Thursday and Friday - Bears, Moose, and Sunsets

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After work on Thursday, Danielle and the girls picked me up for a hike at Falls Creek, about a half hour south of Anchorage. We had read about the hike in a number of different guidebooks and also in the Anchorage Press (similar to the Advocate). From the size of the parking lot it is obvious that the trail is not over used. The trail started alongside the creek, which cascaded down and sounded beautiful. Danielle finally spotted baneberry. Baneberry is the most poisonous berry in Alaska. Its berries can vary from red to white or even black. Gabbi was very concerned about them after Danielle pointed them out to us. She preferred that we not stop to look at them and certainly didn’t want us touching them or the plants that they grew on! After hiking along the creek for a ways, the trail veered away and up the hillside next to it. The area was still very wooded, but now became quite overgrown with grasses and brush. After a bit, we noticed an area where some sort of animal had obviously spent some time resting. We spent some time talking about what it could have been. A few more steps up the trail, we spotted a fresh pile of bear scat. Not far up the trail again, we spotted a fresh bear print. Well, since we couldn’t see very far ahead of us, we were concerned that we would catch up to and startle the bear that we thought could easily be just ahead of us. We decided that we should play it safe and turn around…

On Friday, I rode the bike that I have borrowed from my co-worker Maggi to work. When I got home, it was a beautiful afternoon. The girls had gone to Kincaid Park for the afternoon and played at the playground and saw a moose. As we were playing, we spotted a cow moose with 2 calves in the yard of the house in front of us. We watched them for a bit and then packed up a picnic dinner. We looked at the map in the phone book (which is quite detailed) and Danielle found a couple of parks in the area around a brewery that was offering an evening tour. Now, there are a lot of parks in Anchorage, but you never know whether they are going to be undeveloped open space, playgrounds, or ballfields. The other challenge of using the city map as a guide is that the entrances to the parks are not always obvious. The first place that we found turned out to be ballfields and a motocross track. Then after prowling through a neighborhood, we found a nice picnic table alongside a lake with a walking path. After a nice meal we headed to the Midnight Sun Brewery. We sampled some tasty beers and enjoyed seeing the brewing equipment (at least I did). We finished with some sampling and peeked into the garage of the taxidermy shop that was next door. The taxidermist was salting a bunch of hides and doing something to a moose’s ear!?!? The girls were quite interested and we heard a story from the brewery’s marketing director about how there was moose head in the trash one day…. After the tour we headed back to the apartment. It was such a gorgeous evening that we were able to convince the girls to take a walk to the coastal trail and watch the sunset. It was well worth the walk and a great way to finish a great evening.

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