Before I went to bed last night at around 11:00pm, I looked outside and it was still light out. Karen told me this morning that she woke up around 3:00am and when she looked outside, she noticed that it wasn’t completely dark. We learned today that at this time of the year, the sun doesn’t completely set.
Once we got going this morning, we headed to downtown Anchorage to meet up with Jody Overstreet of Alaska Photo Treks. We always try to find a photography tour in cities that we visit since it is a great way to see and learn about the city. We met up with Jody at Stewart’s Photo Shop along with Aileen who was also on the tour.
We spent the next two hours walking around downtown Anchorage getting a great history lesson about the city. Because there were only three of us on the tour, Jody was able to cater the tour to each of our photographic skills. She gave us lots of great tips which I hope we’ll remember and use the rest of our trip here. The Ship Creek Salmon Derby is happening right now in Anchorage so Jody took us to Ship Creek where it is taking place. We did see a few fisherman in the water but none of them caught any King Salmon while we were watching them. We stopped by the derby headquarters where we saw a contestant weigh-in with a 15lb salmon. We ended our tour with Jody at the Anchorage Market. It is Alaska’s largest open air market with over 300 vendors spread out over seven acres. There is everything from fresh produce, crafts, Alaskan souvenirs and many food vendors. My favourite thing at the Paris Fair is the ribbon frieds but they have been replaced with a twisted potatoe. After having some lunch, we spent a couple of hours investigating every inch of the market.
We got back to the car and started down the Seward Highway to the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center. It took us about an hour and a half to go the thirty miles to the center. The reason why it took us so long is that whenever there was a safe place to pull over, we would to take pictures. The scenery is simply stunning and I can’t wait until we do the drive all the way down to Seward.
The Alaskan Wildlife Conversation Center’s purpose is to provide care to injured or orphaned animals. If an animal can not be released back into the wild, the animal will either live at the center or be transferred to another facility. We got to the center around 4:00pm and headed over to the bear area since we knew that there would be a brown bear feeding at 4:30pm. The bear area is approximately 22 acres and in the middle of it, is a raised boardwalk that allows you to get kinda close to the bears.
As we got closer to the viewing area, we spotted our first brown bear, JB. He is an 11 year old brown bear who weighs 800lbs. Very soon, we saw his sister Patron who weighs 600lbs. The third bear in the enclosure was a 15 year old grizzly called Hugo who weighs around 400lbs. In the other enclosure were the black bears. All of a sudden, we hear this growling and then JB and Patrone are having a scuffle. It didn’t last too long because I think the bears knew that it was feeding time soon. At 4:30pm, the staff came over and starting throwing out dinner to each of the bears. Dinner consisted of ground meat of some sorts, beef and lamb I think. This was followed by moose meat which I saw one of the staff members cut off of a moose leg and the final course was dry dog food and carrots. After watching the bears enjoy their dinner, we decided to leave them to check out the other animals. We saw moose, musk-ox and deer. I highly recommend that if you are ever in Anchorage, go to the AWCC.
On our way back home, we made a side trip to Girdwood where we ended up having dinner at a funky place called the Chair 5 Restaurant. We were going to go and check out the sunset but since we were so tired, we decided to have an early night. But on our way home, we did see a moose in someone’s backyard.
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