About

Tim Bergsten created this Ning Network.

You Know You're In Alaska When...

  1. On your flight to Anchorage from San Francisco, boarding at 5pm, the sun never sets.
  2. You arrive in the Anchorage airport at 12:30pm and it’s so busy it looks like DIA in the holiday season.
  3. Light is always entering your hotel room, even though the sun has technically set. (Have I mentioned it’s light forever here?!)
  4. You can’t help but think how incredible an ultra race would be here.  
  5. You go for a run at 10pm and need to wear sunglasses; another midnight run ends in a beautiful ocean and mountain sunset.
    Just your typical midnight run at sunset
  6. You apply “OFF” as thickly as a fair-skinned person in Colorado applies sunscreen (and still end up with nasty bites.)
  7. You have no idea what time it is, and it’s not an odd occurrence to have dinner at 10 or 11pm.
  8. On your drive into Denali National Park, you see a mother moose and super cute baby moose, and just after pulling in to your campground, you see a cute fluffy grizzly bear.
  9. The trails are the ones you make. (Sounds fun, but difficult bushwhacking through willows.)
  10. You camp right on the beach, with a 360 degree view of mountain surrounding you.
  11. You see more glaciers than ever before.
  12. You see puffins, sea otters (SO CUTE!!!), whales, and seals.
  13. Hitting 100 °F in a town is a record-setter, and the 70° highs have the locals raving about how hot it is.
  14. You run a PR half marathon!
  15. You go for a bike ride along a coastal trail and a local warns you of moose that will stomp you off your bike.
  16. Many of your in-town runs have signs that say “Ski Trail Only”.
  17. You’ve never been so close to a Bald Eagle on your beach run.
  18. You find a run, Mt. Marathon, that puts the Incline to shame. On this run, you meet runners that are the closest morphing of human and mountain goat that exists, watching in awe as they leap down a waterfall and 68% slope.

Mt. Marathon climbs 3000 feet in 1.5 miles above Seward, AK, giving stupendous views of Resurrection Bay and Kenai Fjords National Park

To say the least, Alaska is BEAUTIFUL. :) The only downside? Not much altitude training, so it'll be wheezing time for the Roundup and kicking it into the high gear for the rest of the Triple Crown with the Double!

Views: 435

Comment

You need to be a member of Pikes Peak Sports to add comments!

Join Pikes Peak Sports

Comment by Ann Labosky on July 3, 2013 at 11:47pm

GREAT trip with many great memories!! Thanks for making sure we got a daily run in .. we may have lost all altitude training by the time we get back, but now any trail will be easier than bushwacking, and the incline with RR ties will be much easier than straight up on all 4's thru scree/dirt/loose slate :)

Comment by Megan Kunkel on July 3, 2013 at 11:10pm

Ryan- Thanks! Oh, very cool! Yeah, the summers are awesome! (Minus the mosquitoes). But the winter would be rough...especially for running. I've heard that runners will run hundreds of laps around an indoor track to get long runs in. 

Comment by Megan Kunkel on July 3, 2013 at 11:06pm

Vanessa- it seems hard to catch sight of a moose. I've run and biked on a trail where there's a supposed high chance of seeing a moose, but haven't seen a glimpse there. But driving we have. We've run into several people who say they saw a moose or a bear their first day or first hour of a ride and then nothing since. 

Comment by Ryan Johnson on July 1, 2013 at 4:03pm

Awesome pictures!!  I grew up, for a while, in Fairbanks, AK, where my dad was stationed, and miss the amazing scenery...Summers there are incredible, although the flipside is the ever-present dark during the winter!

Comment by Vanessa Shawver on June 28, 2013 at 2:03pm

I spent two weeks in Alaska trying to catch a glimpse of a moose. I finally saw ONE during hours spent on the hunt in Denali.  I think the moose invasion is a myth, although my Alaska friends disagree.  I saw almost NO wildlife ANYWHERE.  Maybe I scared them all away?

© 2024   Created by Tim Bergsten.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service