Alaska was truly breathtaking. Well, let me start from the beginning. We met up with friends at a central house to carpool up to LAX together. Despite getting there in good time, and not taking too long in security, we barely had time to drink one beer before boarding our first flight to San Francisco, and then no time between landing and catching our plane to Anchorage. The flights were pretty uneventful, which is really what you want out of a flight anyway, but I can tell you this - I had the window seat when we landed and when I could finally see what was going on, all it was, was heavy snow and drifts and wilderness and my first thought was "What the hell have we done?" it really felt very wild and deserted and more remote than it actually ended up being, but I'm glad that we had so many of us there! (It was eight by the way - we nicknamed ourselves The Hateful Eight, which is eerily similar to the actual movie - 8 strangers holed up together in a snowstorm. Spoiler alert, no one died and no one got hateful. Ha.)
We picked up our car and then only had to drive about ten minutes away to the hotel. We decided to do a hotel for the first night since it was infinitely cheaper and we were getting in so late and didn't want to risk the dark snowy drive to the house in completely unfamiliar terrain. AJ and I shared a room with Shirley and Chris, and we watched Team America and played Cock and Bull until we fell asleep. We woke up at 9 or 9:30am, and it was so dark I thought it was 5 in the morning. Outside the horizon was barely purple with a dawn, it was really freaky. We mobilized our group (which of course takes forever) and then went to a diner in town for breakfast, which included mimosas, bloody marys, and reindeer sausage! It basically tastes like sausage although it had a little spice to it, and was deeeeelish. We went around Anchorage for a little bit, and everything was such a winter wonderland. Honestly it felt like we were inside a snowglobe!
After breakfast we went to a liquor store and loaded up for the weekend, and then drove about an hour outside of Anchorage to our cabin, in a valley in Eagle River, and the cabin was insaaaaane. Huge, four bedrooms, a workout room, wash room, den, wrap-around patio with a hot tub, a green house, and tons of property. It even had soooooo many supplies there that had likely accumulated over the visitors, from snacks and hot chocolate and spices to tons of alcohol! It almost felt like a waste to have bought all that we did!
This is a time lapse of the drive to our cabin once we were off of the main road
We spent the weekend holed up there: drinking, playing games, exploring, going in the hot tub, sledding, and the guys built a beer pong table out of snow from the front yard that pretty much kept them entertained all weekend. Since we were up so late, we usually slept late (at least I did) so I would wake up around 11a where it was early morning light, and then the sun set by 4p. I have to say, it wasn't that weird. It was weird the one day I was up at 9am and it was so dark, but otherwise, it wasn't as crazy as I had been expecting it to be.
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| At the liquor store I suggested we pick up Alaska Husky IPA (because I liked the Husky on it) and the guy at the liquor store complimented our choice, telling us that was a brand new brew and that it had literally just been released that day! That's what I'm showing off here |
Here is a boomerang of us sledding
A boomerang of snow throwing
A boomerang of me trying to trust fall into the snow a la Jack Skellington
We took the sledding up a notch and started going down the driveway
Me and AJ going down the driveway together
Me sledding that turns to slow-mo
We took it up a notch again by tobogganing down the driveway
The first try was kinda sad though...
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| We played a game of assigning cards to different people, and these were the ones that I "won". I'm not even mad. |
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| Moose tracks?? |
We did a ton of research on the Northern Lights and found a scientific tracking which predicted their visibility throughout Alaska and activity on their "KP" index, which ranged from 0 to 9. This, combined with the weather and general cloud cover, showed us that our first night in the cabin, on Friday, December 30, was going to be our best chance to see them. The goal was to stay up all night, or least have someone up on light duty to check for them and wake everyone else up if they saw them. I was crashing at like 3am, and the two other guys awake with me were saying they were ready for bed, but I was pleading with them to stay up on light duty because I might not make it. One said, "I'll check one last time right now before I go to bed" and he went outside and holy smokes - they were out. They went to rouse everyone else and I went outside and there they were, a lime green in both stripes across the sky and in a ring shape, and they were curtaining and swirling slowly into neon green patterns. It was so magical and impossible to describe and so surreal! We all stayed out there for awhile trying to take pictures (which both didn't do it justice, nor did they really show up well) and then AJ insisted we watch them from the hot tub. No one could be convinced, and I felt guiltily obligated, so AJ and I sat in the hot tub until 4am, drinking and watching the lights move in the sky above the snowy mountains. So beautiful!
The other night of note was of course New Year's Eve. We cooked up a fancy dinner of steaks and potatoes and dressed up and had confetti. We went outside for midnight and there were fireworks going off everywhere, from the sides of the mountain and over the mountain and we put on music and danced... which was hard to last too long since it was about 5 degrees outside.
Not much else to say other than it was too short of a trip and I would be happy to go back, even to see it in the summer, it must be so gorgeous no matter what the weather is!
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