Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city!
Big Wildlife and City of Flowers
Anchorage is in the heart of the state’s south-central gulf coast. Located on the upper shores of the cook inlet, it is on a low lying alluvial plane bordered by mountains, water, and forests.
Within the city limits there is an estimated 1500 moose, 250 black bears, and 6o brown bears. It seems like we should have seen at least one of those animals while we were in town! No, we didn’t! Besides the wildlife, Anchorage is also known for it’s colorful hanging baskets of flowers that decorate homes, businesses, and lampposts.
We drove to Lake Hood to watch the Planes/FloatPlanes…one of our favorite things to do in Anchorage! We saw a few floatplanes on the water and a couple of take-offs and landings. It was a fun way to spend the afternoon!
Lake Hood Seaplane Base started out as two smaller lakes. A canal was dredged between the two lakes to create seaplane takeoff and taxi lanes. Today, Lake Hood is host to nearly 200 daily operations and has become the largest and busiest seaplane base in the world.
We stopped at Ship Creek, a popular and well-known place to fish in downtown Anchorage. Fisherman line up to catch king salmon from late May to July and silver and pink salmon in July and August. It was low tide and not much fishing activity. We did see one fisherman with a nice fish and another fisherman filleting a fish. He seemed to be having some trouble cutting…I think he needed a sharper knife!
The Ulu Factory is located next to Ship Creek, so we dropped in to check out the knifes. We learned, on our previous visits, that the Ulu Knife is a great tool for cutting vegetables (especially for Salsa). The Factory store had many different sizes and designs. At least at this shop we bought “useful” souvenirs!
“Uses of the Ulu Knife The uses of the ulu are enormous, from complete dressing of large to small game, to cleaning and filleting fish, to sewing, and of course, a wide variety of kitchen tasks, slicing, mincing, chopping, dicing, etc.. When you add a properly fitted chopping bowl, it takes kitchen tasks to a whole new level, just dice your vegies and start rocking that knife, just make sure you don’t dice it too fine!”
After Anchorage comes Kenai Peninsula!