, however I couldn't really stop to take a picture. So I turned around, away from the airport, and went back, eventually stopping on the shoulder of a not-at-all-busy highway on-ramp to capture the image. I am my father's daughter. Not sure if it looks as good on film as it did in person, but judge for yourselves, I suppose...

The flight back home was fairly uneventful. I spent a good deal of time peering out the window again, looking at the vast expanse of mountains and glaciers below me. At some point, the smooth white surface was pitted with little circles of intense aquamarine, as if a series of teeny little lakes had formed by someone sprinkling the surface with hot water or something. I eventually settled back with my book (an excellent book called “What is the What”, by Dave Eggers – which I highly recommend, by the way) and the rest of the time went by fairly quickly. I had to change planes in Chicago again, which went smoothly to my great surprise since I tend to think of O’Hare as a black hole of travel.

I finally arrived home in DC at 9 pm-ish, to be greeted by Special K at the airport. Bless his little heart, he cleaned the house before I got home, so we arrived home and I collapsed into bed.

So there you go – that’s why there’s been so much radio silence (I’ve been neglecting e-mail as well), and that’s my lil’ Alaskan adventure. Now I’m ready for a long, long nap.