Back in 2010 and 2011 I lived in Alaska, and I used to talk to people about opening up a Krispy Kreme store in Anchorage. Unfortunately I never did that, but now in 2016 someone else has. Here’s the story of the opening on adn.com.
This is a photo of Denali, Alaska, on September 12, 2007.
“Denali gives me the opportunity to be my best self.”
That’s a thing that I like about Alaska: If you have doubts about who you are, you can go live in remote areas of Alaska and find out what you’re made of.
(Image from this Twitter page.)
The Alaska state motto, according to Dr. Joel Fleischman of Northern Exposure.
I’m posting this two days late, but according to this tweet, Alaska was hit with 25,000 lightning strikes in two days.
I’m looking into going to Alaska for Christmas and New Year’s this year. On New Year’s Eve there’s a great fireworks celebration that starts at about 5 or 6 pm, or at least it used to start then. (It gets dark there very early in the winter.)
Back on Pi Day in 2011, I was living in Palmer, Alaska, and had no plans on returning to the “Lower 48,” no plans to write the Scala Cookbook, etc. (And then some personal stuff happened in my family, and I thought it would be best to move to Colorado for a while.) I took this photo of a local baseball field and the mountains in Palmer while I was walking around that day.
(If you’re interested in what I was thinking then, this is a photo of the building that I thought would become my office in downtown Palmer.)
Folks in the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska — just southwest of Anchorage — got a 1:30am wake-up call this morning. The earthquake magnitude is reported at 7.1, with the epicenter 60 miles west of Homer and 160 miles southwest of Anchorage. The image comes from this Alaska Dispatch News Twitter page.
Summertime traffic problems in Alaska. Image from this adn.com tweet.
A small black bear got its head stuck in a coffee can and wandered around the roads in Tok, Alaska for a while before the Fish & Game people were able to rescue it. The video looks really sad, but the story has a happy ending. Here’s the story at adn.com.
Salmon fishing is kind of a big deal in Alaska. I don’t remember what store I was in when I took this photo, but as it shows, someone in the store kept the fishing information up to date.
If you ever get an RV and decide to drive around Alaska, make sure you stop at the Resurrection North Campground in Seward, Alaska. You can pull right up next to Resurrection Bay. You’ll thank me later.
(Not to be too morbid, but I have it written in my will that half of my ashes should be spread in Resurrection Bay.)
I learned about the Pebble Mine project in Bristol Bay when I lived in Alaska in 2010-2011. This image tells of some of the problems with the mining project, including the need to manage the waste for “hundreds of thousands of years.”
Here are a few more quotes from the adn.com article:
“The mine footprint would be enormous. The pit would be nearly as deep as the Grand Canyon. The pit, tailings dams of processed ore, and waste rock piles would cover an area larger than Manhattan ... the deposit is in the watersheds of two major salmon rivers, which together support about a quarter of the world’s wild sockeye salmon, according to EPA.”
Wow, I've never been near the epicenter of an earthquake before, but this morning I was. A 4.6 magnitude earthquake hit just north of Wasilla, Alaska at 8:19 a.m. local time, 10.4 miles north on the George Parks Highway from my current location.
Back in the day, when I first moved to Alaska, I didn’t know it at first, but the Talkeetna Cemetery was a very close neighbor. Once I found out I thought it was pretty cool, as it’s an interesting little place.
This story is from 2004, but an organization shared it on Facebook today to remind people to be careful around bears, and to keep their campsites in order. All I can add is that I never heard of Rainier beer until I started watching Longmire, and from past experience I can understand why he didn’t drink the Busch beer.
Six years ago I was forty miles from the epicenter of a 5.2 magnitude earthquake in Alaska.
(And I’d still rather live there than anywhere else.)
This is the 36-month running Alaska statewide average temp, from this Twitter link, with the red and blue lines added my me.
July 6, 2016: The Brooks Falls Katmai National Park “bear cams” are back online at explore.org.
