Our good friend Sarah, a passionate lichenologist who can hardly go ten minutes without wanting to stop the car to explore lichens, comes up to Alaska sometimes to work. As Alaska is among the dwindling number of states we’ve never visited (and is supposed to be very beautiful), we decided to come up and visit her, and she has extended her stay.

Alaska is home to uncountable breathtaking landscapes. The fly in on Thursday evening was incredibly beautiful. Even more beautiful, we hesitantly agree, than the fly in to Cleveland.

Waiting for Sarah to finish up her work (she was spending 16 plus hours a day doing wacky lichen identifying and such – an intensity facilitated by the daylight hours: fairly light from four thirty in the morning until eleven at night) Keely and I explored Anchorage a bit. It is a fairly unattractive town nestled among stunning mountains and sea. There seemed to be a vacancy in the town with the tourist season not yet being in full swing. We did, however, come across some kind of poorly attended street fair type of thing, where soulful country / folk musicians would, after surprisingly long explanations, play the audience a song. One comment during the preamble to a song we heard was, “many people in the audience may want to sing along with this next one, but don’t, because that’s not the way we’re doing this”.

A culture of eating and wearing animals prevails. Even at restaurant chains you can upgrade your sausage to reindeer. The city was incredibly clean, other than the pervasive gravel remaining from the snowy season. We visited a unique out of the way cocktail bar featuring a dragon water fountain and a fashionably funky wait staff. No pierced eyelids or angry cherub facial tattoos, but modest ink. We probably missed the really wacky kids in town. The mudflats were very nice by land, but quite amazing from the air when flying in.

Saturday afternoon we drove south to Seward. After a couple hours of breathtaking landscape, we arrived at the cute town at the end of Resurrection Bay. Yesterday we went on a boat tour and saw quite a bit of wildlife: eagles, otters, mountain goats, sea lions, etc. No puffins, bears or moose, though, unfortunately. It was a wet and cold trip, but very fun. The half hour or so spent outside the bay on the Gulf of Alaska was quite rough, the slightly under 200 foot boat we were on was tossed around pretty nicely.

Today we’re going to visit Exit Glacier and head back to Anchorage so I can head home to class.