Well after the marathon weekend I was invited by Sarah to Cooper’s landing to go for an overnight camping trip to join her and her friends fishing. Now I’m not much for fishing, so I figured it was a good chance to get out of Anchorage and see something different and experience the fishing culture of Alaska. Sarah, Laura, Andy Corrine and I all camped out near Kenai Lake near the town of Cooper Landing. We stayed up late, and made marshmallow Bailey’s shots. It involves roasting a marsh mellow just perfectly so that the outside slides off and makes a perfect shot glass, then you fill with Bailey’s and consume. We went to bed around 2:30AM when it finally started getting lighter.
The next day we headed to the Russian river where everyone but Laura and I started fishing. Well Andy fished a bit and then joined us hiking upstream. The river was full of fisherman, “combat fishing” as they call it because they are literally lined up along the river shoulder to shoulder trying to make a catch. It is Red salmon season at the moment, and humans weren’t the only ones fishing that day. Laura, Andy and I had hiked upstream, and enroute came across a number of fisherman and a black bear and her two cubs on the opposite side of the river. She was moving upstream too and so we stayed about 50 yards back, and photographed her extensively. Eventually the sow caught a fish and then three of them scurried up the bank and out of site. We continued to hike up to the waterfall on the river, then eventually back to the car where we are a late lunch and waited for Sarah and Corrine to finish fishing.
That night I spent the night back in Anchorage. The next day I met with Thomas Wells, another couch surfer who lives in Anchorage for lunch and he had invited along Marianna and Danica, two couch surfers that had just arrived from Hawaii that morning. Thomas has been living in Alaska for 3 years, and was a wealth of knowledge of places I could trail run, hike, camp and more. I was planning to meet Rose and Mike in Girdwood, AK for a night of camping and Danica and Marianna decided to join me since they had no real game plan for Alaska. However since they promised the CS host they were staying with that they would join her for dinner we had to wait until about 9:30PM to leave town. No problem since Girdwood is only about 45 minutes away, and it never gets dark in Alaska so time starts to become irrelevant. We camped that night and celebrated with old and new friends. The next day we went on a 8-10 mile hike, that included a river crossing via hand tram. It was really cool, and a bit of a workout too. That evening Danica, Marianna and I headed back to Anchorage. I spent the next couple of nights hanging out with Sarah and meeting more of her friends. I went trail running during the days, once with a meetup group, the other time by myself up to the top of Wolverine peak. The trip up took 90 minutes, and climbed 3000 ft in 3.5 miles, then I came back down in 48 minutes. The views from the top were phenomenal.
The more time I spend in Anchorage the more I like it. The city layout is not great, it’s very spread out and seems you need a car to go everywhere, the drivers are terrible too. However the access to so much cross country, backcountry and resort skiing is top notch. Hiking and backpacking trails are literally right in city limits. I think I could spend a couple years here if I was given the right motivation or opportunities.
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