After about 24 hours in LA Trey was back at the airport getting ready to board his next flight to Anchorage, Alaska for a conference. The flight arrived in Alaska around 2am but because Alaska is so far north it was still light out. Technically in Anchorage during this time of year the sun sets around midnight and rises at about 2:30 am. The time in between this the sky is a bright dusk. When I got to the hotel it was still a little early for check-in ~3am so I got on my computer and did a little work. To my surprise the hotel let me check in only a few hours later at 5am. This was nice, but I decided not to go to sleep because I was scared I would not be able to wake up for my 8am bus tour to Portage Glacier. I decided to take a shower and then head back down to the lobby to get some breakfast.
view from my hotel room
After a long breakfast I boarded the bus to start the tour that I had signed up for. I was expecting the tour bus to be full of older people, but boy was I wrong! It was filled with nobody. In total there were only four of us taking the tour and we had a full size couch bus to ourselves. It looked like there was no reason to show up early to make sure I got a window seat. The bus took us outside of the city down US highway 1 along the Turnagain Arm of Cook Inlet. The scenery along the drive was amazing, very reminiscent of New Zealand with the water, greenery, and snow-capped mountains all so close together, yet it was somehow distinctively different.
After about an hour in the bus we arrived to our first destination, the visitor center at portage glacier. We were given about an hour to explore the visitor center; learning about glaciers, Alaskan wildlife, and the Exxon Valdez incident. Although we could not see Portage Glacier from the visitor center we could see some medium size icebergs floating in the adjacent lake. When the visitor center was originally built you could see the glacier from it but it has since receded around a corner in the 1980s.
Next we boarded the bus again and drove a few minutes to a dock where we boarded the mv (marine vehicle) Ptarmigan for a 1 hour boat cruise to the glacier. The boat had a little bit more people on it than the bus, but it was still almost empty. Also, it had started to rain a little which kept almost everyone down on the covered first deck, leaving the entire open-air second deck free for me to enjoy by myself.
The boat took us to within ~300 feet of the glacier where it circled back and forth for about 30 minutes so that we could get our fill of pictures and also in the hopes of seeing a chunk of the glacier fall off into the ocean. Unfortunately, this did not happen but it was sill amazing to see the blue ice of the glacier. When you are looking at the pictures it is good to note that the ice from the glacier extends 200 ft below the surface of the water. Also in some of the zoom-in photos you may notice that it looks like there is a large overhang of ice over the water. This is a result of the ice in the water melting faster than the ice above it in air.
After the boat trip we boarded the bus again and drove to Alyeska ski resort where we stopped for lunch. The ski resort was beautiful, although I do not think I will be traveling up to Alaska anytime soon just to go skiing because it would be too cold. For lunch I had a very good Halibut sandwich with strawberries and goat cheese. After lunch we got back on the highway and began the trip back to Anchorage. At this time the tide was going out which was a site to see since Alaska has a very high tidal shift. When the tide changes the rate at which the water flows out of the Turnagain Arm causes standing waves to form. The waves are a few feet high and look like regular ocean waves except for they stay in the same place instead of moving towards shore. Our tour guide told us that on nice days sometimes there will be people out on these waves surfing, but this is very dangerous because of the high current. I arrived back at the hotel around 4pm just enough time to get ready for the reception banquet at the conference.
The reception banquet was a lot of fun because I got to see many people from MIT that I had not see for almost a year including Hank, my former advisor, and many current and former members of my old lab. Although I was enjoying talking to everyone the lack of sleep was starting to catch up with me so by 9pm I went to bed so that I would be well rested for the talks and my poster presentation the next day. I will not go into detail about the conference but I did go to some interesting talks and based on conversation I had with people there I have a few ideas I want to try with my research.
After the first day of talks I went out to dinner with all of the people who had worked in the same lab as me back at MIT as well as Volker, the one guy from my new lab in New Zealand who was also at the conference. Although it was around 10pm by the time we finished dinner it was still very light outside so we all decided to take a little trip to nearby Flattop mountain and climb to the top. It was good to get a little exercise after spending the whole day sitting and listening to research talks. We drove over to the mountain and by 10:30 were starting the 1.5 mile long, 1280 feet elevation gain, hike from the parking lot to the summit. Flattop mountain is the most climbed mountain in the state so at least the first portion of the track is very well-maintained. Towards the top the hike got harder due to some areas still being covered with snow and other areas being quite steep. We reached the top at midnight and enjoyed the views for a little while before heading back down. One thing I found amazing was the number of people that we saw climbing at the same time we were. Even as we were heading down well after midnight there was a group of people just starting, hoping to the get to the top in time to see the sunrise. Your whole sense of time of day is really thrown for a loop when it is daylight all the time.
the start of sunset ~11pm
Looking up towards Flattop mountain
Looking out over Anchorage from the summit at midnight
This is about as dark as it got the whole time I was in Alaska
The next night was the conference main banquet which was held at the Alaska Native Heritage Center museum. Before dinner we had a chance of touring the outside of the museum where they had built traditional native houses from 5 of the native tribes of Alaska. What I found most interesting about these houses were to deal with the cold weather the houses were typically shared by a large group of people and their walls were a few feet thick of dirt, almost like living in a man-made cave. During dinner they put on a small show demonstrating the native dancing as well as some of the native games. The original purpose of the games was for hunters to stay fit during the long cold winter months. Most of the games emphasized strength and body control. The hardest one of the games was where they balanced their whole body on one hand and then tried to reach as high as they could with the other hand, it sounds easy but looked very difficult to do. Also at the banquet we had a guest speaker, Edgar Mitchell, who was one of the Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon. His talk was quite good recounting his trip to the moon. The end of his talk got kind of weird when he started talking about finding the meaning of life and us not being alone. He thinks there are aliens. Enough said. It turns out that he is a little bit crazy but that is why his speaker fee is so much less than the other Apollo astronauts. After one more day of talks I grabbed a red eye flight back to LA so that I would get back for Cynthia’s birthday.
It was good to see old friends and explore a new state.
