If you ever watched the tv show Northern Exposure, you might find this funny. It’s from the episode where Chris faces an extradition trial, and Mike uses an “identity” defense (“This Chris Stevens is not the same Christ Stevens that left West Virginia ...”).
NX was the first show I can recall that got me interested in Alaska, and philosophy.
I always wondered if this ever happened: Three people were injured when a whale collided with a boat (or vice-versa) in the waters just north of Juneau, Alaska.
My favorite line from this “Bear Safety” sign in Alaska:
“Play dead unless it starts to eat you, then fight back.”
This is one of my favorite traffic signs in all of the world. You can find it if you drive north from Anchorage, Alaska towards Wasilla and Palmer. When I lived in Alaska in 2010-2011, I would take the exit to the right to go to Palmer. If you keep going straight you’ll go to Wasilla, followed by Willow, Talkeetna, and eventually Denali and then Fairbanks. (If you’re really gung-ho, as I was, you can also keep driving to Prudhoe Bay, if you don’t mind 400 miles of dirt roads in the Arctic Circle.)
And as you can tell from the highway numbers 1 & 3, there aren’t many main roads in Alaska. :)
A favorite sign in Alaska. Anchorage to the right, Fairbanks to the left. Keep it simple.
One of my favorite road signs in Alaska: “Caution: Yield to All Aircraft.” Seems like great advice. You can find this sign somewhere around Lake Hood, in Anchorage, Alaska.
From this Juneau Empire article, “Officials say a person who didn’t follow quarantine procedures after arriving in Alaska has created the possibility of broad community spread of the coronavirus. The person went to social gatherings and public places in Ketchikan while awaiting results of a COVID-19 test that turned out positive, officials said.”
(The image comes from that article. I just thought it was beautiful and tried to make an oil painting from it.)
Yep, it can get windy in Alaska in the winter, especially in the interior. I ate at Evangelos several times, and it was good. (Image from this Twitter page.)
adn.com has this nice Iditarod story: Martin Buser is an Iditarod double-winner, collecting awards for sportsmanship and inspiration. I forgot about the Elim 11 in the 2020 Iditarod, “a group of 11 mushers who got stuck at the Elim checkpoint when a sea storm obliterated the trail.”
I know “Fred Meyer” as the chain of grocery stores in Alaska that are now owned by Kroger. It turns out that the real Fred Meyer was born Fritz Grubmeyer in Germany, and was a “relentless” business person (putting it nicely). The adn.com website reports that there is a new book out about him, and offers this summary.
This photo is of the Fred Meyer grocery store in Palmer, Alaska, where I used to shop. If you walked straight forward towards those mountains about four blocks and then took a right turn, that’s where I lived.
A “community library” sounds like a great idea. Well, until someone steals it. :( The story is here at ktuu.com, Anchorage, Alaska.
I’ve been stuffing receipts and junk into a compartment in my car for years, and cleaned it out yesterday. This card is by far the best thing I found in there (find Haines, AK on a map, and you might know why). As I’m shredding things, I just saw that on this day two years ago I was in Virginia Beach.
Jack London’s credo, which I like very much. (I don’t know who first created this image, but I saw it on this Twitter page.)
In case you wondered where Kotzebue, Alaska (population ~3,300) is, I hope this map is helpful.
One point worth mentioning is that there are no roads on most of the west side of that map. For instance, there is no way to drive from Fairbanks to Nome, Talkeetna to Nome, Fairbanks to Barrow, Nome to Kotzebue, etc. There is one road from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay, and it’s called the Dalton Highway. That’s where the “Ice Road Truckers” drive.
Also of interest is that President Obama is nowhere near Alaska’s state capitol. In fact, Alaska is so big, Juneau, Alaska is not even on this map. It’s off the map to the lower-right.
Map courtesy of Google Maps.
Some moose on the road at Denali National Park, May 1, 2018.
A moose traffic jam in Denali, Alaska.
This image comes from 2014, but it’s still a cool idea today. Someone created an art project in Juneau, Alaska that allowed people to complete the sentence, “Before I die I want to ...”
The Anchorage Daily News reported yesterday that about one-half of the cruises to Alaska have been canceled so far. As you can see from this image, all of the news is about the coronavirus. You can see more coverage at this Twitter page.
I lived in Palmer, Alaska for too short a period of time, and on my daily walks I would often go past this statue of Balto in the downtown area. Someone was kind enough to put a hat on him to keep him warm.
The postal code in Stewart, British Columbia, is “VOT 1WO,” which the locals tell me stands for Very Old Town, One Way Out.
