Globalista

This city has an unusual catch line: 'visit Anchorage - only 30 minutes from Alaska!' And, in a way, that says it all. Anchorage was born as a tent city for workers on the Alaska Railroad in 1915, and grew to become Alaska's largest city. Yet Anchorage has a ghostly, impermanent feel - wide avenues, empty parking lots, buildings like Legoland cold stores. It seems almost apologetic to be there, an interloper in nature. But if the city wins no architectural awards, it is amply compensated by the untouched beauty at its doorstep. Surrounded by mountains, forests and ocean, the citizens of Anchorage live for the wild outdoors, and the wild outdoors finds its way into Anchorage. What other city in the world can claim a resident population of 1,500 wild moose on its streets, and grizzly bears roaming its parks?

Alaskans are hugely proud of their state, referring to the rest of the continental USA as 'the Lower 48'. Hawaii is excluded from this definition, obviously - 'They too are different,' Alaskans will tell you of Hawaiians, 'just like us.' It is the largest State in the USA, three times the size of Texas, yet has a road system smaller than that of Rhode Island, and only 30% of it paved. The famous Iditarod dog-sled race was born of the need to deliver emergency diphtheria vaccine to Nome during the epidemic of 1925, when dogs were the only viable means of speedy transport. Remote, isolated, inaccessible, Alaska is a country of space and solitude: where else but on the Alaska Railroad (on a stretch of it, at least) can you flag down a train to take you home?

Downtown Anchorage is compact and easily negotiated on foot - a grid of streets running alphabetically from east to west, and avenues running numerically from north to south - while the business and residential districts sprawl far beyond. It is a pleasant, informal and comfortable base from which to spread one's wings. And the food, so fresh from both surf and turf, is delicious. Just watch out for those moose.

Globalista's Pick of the Press

31 May 2009 - The New York Times - In Alaska, a Wilderness to Call Your Own