We woke this morning to gusty winds and the smell of smoke. Winds had cleared the haze from the mountain across from our resort, but totally obscured the distant views to our north.
The Swan Lake Fire started from a lightning strike on June 5. It has grown to be the largest fire on the Kenai Peninsula. As of yesterday, the fire covered nearly 70,000 acres, and the first-ever dense smoke advisory was issued for Anchorage. It's the first major burn in the undeveloped area (80 miles from Seward) in 150 years, and is expected to burn into August or September.
Anchorage is a 2 1/2 hour drive from Seward, but we broke up the ride with a stop at the Alaskan Wildlife Conservation Center. The AWCC is a sanctuary for injured, abandoned, rescued and orphaned animals that are native to Alaska and unable to survive on their own. The property sits on over 200 acres on a former elk ranch.
The Center has brown (Kodiak) and black bears, musk oxen, timber bison, elk, Sitka black tailed deer, moose, wolves, foxes, etc. The animals roam within large fenced areas out of reach of people.
I'm sure this is as close as we'll be to any Alaskan wildlife, so I'm cheating here and adding animal photos that aren't quite in the wild.
This brown bear was having a grand time playing with a length of rope and a piece of wood. She loved laying on her back in the water with all four feet in the air. Check out those claws.
The black bear, much more shy than her cousin, was heading for a den.
With all the staring people, who could blame her?
A red fox could have cared less.
A sharp-clawed porcupine named Tripod had lost a hind leg in a trap.
But it's still best to stay away from his business end. The soft looking fur is ok but the white quills are dangerous. (Fun fact: a baby porcupine is a porcupette. How cute is that?)
Not a porcupette
After an hour or so, we motored on to Anchorage. I think our driver was trying to kill time until the hotel was ready, as we saw such highlights as the Lake Hood Seaplane Base where we looked at rows of float planes and waited to see one take off.
Once we were settled in, Greg and I walked around downtown to sightsee and geocache. Anchorage was officially established in 1914 as a tent city construction camp for the Alaska Railroad. It's come a long way in 105 years. It's now the largest Alaskan city in population and has an area nearly the size of Delaware.
We started at the Anchorage Alaska Center in the historic federal building, where we watched a film on the 1964 Black Friday earthquake and picked up a couple more National Park stamps.
We geocached our way down to Ship Creek in hopes of seeing some salmon swimming upstream to spawn. We'd been told that the best time to see them run is 2 hours either side of high tide and we were just within that window. We saw lots of fishermen,
But only one salmon.
It's a king salmon, on its way to dinner.
We walked back into town and bought caribou gyros from a recommended street cart. They were so good! (And we were so hungry.)
Every year the Iditarod race has its ceremonial start in downtown Anchorage. They cart in snow by dump trucks if it's not there naturally, line the teams up on 4th Avenue, the main drag, and off they go. There's a monument to the sled dogs and a Dog Mushing Hall of Fame at the starting line. The race actually runs from Willow to Nome, Alaska and starts on the first weekend in March.
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