Little O’Malley, O’Malley, and Williwaw Lakes Hike

Posted on April 23, 2025April 22, 2025 by Lark

Another hiking day! The weather was, as usual, looking uncertain, but in the mountains, that could mean misery or an absolutely beautiful day. If we waited for everything to look perfect, we’d never go anywhere. So, we packed lots of snacks and clothes for any possibility, and off we went.

Our planned hike had a few possible variations built in. We were headed back to Chugach State Park, just one ridge over from where we were for Flattop and Flaketop. This ridge started with Little O’Malley, another peak Olivia had hiked a million times, but after that, we hoped to continue on to Big O’Malley (actually just called O’Malley). After O’Malley, we could turn around or, better yet, continue on past a couple of lakes and turn our hike into a loop, rather than an out-and-back (always more interesting). Later, there was one more opportunity for an add-on, an out-and-back trail off the loop that led to more lake views. We definitely couldn’t do that entire trail, but we figured we’d wait to decide how far to go once we were there and had a better sense of the weather and the timing. We expected the whole thing to be around maybe 12-15 miles (19-24 km), depending on some of those decisions.

Fair warning… I have a LOT of pictures. You have no idea how hard I worked to winnow them down to the ones I’ve included, and there are still so many.

The hike up to Little O’Malley wasn’t bad at all. There was definitely some good elevation gain, but there were nice switchbacks that made it reasonably gradual which was nice. The view from there was… obscured. There was a lot of fog/cloud cover surrounding us. Thankfully, it was moving fast so we did see SOMETHING, but it was moving fast, so you had to keep your eyes peeled and be ready.

Atop Little O’Malley. Honestly, it didn’t even really feel like a summit, but maybe that’s just because when we were at the tippy top, we were completely surrounded by fog and couldn’t see anything.

From there, we continued on to O’Malley. Just like with Flattop and Flaketop, once we got past the first peak, we saw very few other people. There were maybe 5 human sightings over the rest of the hike. It felt like we had the place to ourselves. Crazy!

This was also where things got much more challenging. Well, not getting from Little to regular O’Malley. That was pretty flat, and it was very beautiful because of the colors of the valley and the dramatic mountains surrounding us (on the rare occasion when you could actually see them through the clouds… ha).

Another warning… the number of times I’m going to caption a photo with just an exclamation about “THE COLORS!!!!”… it will be more than once. But seriously, though… THE COLORS!!!! And we’re just getting started.

When we got to O’Malley, we knew it was going to be a different story. No more easy, flat ground. Our upward trek started out with what felt like an endless scree field. That’s where it’s all shifting and sliding little rocks, and you have to either not care about slipping or take extra time to be sure of your footing. I’m definitely a “take extra time” person. It takes me forever to go up those things because I’m checking and double checking my footing on every step before I commit. I hate the feeling of sliding. There wasn’t a particularly defined path for the up, so Olivia and I each decided for ourselves what seemed least terrible and ended up taking completely different routes.

This was the worst part of the whole hike, but thankfully, despite the slow going, I still felt good, both physically and mentally. There was never a point where I wasn’t sure I would make it. I knew I would be fine; I was just moving slowly. I also didn’t worry about Olivia. I knew she could handle herself, and we’d meet up at the top.

This was the last time I was close enough to Olivia to take a photo. I’m a pokey pokey tortoise.

Can you spot the little speck Lara in this photo? (If not, see bottom right.) I feel like you can maybe kind of see how steep the uphill was, considering that the world seems to drop off a cliff behind me.

As we wait for slowpoke Lara to crest the scree field, I’d like to pause for a moment of Olivia appreciation. There are MANY things I appreciate about Olivia. She’s fun and interesting and thoughtful. When we met in Armenia, I knew immediately that I wanted to be her friend. I thought she was the coolest (still do). We’d never hiked together before this trip, but I had a good feeling about it. Turns out, we make great hiking buddies because 1. We will never run out of things to talk about, 2. We’re on a similar level, fitness-wise, and have a good sense of our capabilities, 3. We love adventures, 4. We’re up for a challenge, and 5. We’re determined.

I feel pretty confident that if I’m up for something, Olivia will be too. My adventurous side feeds off of that… knowing that she’ll likely say yes makes me push myself a little more (and it’s probably the same for her). It’s not like I would do something I didn’t want to do, but having her as backup lets me say yes to things that my voice of reason would talk me out of I was alone. Like this – doing an unfamiliar, challenging hike with basically no cell service and no other people around. Everyone evaluates these things differently, but for me, doing such a hike solo would have felt like a silly risk. Would I probably be fine? Sure. But there are too many things that can go wrong, and an extra person increases the chance that at least one of you will be able to get help if needed.

Anyway. In conclusion, Olivia is the best. Okay, slowpoke Lara has to be getting close by now…

Once I finally tortoised my way to the top of the scree, Olivia and I reunited and continued our trek. From there, we still had about another half mile to the peak with 800 feet of elevation gain, but after what we’d just done, it felt easy. The path was hard to track, but having learned our lesson from the last hike, we were much more diligent with checking the map whenever it seemed like we were getting off course. There were also MANY false peaks. These are high points that look like they’re the summit, but they aren’t. Usually, you get there and then see that the true summit is still ahead. As you might imagine, that can be discouraging. We called them deception peaks because it made us laugh and was also more fun to say when we were yelling at them. Luckily, since we were looking at our maps, we were undeceived. (In case you’re wondering what one yells at a deception peak, it’s just things like, “NICE TRY, deception peak! I’M ON TO YOU!” Um. Anyway. Just trust me when I say it feels therapeutic in the moment.)

Here’s a snippet of our route up O’Malley. We came in the top left, and that part with the tight contour lines is the scree field. When our route turns more horizontal, that’s where we’re walking the ridge. You can see that our paths out to the peak and back are totally different. Like I said, we tried to follow the path. I’m still not completely confident that there IS a single path. And the one spot where we’re matched up in both directions is completely off the “trail” according to the map. Oh well. Whatever works!

Olivia made it to the actual peak before me, and she popped up holding a metal case. I wasn’t sure what it was… random geocache at the top of the mountain? It contained some random objects and a book where you could sign your name!! That was cool. It made us feel like we’d accomplished something significant.

It was fairly cloudy when we reached the top, but since the clouds were still moving so quickly, we decided to stick around, eat a snack, and see if the view cleared up at all. Eventually, we got a decent view of the valley on the Flattop side of the mountain, but the other side stayed covered. Of course, that was the way we were headed. We just hoped that there was no rain associated with those clouds.

Just happy I’m not hiking up scree anymore.

Once we were thoroughly chilled, we got moving again. We trekked down across the ridge and then were back at the scree field. In case you don’t have a lot of scree experience, let me tell you. Going down a scree field is way easier than going up. I still don’t love doing it, but if you get into the right rhythm, it feels like magic. All you have to do is turn off the part of your brain that thinks sliding = falling = bad. You take long, gliding steps and ride little self-created rockslides down the mountain while also steering yourself around immovable rocks and any scree-free areas. Oh, and remember to keep your weight on your heels so that you don’t tumble down the mountain. And bend your knees. And sit down to reset if you start feeling out of control. And keep a good distance between you and anyone else so that you don’t send any surprises hurtling their way (either a rock or your body). Got it? Easy peasy!

Leaving a healthy distance between me and Olivia. It looks like she’s literally headed off a cliff.

Like I said, when you get into a good groove, it’s kind of awesome. I feel like I’m flying or moonwalking or I don’t know. Floating. Weightless. Like I said, it’s magic. Then, a split second later, that euphoria turns to terror because I’m moving too fast and losing control and there’s a big rock ahead and it’s coming on WAY too quickly. Sit down. Breathe… 1, 2, 3. Recalibrate. Restart. Maybe I lied a little bit when I said I don’t love going down scree fields… I kind of do, but the feelings of terror and euphoria are so interwoven that it’s hard to isolate the joy when thinking about the experience. And the faster you go, the higher the high but also the higher the risk. It’s a fine balance. I took three recalibration breaks, aka panic sits, on the way down.

We took another time out at the bottom, stopping to clean out our shoes which were, shockingly, full of little rocks. I also needed a mental break… you have to stay focused the entire time you’re scree sliding, spotting your path and always having the next few steps planned. It’s exhausting.

With O’Malley behind us, we reached our first decision point. Keep going, or turn back? We both felt fine physically, and the weather was drizzly but not terrible. We decided to continue on to the lakes. This involved another relatively steep downhill, but it was dirt/mud rather than scree. That’s its own challenge, but slightly less terrifying and also way slower to descend. We didn’t mind, though. The whole way down, there was a beautiful view of the valley and one of the lakes. We kept yelling about how it didn’t even seem real. (If it seems like we did a lot of yelling, well, yes. There was no one else around, so why not?)

At the decision point. As you can see, we’re a little wet from the rain. We only look happy because we took a picture with miserable faces before this and looked so pathetic that we started cracking up.

This was the view as we were descending the mud/dirt slope. Unreal.

Spot the little Olivia, running on ahead.

Black Lake. Now brace yourself for approximately 10384024932 photos of kind of the same thing but different.

The little plants on the ground were so pretty. And so many blueberries! Olivia was snacking the entire time we were hiking. This is also why, later when there were more hiding spots, we were on high alert for bears.

Last one! Of this lake, at least. Onward!

Eventually, we made it down to the bottom of the valley, and our trail dead-ended into the trail that we planned to follow out. This was our next fork… we could either turn left to go back to the car or turn right for more adventure before turning around. We decided to go right for a bit, just to see where it led, but we quickly hit a river crossing that was definitely too much for Olivia to do without waterproof shoes and probably too much for either of us to do without hiking poles. We settled on a short detour to get a better view of the nearest lake and then turned around and started heading back towards the car. We had about 8 miles to go and only a few more hours of sunlight, so turning around was probably the right choice anyway.

Before we go, though, we should enjoy a few more pictures…

Look at that bright green! Trust me when I say that this is actually how it looked in real life.

Okay now this… this is insane. I have pictures of the same mountains in the background with like 15 different foregrounds because they’re all spectacular and I couldn’t stop taking pictures.

Looking towards our way out. THE COLORS. ARE WILD.

Here are those identical background, variable foreground pictures I was talking about.

One more. Those mountains are just so photogenic. All of it. Just amazing!!!

The way back was so much more terrible than I expected. I didn’t expect it to be terrible at all! The maps said that it was mostly flat, and that was good enough for me. And to be fair, at the beginning, it was great! We were in a beautiful valley. We could hear the sounds of the river rushing past. There were some bear-den shrubberies around (aka plants large enough to theoretically conceal a bear), so we made up silly songs about bears and sang them loudly to scare away any potential lurkers. Life was good!

Unfortunately, what we couldn’t see from the elevation profile was that most of the trail was overgrown with tall grasses, AND it was muddy and sometimes completely underwater. Our feet got wet very quickly, and that’s guaranteed misery on a hike. Olivia’s shoes weren’t waterproof, so she had no chance. Mine were once waterproof, but there are some weak spots. So maybe the infiltration took a little longer for me, but barely. Even if our shoes HAD been 100% waterproof, it wouldn’t have mattered. We were walking through waist-height plants that were covered in water and overhanging the path. As we brushed past, it felt like water was pouring down our legs and into our shoes. It was awful. Also, it started raining again. It’s not like it made us much wetter than we already were, but it felt like adding insult to injury. Like really?

I could tell that Olivia was feeling similarly terrible. Neither of us said anything about it because what would that help? But also, neither of us was talking any more than necessary. The creative bear songs faded into Olivia yelling, “Heeeeey, bear,” whenever passing a potential bear den and me just hoping she was making enough noise for the both of us.

I was singularly focused on keeping a good pace, both to end our misery and because we were a little concerned about sunset. That meant I was zero percent focused on the map… if there hadn’t been a couple standing at our crossroads, I would have blown right past our turn. Eek. That would have been very good for morale. But, thankfully, we were saved from that fate, we made our turn, and BAM! There was an insanely vivid rainbow right in front of us! A double, actually! A tiny little boost to keep us going. And man, we needed it. I was holding myself together until we made that turn, but then there were just 2 miles to go and we were so close and I was so over being wet and cold and the end just couldn’t come fast enough.

Double rainbow!!! I took zero pictures during the miserable parts of the hike because I was too miserable to think about anything besides walking as quickly as possible.

I practically collapsed from joy when we got back to the car. We both took our shoes off for the drive home, and back at the house, I took a glorious hot shower. Olivia’s mom made pasta for us, and it was the best thing I’ve ever eaten. She also gathered up our wet clothes and shoes and set them up to dry, and I was so thankful to have nothing to do but eat and vegetate and stretch. Moms are the best.

Our final stats for the hike were: 14 miles (22.5 km), 4,000 feet of elevation (1,200 meters), and 8 hours and 40 minutes (total time, not just moving time). Even with the grumpy final miles, it was a good hike.

Here’s the final map of our hike. We started at the end of that tail on the left, went along the bottom of the loop to that other tail to O’Malley Peak. Then we went downhill (up on the map) to the lakes, had our tiny little detour to the first lakes (Williwaw Lake) on the lake trail (the others are out of view), and then we made that big loop back around the top to meet back up with our path in for the final little leg back to the parking lot.

Offbeat Anchorage Tour

Posted on April 15, 2025April 15, 2025 by Lark

On a day when the weather looked particularly questionable, we skipped the hiking and took Olivia’s mom up on her offer of an Anchorage tour! She said that she has a list of places where she likes to take people who are visiting, and I was ready to go wherever she wanted to take us.

Later that day, we were hanging out with some of Olivia’s friends, and they asked where we had gone on our Anchorage tour. They were fascinated by the itinerary, and apparently, they hadn’t even been to many of the places. They definitely didn’t say, “Oh yes! I would take people there,” to most of the stops. Having experienced the tour, all I can say is, those people are all missing out. We decided that this would be considered the “Offbeat Anchorage” tour which is absolutely the tour I would have booked anyway, given the choice (or, paying homage to my favorite travel resource, Atlas Obscura, the “Anchorage Obscura” tour).

So, come along with me on Annie’s Offbeat Anchorage tour! I don’t know what most people see in Anchorage, but it’s probably not this. (Also, a note – the order doesn’t quite match how we visited them. A few are tied to specific historic events, so I shifted those into chronological order, and the more general stops are just mixed in.)

The tour started with a more personal stop at Providence Hospital where Olivia’s mom volunteers. She maintains a flowerbed and also goes in weekly to cuddle premie babies in the NICU. The hospital was opened in 1939 by the Sisters of Providence, hence the name. Anchorage was a late bloomer of Alaskan cities, so by then, they had already started other hospitals in Nome in 1902 and later in Fairbanks (those were big gold rush towns).

Any tour that starts with flowers is destined to be a good one.

University of Alaska Anchorage’s Foucault Pendulum

From there, we headed to the UAA university library to see one of Annie’s favorite things – a Foucault pendulum! I actually was familiar with the concept because there’s one at a museum in Philadelphia as well, but I was still happy to check it out.

The pendulum demonstrates the Earth’s rotation. By the time it was designed, people knew that the Earth rotated because of astronomical observations, but this showed it in a lab setting. The basic concept is that if the pendulum was located at one of Earth’s poles, it would keep swinging back and forth in the same plane, and the Earth would rotate 360 degrees underneath it each day (or about 15 degrees per hour). If you were tracking which way the pendulum was moving, it would seem like the swing was shifting, but the change would actually be because of the Earth rotating.

I feel like the pole situation is pretty easy to digest, but my brain starts hurting a little once you move away from the poles. When it’s not located at a pole, the Earth is still rotating underneath the pendulum but not a full 360 degrees in a day. (In Paris, where Foucault did his demonstration, it takes nearly 32 hours for a full rotation. In Anchorage, since it’s farther north, it takes about 27.5 hours.) Then, if you were at the equator, it wouldn’t rotate at all. If you crossed the equator, it would appear to be rotating in the other direction!

Apparently, for the best effect, you want a long cable and a heavy, symmetrical bob (the weight at the bottom of the cable). The university’s is 52 feet with a 240 pound, hollow brass bob. It also uses an electromagnet to keep the pendulum swinging since it’s not an ideal pendulum and things like friction, etc. exist.

I didn’t take a picture of the UAA pendulum, but here’s the one at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. This one has an 85ft cable and ~175lb bob. It has little metal pegs that get knocked down during the day to help show the rotation.

Train Station/Eisenhower Memorial

There’s an Eisenhower Memorial in town, and from there, you can see the train station. I didn’t take any pictures of the memorial because it was in depressing shape, but let’s talk about trains!

Anchorage was first settled thanks to the construction of a government railroad, meant to increase access to the resource-rich interior of Alaska. The associated job prospects caused thousands of people to pour into the area, and a tent city of makeshift shelters was erected on the banks of Ship Creek. This “city” only existed for a few months in 1915. Conditions were horrible, and the area taken up by the settlement was needed for the railroad/shipping infrastructure.

A new site was selected for the settlement on higher ground, and over 600 lots were auctioned off. Random fun fact: People wanted to call the city “Alaska City” (they even held a vote to come up with that incredibly creative name). But alas, the postal service decided it should be called Anchorage, and so it is.

Elderberry Park & Oscar Anderson House

Our next stop was Elderberry Park which wasn’t particularly interesting in itself, but next to the park is the Oscar Anderson House. Oscar Anderson was Swedish and came to Anchorage back in the Tent City days (he said he was the 18^th person to arrive). He bought land in the 1915 land auction and built a house, supposedly the first wood-framed home in the city. It was given to the city in 1976 and was moved about 60 feet from its original site. (I always think that kind of thing is wild. The logistics of relocating a building! I’m sure there was a reason, but all that for 60 feet? Geez.)

The house was closed for renovations when we visited, but I still felt like I got my money’s worth with the stop (zero dollars, but who’s counting). There was an informational panel outside that was written by someone who deserves a raise. Usually, trying to read those things turns my brain to goo. This one, though. From the first two sentences, I knew it was different.

“Oscar lived in this house for nearly 60 years. They say his ghost still lingers on.” TELL ME MORE. It said that after Oscar died, the people who moved in reported strange occurrences and noises that sounded like footsteps. “When they reported these stories to his widow, Elizabeth… she was delighted. She said she always knew Oscar loved the house too much to ever leave it.” That cracked me up. She was DELIGHTED to hear that her husband was haunting their old house. So good.

There was also a fabulous write-up about “Demon Rum”. Before I get into that, some context. Back when they were auctioning off land, “to encourage sobriety and good behavior among construction workers, the rules of the townsite sale stated that all lots would be forfeited if used for gambling, prostitution, or the manufacture and sale of liquor.” (Quoted from an info panel at the Eisenhower Memorial.) In case you’re curious about how that went… enter Demon Rum info panel.

Uncle Sam laid down the law in 1915. There was to be none of that mischief within the new townsite of Anchorage.
Who was he kidding? Some thought the Wild West had had its final fling. But this was a new frontier.
“The only thing more prevalent than the fine dust which clogs the air is the raw whiskey with which they wash it down,” observed one disgusted federal bureaucrat, thoroughly unimpressed by the new railroad town and the moral fiber of its inhabitants.
The laws prohibiting such behavior may have been there on the books. But enforcement was a different matter. Sometimes The Law was in cahoots with The Lawless.

The next paragraph gives a little more detail and a quote from a historian talking about “Characters nicknamed Dago Jim, Creampuff Bill, and The Pale Faced Kid,” and I couldn’t stop laughing about Creampuff Bill. What a nickname!

Anyway, all that to say that I wish I could submit positive feedback about the articles. 10/10

Captain Cook Monument

I don’t have much to say about the actual monument… It’s a statue in a little park with a nice view of the water. While we were there, though, we saw a barge cruising past, and that ended up being far more interesting to me.

Annie explained that these big barges come in with supplies a couple of times per week. About 95% of Alaska’s purchased food supply is imported, plus clothing, home goods, vehicles, etc. (On the export side, 75% are fishing and mining related.) It’s probably not surprising that one of Costco’s most successful locations is in Anchorage. It makes sense… people come to town for supply runs, and what better place to bulk shop for supplies than the bulk grocery store?

Annie also said that there are a bunch of food caches hidden around the city in case something happens to the barge supply lines. I couldn’t find anything about this online, but maybe that just means it really is a secret… I guess we’ll never know.

Eleventh Air Force/Americans Home from Siberia – WWII Memorial

Our next obscure stop was at a WWII memorial which looked practically abandoned. Apparently, Annie stumbled upon it while playing one of those location-based app games during the pandemic. She thought it was interesting, so now it’s a tour stop! It’s in a very weird spot… next to an airport (I guess because of the “Air Force” part), not on a well-traveled road. It’s not surprising that no one seems to know about it.

The driveway into the memorial… weird, right?

Since Alaska was virtually undefended prior to WWII, the U.S. started building military infrastructure there in 1939. The war had a huge impact on Alaska. The population of Anchorage grew from 3,500 in 1940 to 12,000 in 1945!

Did you know that the only WWII campaign fought on North American soil and the only occupied American land was in Alaska? The Japanese occupied two of the Aleutian Islands (the islands that make up Alaska’s long tail) from June 1942 until they were finally driven out in August 1943. The U.S. and Canada lost over 500 men retaking the islands, and over 1,000 were wounded. After that, there weren’t many troops kept in Alaska, but part of the U.S. strategy was convincing the Japanese otherwise. The goal was to make them think that an attack might come from the north, forcing them to keep resources positioned to defend against that possibility.

There was a lot of people-moving happening during the war…

The U.S. forced hundreds of native Aleuts to relocate from the islands during the war. About 10% died in camps in southeast Alaska, and 4 out of 6 of their villages ceased to exist.
The Japanese captured 43 people from the islands and took them back to Japan. Only 25 returned.
The US imprisoned 245 Americans of Japanese descent from Alaska in internment camps in the western U.S.

And this one is what the memorial is specifically about:

The Russians interned hundreds of U.S./Canadian airmen who had to divert to Russian bases after flying missions against Japan. Usually this was because they didn’t have enough fuel to get all the way back to Alaska after running into unforeseen circumstances. Russia was in a complicated spot with these “captured” airmen because the U.S. and Russia were allies against Germany, but Russia and Japan were not at war. The interned airmen were treated fairly well, and some were helped to “escape”. (There’s an interesting article about this linked in the “Sources” section below.)

Delaney Park Strip and Star the Reindeer

We drove past a park which Annie explained was originally put into the city plan as a fire buffer between the city and the forest. It’s one block wide and ~13 blocks long! In the 1920s, it started being used as a golf course and also an airstrip. (Honestly, it seems like if it was a good airstrip, it would be a terrible golf course, or vice versa. I’m going to go with “terrible golf course” because it is very flat.) Now, it’s a park with fields, memorials, and recreation areas.

Next to the park strip is the home of Star, the unofficial reindeer mascot of Anchorage, so named because Star #1 had a star-shaped mark on her head. Also, fun fact – “reindeer” are just domesticated caribou.

When I was researching for this post, I learned the unfortunate news that the latest Star (#7) just died earlier this month! They think he might have been poisoned. If that’s the case, he won’t be the only Star iteration to have had a suspicious/sad end. #1 lived a long life. #2 was killed and butchered, and the meat was sold (the perpetrator was caught and spent a year in prison). #3 died after eating plastic bags that someone had shoved into her pen. #4 had arthritis but lived a long life, though it wasn’t without its traumas – someone once climbed into her pen and broke off an antler (seriously, what is wrong with people?). #5 died from a bacterial infection as a calf. #6 lived a long life and died of natural causes, but there was an attempted kidnapping at one point.

If you’re wondering if anyone can own a reindeer and keep it in their house in the middle of Anchorage, the answer is no. The keepers of Stars 1-5 got special permission, and it turns out that the permission is linked to the property which is how Stars 6-7 were able to keep the tradition going after the original keepers passed away. ALSO, you’re not allowed to own an Alaska reindeer unless you’re an Alaska Native. Stars 1-5 were leased, but after that, the law was changed so that non-Natives can’t lease Alaska reindeer either. So, where did Stars 6-7 come from? They were, in fact, Canadian reindeer, so the Alaska reindeer law didn’t apply. Technicalities! Another fun fact – Stars 1-6 were female, and Star 7 was male.

Also… the reindeer pen is attached to the house. The current owner would leave the door open in the summer, and Star could wander in and out of the house as he pleased. I think it’s safe to say that it takes a special kind of person to choose a reindeer as a pet…

Earthquake Park

The Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 is still the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North America. It had a magnitude of 9.2, lasted for over 4 minutes, and was caused by tension along the fault between the Continental Plate (Asia) and the Pacific Plate. The plates are moving towards each other with the Pacific Plate going underneath the Continental. In this case, the Pacific caught in place, rather than sliding nicely under, and the buildup of stress eventually led to an explosive earthquake.

There were 11 aftershocks over 6.2 magnitude in the first day after the main earthquake, and then there were 9 more over the next 3 weeks. Noticeable aftershocks continued for over a year!

Most Anchorage buildings weren’t designed to withstand earthquakes, so the damage from the quake alone was extensive. Beyond that, though, there were landslides that destroyed even more of the city and caused significant, permanent changes to its geography. Earthquake Park is situated in one of those areas. One of the soil layers was a type of clay that destabilized in the quake. This led to a landslide as the upper layers slid out towards the ocean, destroying 75 homes and killing 4 people.

This shows what happened to the land… that dashed line in the top view shows what the ground looked like before, and the little cartoon rocks/houses below illustrate what happened after the earthquake (the “bootlegger cove clay” is the bad clay layer that caused the sliding). The bottom view shows how the land slid into the water and changed the shoreline.

Anchorage was lucky to escape damage from tsunamis, but other towns, like Seward and Valdez, were completely destroyed by 40-foot waves. Valdez, rather than rebuilding in the same area, decided to move 4 miles away to a less seismically risky area.

The Alaska Railroad was hard-hit with 200 miles of warped track, over 100 destroyed bridges, and other extensive damage to the infrastructure.

It was also catastrophic for the flora and fauna in the area. Thousands of deep water fish in Prince William Sound were killed by underwater shock waves. Mollusks suffocated under the mud and debris carried by tsunamis. Freshwater areas were inundated with saltwater, waterfowl nesting areas were destroyed, and forested areas were stripped bare by waves and landslides.

Coastal Trail

Later in the week, we strolled along the coastal trail, an 11-mile trail that, you guessed it, runs along the coast. It’s a beautiful trail, and people see all sorts of wildlife on it. Like I said in my Welcome to Anchorage post, Olivia saw a family of black bears (eek!) a few days before I got to town… We just saw some beluga whales on our walk. That’s kind of exciting I suppose, but they are maybe the least interesting animal to glimpse from the shore because they don’t have much on their backs to make them particularly visible. Like when you see a dolphin, you KNOW you’ve seen a dolphin. It’s cool even if you only see a fin. The belugas just have a ridge along their backs, so spotting a beluga is basically seeing a flash of white in the water and wondering if it’s a little whitecap or a whale. But anyway. The trail was pretty!

No belugas here, not that you’d be able to see much of anything anyway.

Besides all of those, we also went to:

Fish hatchery – I’m going to talk about this in a separate post.
Westchester Lagoon – a good spot for birdwatching, I’m told.
Olivia’s high school (West Anchorage High) – to see the eagle mural gifted by the class of 1971. They wanted to include “Class of 1971” on it, but that was rejected, so they hid a 71′ in the design. I, of course, didn’t take a picture, but if you’re really interested, you can google it. Apparently it was years before anyone noticed. (Also, they put the apostrophe on the wrong side which would drive me crazy if I was bothered by silly little things like that…)
Lake Hood Seaplane Base – I talked about this in my Welcome to Alaska post.
Downtown Balto statue – this is also the location of the ceremonial start of the Iditarod.
Anchorage Museum – this wasn’t part of our “official” Anchorage tour, but Olivia and I went later in the week and it’s awesome. They have some incredible Alaska Native art… my favorite part was the amazing beading and embroidery. And I loved their landscape painting exhibit!

Sources

Foucault Pendulum – there’s also a link to a PDF with some images to help illustrate how a Foucault Pendulum would behave at different locations on the globe.

“Foucault Pendulum.” UAA/APU Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage, consortiumlibrary.org/about/building/pendulum.php.

Oscar Anderson House

“The Oscar Anderson House.” Distinctive Destinations, National Trust for Historic Preservation, muni.org/departments/ocpd/planning/documents/oahmbooklet_final_07_02_13.pdf.

Article about Russia returning interned US airmen during WWII

Goldman, Stuart D. “The Soviet Union’s Top Secret Operation to Repatriate Downed U.S. Airmen.” HistoryNet, 6 May 2021, historynet.com/the-soviet-unions-top-secret-operation-to-repatriate-downed-u-s-airmen/.

Star the Reindeer

Berg, Bailey. “Meet Star the Reindeer, Anchorage’s unofficial mascot for 60 years.” Roadtrippers, 18 December 2020, roadtrippers.com/magazine/star-reindeer-alaska/.

Flattop, Peak 2, Peak 3, and Flaketop Hike

Posted on March 25, 2025March 25, 2025 by Lark

When I signed on to visit Olivia in Alaska, she asked what I wanted to do while I was there. I was up for anything, but I definitely wanted to do some hiking. I love to hike, and Olivia and I are well-matched hiking buddies (the same amount of crazy but also appropriately cautious). We didn’t travel too far from Anchorage, but there are plenty of awesome hikes in and around the city. In fact, Chugach State Park, which supposedly has over 280 miles of maintained hiking trails (you’ll soon see why I say “supposedly”), is mostly located within the municipal limits of Anchorage (a fact that Olivia repeated anytime I said something about hiking near Anchorage. “Actually,” she would say, “did you know that much of it is IN the city of Anchorage?” Thank you for the fact check, Olivia. I will continue to say that it’s near Anchorage).

Prepare yourself for LOTS of pictures. And these are the ones that I was left with after really doing my best not to overdo it on photos…

Looking back towards Anchorage on our way up to Flattop.

Chugach is enormous (~495,000 acres), so we didn’t explore even a tiny fraction of the park. We stuck to the area most accessible from the city which is basically made up of a few different mountain ridges. We had a couple of hiking days where we followed a ridge, hitting as many peaks as possible along the way. The plan for our first day was to hike around 9 miles and visit four peaks. The first, Flattop, is the most climbed mountain in Alaska. Olivia said she’s been there a million times. From there, though, we kept going which was a first for her. Based on how few people we saw after leaving Flattop, I’d say most people are content to turn around after visiting just that one.

I took this exact same picture about 500 times.

I’m only going to make you look at two of them, though. For now.

Here’s a good view of our mountain ridge for the day!

The next two peaks are creatively named “Peak 2” and “Peak 3”, and the last one is Flaketop. To travel between peaks, the trail runs along the ridge. Since this is a less-traveled path, staying on track was a little iffy. Sometimes, the trail was super easy to follow. For example: walking through a grass-covered area and sticking to the non-grass-covered line. Other times, it was less so. For example: walking through a rocky area and trying to determine if this patch of exposed dirt seems like the trail… or is it maybe that patch of exposed dirt over there? I wouldn’t have been opposed to the use of some trail markers. I’m just saying, a couple of paint blazes wouldn’t hurt anyone.

We may not have had a clear path, but we did have awesome views to both sides. Views to the right…

Also, this may come as a surprise, but Peak 2 and Peak 3? Not the most defined peaks I’ve ever encountered. We did some, “Do you think this is the peak?” “No, my GPS is showing it somewhere over here… do you think this is it?” I think we probably found them. Let’s just go with yes.

There were also some very fast-moving clouds.

Compare this to that last picture! It was crazy how quickly the conditions changed.

And for good measure, let’s put another of these photos in.

Possibly taken from Peak 3? (I feel pretty sure that we made it there.)

Ambiguous peaks/trail aside, we did okay getting from Flattop to Flaketop. We certainly didn’t take the most efficient route, but we mostly managed to stay near the trail. There was a lot of map checking and course correcting. This was possible because while the trail wasn’t necessarily CLEAR, it did exist, so if you started walking in the right direction, at some point you’d think, “Ah, yes! Here’s the trail!” and start to follow that. (Was it actually the trail? Who knows. But at least there was something trail-like enough to convince you that you might be in the right place.)

Spot one of the approximately 3 people we saw on our hike post-Flattop.

There were some pretty spectacular colors along the way.

Happy to be walking on the trail (maybe).

Flaketop is the craggy peak to the right in this photo (not the tallest one).

After Flaketop (a much more commanding peak than Peaks 2 & 3), things started going downhill. As in, we began descending, and also as in, the trail quality took a dive. There was just… nothing. We’d follow a maybe-trail until we found ourselves at the top of a sheer drop off saying, “Hm. This is probably not right.” We’d check the map and see that we were WAY off course. Then, we would “find the trail”, but that just meant that our little GPS dots looked like they were in the right place. Sometimes, we would insist that we really did see a trail. “Oh yes! This is totally it!” one of us would say, as the other person nodded with great enthusiasm but weak conviction. Then, one step later, the hint of a trail would be gone again. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

At least if we were going to be lost forever, it was in a pretty place.

According to our maps, we were headed for a junction with Ptarmigan Pass Trail, our route for the next leg of the hike. As we struggled down the mountainside, we staked our hope on that transition. “That one is probably more popular, right?” “It can’t be worse than this, right?” “Don’t let me down, Ptarmigan!” I’m sure you can guess where this is going.

We overshot the imaginary junction. How could we not? We were on an imaginary trail, headed for another imaginary trail. I started yelling about how it should be called Pterodactyl Trail because it was extinct. This felt funny at the time, if that tells you anything about how we were doing mentally.

Olivia and I kept checking our maps. “The trail should be just over here.” “Mine shows it right over here.” I kept thinking that our GPS must just be a little off. It’s never perfect, plus we had no cell service which doesn’t help. Eventually, though, we determined that there was no trail. I wish I could say that we gave up on trying to follow it, but we didn’t. After all, the trail could magically appear at any second! Right? (Spoiler: wrong.)

The more we walked, the loopier we got. My terrible pterodactyl joke apparently wasn’t enough for me, so I kept going, asking Olivia if she was on the trail yet or pointing literally anywhere and saying, “I think that’s the trail there!” or, seeing that my GPS dot was in the “right” place, “Look! Can’t you tell that I’m on the trail?” Olivia was actually laughing at all of the jokes, so again, you can make your own call about how we were doing.

I look like I’m falling apart, and there’s a good reason for that.

Where’s the trail? Are you on the trail, Olivia?

The only positive I can come up with is that this “trail” was carpeted with little ground-cover-type plants that made the descent really nice on the knees. The negative is that you’re generally discouraged from going off trail to keep from killing things like little ground-cover plants… but we didn’t have much of a choice. We figured that no one was ever going to replicate our steps, so the plants would probably be fine.

There was a small part of me that felt like we were never going to get down to the bottom. Then, out of nowhere, this beautiful, bold trail came snaking up towards us. I was indignant, “HECK NO. There is NO WAY the whole trail was like this, and we just couldn’t find it.” No. It’s impossible. We zigzagged over every part of that mountain. There was nowhere left for it to hide.

Afterwards, it was almost comical to look at the map of our route. When you look at it from afar, it looks fine…

For reference, here’s the overall map of our route.

But if you zoom in, you can see the chaos.

At the top right, you can see the “junction” between the two trails. And then you can see how we absolutely didn’t even almost follow the “trail” (that skinny little yellow/orange line) down (we’re the thick orange line that looks like total nonsense).

The hike ended on a good note. The last trail was glorious – wide and flat, and we couldn’t have gotten lost if we tried. Shout out to Rabbit Lake Trail. You’re my hero. We zoomed back to the car, cranking out the last 2 miles like they were nothing.

Alaska State Fair & Giant Cabbages

Posted on March 18, 2025March 17, 2025 by Lark

On my first day in Alaska, Olivia and I participated in a quintessentially American experience – the state fair. The Alaska State Fair takes place at the end of the summer each year, and when Olivia asked if I’d like to go, it wasn’t a hard decision. Giant produce? Fair food? Random displays and exhibitions? Count me in.

I’d never been to a state fair before, and it was simultaneously exactly what I expected and full of surprises. There were booths selling knick-knacks next to booths selling saunas and hot tubs. We visited the reptile house and saw fish and snakes and lizards. We walked around the craft pavilion and admired the things that people quilted, knitted, crocheted, and cross-stitched. We felt the difference between alpaca and sheep and muskox fibers. We watched performances by various dance groups. And then… we headed to the farm pavilion.

The farm pavilion is where the action happens. It’s where the livestock is kept. The smells are unmatched. We saw sheep and pigs and goats and cows. There was a pregnant pig whose piglets could come at any second! We were a little early to witness the wonder of piglet-birth… 12 piglets were born two days later.

Anyway, the animals weren’t what I wanted to see. I took a look to be polite, but let’s be real – I was there for the giant produce. The pumpkin weigh-off had taken place the day before, so I was looking forward to seeing what a 2,035 lb pumpkin looked like. Olivia told me that it was going to be the size of a small car which was completely overselling it, unless she meant a toy car for children. I have to be honest. I was underwhelmed. I mean, it was an enormous pumpkin, but it wasn’t car-sized. It wasn’t even big enough to take a “James and the Giant Peach”-style adventure in. Oh well.

Even so, the day wasn’t a complete loss. We saw a giant zucchini and a carrot with roots that were at least 4 feet long. Whoever dug that up had some PATIENCE. There was an endless display of regular-sized produce that had been judged to determine the best in show. Best snap peas. Best basil. Apples, potatoes, broccoli, etc. It’s endless. All I could think about was the judges. How long does it take for them to judge all of the entries? How on earth do they determine a winner? The judging criteria was posted – clean, uniform, undamaged, size, color, etc. – but still. It feels very subjective. And after you look at hundreds of snap peas, do they not all start to look the same?

Me with the tiny pumpkin.
Also, apologies for the fact that I have so few pictures from the fair. I hadn’t yet decided that I was going to blog again, so I wasn’t in the same photo-taking mode as I would have been otherwise.

The only reason I have this prize-winning zucchini picture is because my mom also grows zucchini, and I thought she’d be entertained by this 23.9 lb monster.

I could go on and on about this, but I have more important things to discuss. We were fortunate to be in attendance on the day of the infamous Cabbage Weigh-Off. I will try to explain, but just know that no words can bring to life the energy, the tension, the excitement that filled the arena.

We sat down on the grandstand overlooking the holding pen. The competitors, seated on large tarps and pieces of plastic, waited around the perimeter with their humans. In the middle, there was a scale, presided over by an official of the Alaska Department of Weights and Measurements. Yes. This is a thing that exists, and contrary to my first thoughts, they do, in fact, have other responsibilities besides weighing large produce at the state fair each year, but none is as important.

This is my only picture of the weigh-off, so for the rest, you’re just going to have to use your imagination. You can see the scale in the middle of the holding pen (FYI no one calls it a holding pen. I just think it’s funny to do so. And no one else considers the cabbages to be the competitors, but really, doesn’t that make the most sense?). The pavilion where this all takes place is enormous. This photo shows probably less than half of its entire length. The livestock is out of frame to the left. You can see a wall straight ahead, and behind that is the rest of the produce, the flower displays, and the rabbits.

As we waited for the festivities to begin, the cabbage fairies (I’m not joking) circulated in the stands with baskets of “cabbage candy” (green-colored white chocolate rosettes). I ate one because I’m always up for some unpackaged candy in a basket that people are reaching into with their definitely clean hands. It’s best not to think too much about these things.

The fairies, though! They were clearly important. I had to know more. I did some quick googling and got the scoop. They are second-generation cabbage fairies. The original fairy group was founded by the mother of the Gen2 lead fairy. She attended the cabbage weigh-off one year and was inspired! (Understandable.) She created this costume that includes a skirt made of cabbage-leaf-shaped placemats. (I read an article about them – see “Sources” below – and that was specifically called out.) I was excited to see what they had planned. I thought that there would maybe be a cabbage-inspired dance or something. You know, a performance. I was a little disappointed to learn that mostly, they just exist. They’re like cabbage ambassadors. They also attend the pumpkin weigh-off, but they don’t dress like pumpkins. They do add some orange into their outfits for the occasion, though. I still think a cabbage dance would be a great addition. I’ll send a suggestion in.

The fairies seem to be one part of a multi-level response to the understanding that watching the weighing of 40 cabbages is not the most thrilling activity. The pumpkin weigh-off involves maneuvering the pumpkins onto the scale using a crane. That sounded exciting! Unfortunately, the cabbages aren’t heavy enough to warrant a crane, so there goes that entertainment option. Some of Olivia’s friends were emceeing the event, helping to move things along by interviewing the cabbages’ humans. Much of the questioning was focused on the cabbage’s name and, if it wasn’t obvious, asking for the provenance of the name. The youth division was up first. We had Dave the cabbage, named as such because “I dunno”. There was also Slug Snack. I liked that one. I wish I had written more down because for some reason, they don’t record the names of the cabbages on the website, just their handlers. That’s not right! Give credit where it’s due.

I expected more from the adults, but honestly, they weren’t much better. I did my own judging, quietly giving each cabbage handler a score for their naming skills. I think that should be an officially judged category in the future. Maybe then, people would take it a little more seriously.

Other side entertainments included the recitation of the top 3 entries to the cabbage limerick competition – yes, you read that right. If you’re interested, you don’t need to be from Alaska to enter! You just need to be struck by the cabbage inspiration fairy. (Link to the winners is below.)

The word is that things weren’t too hostile this year because no one had grown anything close to record-setting size. It was a bad summer (in fact, one cabbage was aptly named “Bad Summer”) – too wet and too much temperature fluctuation. I was told that in ultra-competitive years, the competitors (the cabbages, not the humans) need to be locked up to prevent any possible tampering. Yes, that’s right. Cabbage tampering. Also, apparently, cabbages begin losing body weight the instant they’re harvested, so there’s this balance between waiting as long as possible to harvest and also getting your cabbage to the fair on time.

The biggest cabbages were 90+ pounds. The 2024 winner was 97.35 lbs and its human was also responsible for the winning pumpkin. We learned that looks aren’t everything when it comes to cabbage size. Some of the heaviest ones were not the ones that looked the biggest. It’s all about density.

After the fair is over, the cabbages and other produce are donated to “various Community Services and the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center” (according to the Alaska State Fair website). So enjoy that mental picture – rescued bears eating prize-winning enormous pumpkins and cabbages. Or google it (or find a link in “Sources” below) and you can find actual videos. Or if you’re in Alaska at the right time, you can go and watch it in person!

After the weigh-in, I felt a bit dazed. Olivia and I wandered around a little longer, checking out the rabbits and a bonsai tree display. We ate some fair food for dinner and more fair food for dessert. I went home with a stomach in revolt which feels like an indication of a successful day at the fair.

Sources

Honestly, I recommend checking out all of these links. I found them all very entertaining, and they’re quick reads.

To learn about the cabbage fairies and see some good pictures…

Bushatz, Amy. “The Alaska State Fair cabbage fairies take a final bow, ushering in a new generation.” Anchorage Daily News, 2 September 2023, https://www.adn.com/alaska-life/2023/09/01/the-alaska-state-fair-cabbage-fairies-take-a-final-bow-ushering-in-a-new-generation/

If you’re wondering what a prize-winning cabbage limerick looks like…

Alaska State Fair. “Giant Cabbage Weigh-Off Limerick Contest – 2024.” https://www.alaskastatefair.org/site/result/giant-cabbage-weigh-off-limerick-contest-2024/

If you’d like to learn more about what goes into growing an award-winning pumpkin (there’s a video!)…

Klecka, Joey. “Alaska State Fair crowns giant pumpkin winner for 2024.” Alaska’s News Source, 26 August 2024, https://www.alaskasnewssource.com/2024/08/26/live-alaska-state-fair-giant-pumpkin-weigh-off/

To see some bears eating large veggies…

Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center. “Big Bears Big Veggies 2024.” https://alaskawildlife.org/event/big-bears-big-veggies-2024/

Note: These external links are not maintained. If they stop working at some point, sorry! They worked once upon a time.

Welcome to Alaska!

Posted on March 11, 2025March 10, 2025 by Lark

Surprise!! Hello, friends! It’s been a LONG time, but we’re back in action! I must say, I’ve missed this. I’ve been feeling for a while like I wanted to get back to blogging, and hey, 2025 is the year! The real question – what am I going to write about? Yes, I’m a “normal” person again. You know, working a job that actually pays me (weird) but that also limits my vacation time (boo). Despite that, I have taken some fun trips since reentering the real world, and I’ve been itching to write about them. So, here we are! We’re going to talk about some new(er) travels and maybe hopefully someday get back to some unfinished adventures from the past. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though. For now…

Welcome to Alaska!! Actually, getting back into things by talking about my Alaska travels is kind of perfect. How did this trip even come about? SO GLAD YOU ASKED. I was catching up with my friend Olivia who, fun fact, you already know! (Well, my faithful readers at least.) Olivia and I met in Armenia while we were both volunteering at Aleppo-NGO. We hit it off, and that was the beginning of a friendship that has survived the six (SIX?!?!) years that we’ve been on opposite sides of the world.

Olivia still lives abroad, and we’d been trying to coordinate a trip together. Schedules are tricky things, and we couldn’t nail anything down. Olivia said, “The only thing I know for sure is that I’ll be on home leave at the end of August.” We paused. I thought, “Wait, her home is…” just as she said, “Wait, my home is Alaska. Do you want to come to Alaska??” I think the “yes” was out of my mouth before she even finished asking. I looked at plane tickets. I bought plane tickets. And 6 weeks later, we were reunited! In Alaska!

I don’t know if you remember how we do things here (I don’t know if I remember how we do things here…), but a new place means a new list of first impressions. And so, here we go! My (very long-winded) Alaska (mostly Anchorage / some season-specific to the end of summer) first impressions…

(I promise all of my posts aren’t going to be this long, but I guess I had some pent-up writing energy after all these years.)

1. Flowers

There. Are. Flowers. EVERYWHERE. In people’s yards. In planters. In hanging baskets (we’ll come back to this). In landscaped medians. Sure, flowers aren’t unique to Anchorage, but I’m telling you, whatever people plant other places, there it’s more. It’s like people know that they only have a few months to enjoy them, so they’ve decided to make the most of it.

That’s the other thing. Having that many flowers with the climate what it is… that takes effort and planning. You can’t just wait for nature to make things happen because there’s not enough time. Growing season is late May to September. Those flowers are greenhouse and garage started.

Also, apparently the long daylight hours and summer temperatures make it so that the plants are especially large and vibrant. I believe it.

One of the many flowerbeds in the city. Look at those colors! I’ll include more individual flower pictures for your viewing pleasure as we go.

Two of the infamous hanging baskets… at least, I assume there are hanging baskets hiding somewhere in that mass of flowers.

2. Hanging Basket Capital of the World

I think Olivia made this up. What does it even mean? Who is responsible for handing out this honor, and how is it calculated? Quantity of hanging baskets per person? Per square mile?

Questions aside, there is a great volume of hanging baskets, and they’re all filled with flowers. And the flowers are all still alive which means someone is taking good care of them… or, I suppose, many someones, because with 9.5 hanging baskets per capita (invented statistic), everyone needs to be pulling their weight.

Aside from the summer care, people also do the work to keep the plants alive through the winter, either paying to board them at a greenhouse (no joke) or wintering them in a garage or basement until it’s time to get them ready to go outside again.

3. Weather

I have been to at least 5 places where people claim that their weather is more unpredictable than anywhere else in the universe. “We can have all four seasons in one day!” they say. “It’s like nowhere else!” I’m sorry to break it to all of those people, but this situation is not unique. It is, however, annoying, no matter where it’s the case. Alaska makes the list.

In my opinion, weather predictions are semi-useless always (sorry, weatherpeople), but in Anchorage, I don’t know why we even bothered checking. The best plan is to ignore the weather reports, decide what you’re going to do, and do it – while being prepared to dress for every possibility (LAYERS, waterproof everything, sunscreen, etc.).

4. Long days

This one feels obvious, but knowing it and living it are two different things. I wasn’t even there when the days were longest. Our days were around 7AM – 9PM, whereas the longest day has nearly 19.5 hours of daylight with sunrise at 4:20AM and sunset at 11:42PM! We had some late starts, but even so, we still had plenty of daylight and plenty of time for activities.

The negative of this is that you don’t realize how late it is, and then it gets dark and you realize, “Oh no! I need to be in bed, like, NOW.” Which may also explain our leisurely starts each day. So maybe it all cancels itself out.

The flipside of the long summer days is, of course, the short winter days. I’ve been struggling with our 9ish hours of winter sunlight at home. On the shortest day in Anchorage, they only get about 5.5 hours of sunlight (10:14AM – 3:41PM), and apparently, even then it never really feels like full-on daytime because the sun is so low.

5. Comfy college student dress code

I remember when I was looking at universities, I was drawn to Penn State because I saw people wearing sweatpants to class, and that was exactly the dress code intensity I was interested in (is that pathetic? Oh well). Anchorage fashion is absolutely my vibe – leggings, hiking boots or sneakers, an outdoorsy fleece, a puffer jacket, a headband. Count me in.

Dahlias are such satisfyingly chunky flowers.

Not quite as pretty as the flowers, but here you go: bear trash can. I should have gotten a picture of one in the city, but just trust me. They’re everywhere.

6. Up close and personal with nature – bear trash cans

If you’ve ever been camping in a bear-y area, you are familiar with bear trash cans. I read somewhere once that the challenge with designing these trash cans is that there’s an overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans… but I digress. The point is, these trash cans are used in areas where bears frequent, and they’re designed with the intent that humans can open them while bears cannot.

Now, I had never seen a bear trash can until maybe college, when I started getting out into the wild more. City trash cans at home are, well, regular trash cans. They’re wide open, just begging squirrels and raccoons to come and feast. In Anchorage, every trash can is a bear trash can. The bears don’t care that it’s a city.

7. Life with animals

The bear trash can thing is linked to another observation – people are used to life being somewhat dictated by wildlife. This was strange to me because there aren’t many wild animals at home that would cause me to change my plans. My presence strikes fear into the hearts of foxes and rabbits and squirrels. Deer flee from me in terror. Sure, if I saw a bear, I would stay out of its way, but there are no bears in my neighborhood. Bears live in the woods where “Be Alert for Bears” signs are posted.

The animals of Anchorage are poorly trained. The bears don’t seem to know that they’re supposed to stay in the woods. Olivia’s mom took me on a field trip to see a “neighborhood moose” (a moose… in the neighborhood). It was eating apples from someone’s tree. She had no sympathy, saying that if those people cared about their apples getting eaten, they would have put up netting around the tree. I guess that’s like having a garden with no fence getting eaten by rabbits. Like, what did you expect?

“Oh, it’s just a baby!” Olivia’s mom exclaimed when we spotted the moose. Moose. Are. Big.

As we drove away, she rolled down the window to tell some people who were jogging with a dog that there was a moose up ahead. They thanked her and just turned around, rather than taking a chance with the dog/moose combination.

Olivia said that in the week before I came, she was jogging on the coastal trail (a path along the water in downtown Anchorage) and saw three black bear cubs on the trail. Her thoughts went from, “Oh, cute!” to, “Wait, where’s mom?” anddd she turned around and went back the way she came.

Okay, I mean, all of this makes sense to me. Of course you need to respect nature in a different way when you’re living with animals like that. But it’s just something I never have to think about, whereas there it’s a part of life.

Okay one more moose picture because I’m still not over the whole “seeing a moose in the neighborhood as it eats your neighbor’s apples” thing.

8. “Lower 48”

This is another “makes sense but I’d never thought about before” observation. People are constantly talking about “the lower 48” aka the contiguous USA. I found this fascinating because down here in the lower 48, there is no catch-all term for the rest of the “mainland” states. “The other 47”, perhaps? But when would you ever use it?

I also felt bad (not really) because it’s like Alaska is constantly thinking about us down here, but how often do any of us think about them way up there? Poor Alaska.

9. Acting like Alaska is not far away

People in Alaska, at least the ones who travel to the lower 48, talk about traveling back and forth like Alaska isn’t really that far away. If I didn’t know any better, I would think that Alaska was located smack dab in the middle of the US. People are “just in town for the weekend” or are “back and forth”. So casual. Multiple times, I found myself listening to conversations where I felt like I needed to jump in and clarify, “I’m sorry, we’re talking about LA like Los Angeles? Like the LA that isn’t close to here? You’re going there? For the weekend?”

Anchorage to Seattle is a 3.5 hour flight with an hour time difference. Anchorage to Los Angeles is 5.5 hours. Anchorage to Philadelphia is a 4-hour time difference and at least 11 hours of travel. IT IS NOT CLOSE. Boggles. My. Mind.

10. Private planes and pilot licenses

Alaska has the highest percentage of licensed pilots per capita in the USA. A 2023 article said that 1 in 78 Alaskans is a licensed pilot which is 6x the number anywhere else in the US.

This makes sense because Alaska is not the most accessible place. Only 20% of Alaska is accessible by road. Juneau, the STATE CAPITAL, isn’t accessible by road, only by boat or plane.

This also means that there are a ton of small, private planes. On a nice day, it sounds like they are constantly flying overhead. There are even some houses with airplane garages and neighborhood runways! Many people have houses outside of Anchorage that they travel to via plane.

Can you spot the runway? Can you spot the AIRPLANE sitting in front of someone’s garage? Can you spot the garage that looks suspiciously big enough to fit said airplane??

We also drove past the Lake Hood Seaplane Base… I should have taken a better picture but was too busy gaping. There are nonstop seaplanes and little plane huts. It’s wild.

Since I didn’t take a good picture of the full scope of the area, please appreciate this snip from Google maps satellite view. And this isn’t even the whole thing.

In case you’re having trouble seeing what we’re looking at in that last picture… SEAPLANES. SO MANY SEAPLANES.

11. Balto

If you’ve never heard of Balto, the sled dog that saved the town of Nome, Alaska from a 1925 diphtheria epidemic, you need to watch more animated movies.

To summarize, the doctor in town quickly raised the alarm and asked for antitoxin to be sent ASAP. Without it, the entire town could be wiped out. The nearest supply was in Anchorage, but the only way to reach Nome in the winter conditions was by using the dogsled mail route. (The port was closed for the winter, there was no train to Nome, and planes at the time couldn’t handle the trip.) A train took the serum north, but it still needed to travel 674 miles west by dogsled. It was estimated that it would only keep for 6 days on the trail, 3 days fewer than the fastest travel time recorded.

A relay was organized with 20 mushers and over 150 dogs. The conditions were horrible, with temperatures of -50°F and colder, blizzard conditions (snow and wind), and January winter darkness. Multiple mushers got frostbite. Many dogs died along the way. The journey was completed in 5.5 days, and thanks to the quick response, fewer than 10 deaths were recorded in Nome (though there were likely additional unreported deaths in the surrounding Alaska Native communities).

Many people think Balto gets outsized glory considering that he and his team traveled only the final 55 miles. Togo, another lead dog, led his team 170 miles to pick up the serum and then another 90 miles back to hand it off to the next relay team, covering one of the most dangerous parts of the journey. Most other teams traveled 25-40 miles.

ANYWAY, the point of all of that is: Balto gets a LOT of glory. You can find him everywhere! I have pictures with THREE Balto statues from my time in Alaska. I’m sure that’s only a small sampling of the full supply. If ever you see a statue of a dog (even in NYC Central Park), I bet you $1 it’s Balto.

Whew! Okay, that was a lot. I hope you’re feeling slightly acclimated to Alaska. There’s more to come! Until next time…

Me and Olivia with Balto in downtown Anchorage.

Me and Olivia with Balto at the visitor center in Palmer.

Me with Balto outside the Iditarod museum.

Sources

I decided to start including my research sources in case anyone is interested in some additional reading (or feel free to ignore if you’re not). Some are pretty entertaining. Also, now you can know that, when I post things that seem absolutely insane, I’m not making things up… I’m just believing and re-posting things that other people made up. (English teachers – I know these are improper citations, and I don’t care.)

Flowers/Hanging Baskets

Anchorage Parks and Recreation. “Frequently Asked Questions.” Municipality of Anchorage. www.muni.org/Departments/parks/pages/ghfaq.aspx

Lowenfels, Jeff. “Alaska is the land of hanging baskets. Here’s how to store yours in winter.” Anchorage Daily News, 7 September 2023, www.adn.com/alaska-life/gardening/2023/09/07/alaska-is-a-land-of-hanging-baskets-heres-how-to-store-yours-in-winter/

Planes (I barely used this article, but it was fascinating)

Johnson, Acacia. “The lifeline of flying: the pilots connecting remote communities in Alaska.” The Guardian, 22 May 2023, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/may/22/its-almost-spiritual-the-female-pilots-connecting-remote-alaska

Balto

National Park Service. “Togo.” www.nps.gov/people/togo.htm#:~:text=Though%20Balto%20received%20the%20credit,at%20the%20age%20of%2016

Alaska Mushing School. “The 1925 Serum Run.” www.alaskamushingschool.com/learn/1925-serum-run-to-nome/

Note: These external links are not maintained. If they stop working at some point, sorry! They worked once upon a time.

Welcome to Quito and Quito Botanical Gardens

Posted on February 19, 2021 by Lark

Welcome to Quito! After nearly two weeks of baking in the Galapagos sun, the cool, night air that greeted me in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, was a welcome change! Quito is way up in the highlands, built on the side of a volcano at an altitude of 9,350ft (2,850m) (for a couple of reference points, Denver, CO is at 5,280ft/1,600m, and Cusco, Peru is at 11,200ft/3,400m… so Quito is somewhere in between). Unfortunately for me, the cool temperatures didn’t extend to daytime hours, so I was still sweating my brains out most of the time.

Last time, we left off on Isabela Island, and the trek from there to my Quito hostel was… lengthy. It involved a 2-ish hour ferry back to Santa Cruz (this was a rough one… I did that thing where I closed my eyes and repeatedly told myself that I didn’t feel nauseous in the spirit of “fake it ‘til you make it”. Didn’t work), a 40-minute taxi ride across Santa Cruz to the northern dock (with our good friend Fredy from our visit to the Santa Cruz highlands!), a 5-minute ferry ride to Baltra Island (where the airport is located), a 10-minute bus ride to the airport, a 4-hour wait at the airport (my family’s flight was earlier, but it didn’t make sense to go separately), a 2-hour flight to Quito, and finally, a 1-hour taxi ride to the city (I researched public transit and it was NOT worth it). Woof.

I have lots of botanical garden pics, so I’m going to start putting them in now. Enjoy!

More dangly flowers! They’re like Christmas tree ornaments.

I gave myself one “chill/get organized” day in Quito before reentering sightseeing mode. After nearly 4 weeks of constant go-go-go, first with my parents in Peru and then with my aunt, uncle, and cousins in the Galapagos, I needed to pull myself back together, take a few deep breaths, and most of all, do some laundry! My clothes were all gross, to the point where it was a struggle to decide what to wear/forgo washing while everything else was being cleaned. I lugged every single item of clothing that I had (7lbs, apparently) to a nearby laundry shop and paid a lady $4.50 to wash it all. Not bad. When I got them back, I think my clothes were the cleanest they’d been in 10 months.

The next day, I rejoined the world. It was a Sunday, so I found an English-speaking church online, got some public transit advice, and set out on my first adventure. Well. The day got off to a rough start. On Sundays, some of Quito’s major roads close to car traffic for the “Ciclopaseo” (bike path). It’s actually awesome – people can bike/walk on 18 miles (29km) of closed roads! But for me, it was a headache. Bus routes on those roads are rerouted, so I hopped on the first bus that was headed in the right direction and figured I’d walk the rest of the way once I got close.

Okay, great, except Quito is HUGE. Since it’s in a valley, it’s somewhat narrow but very long, and for some reason, I could not get a handle on its scale while looking at google maps. I would look up the location of something, see where it was in relation to me, and think, “Okay, looks like maybe a 10-minute walk.” Get directions… “40 minutes”. WHAT.

So, I got off the bus thinking, “I’m pretty close now!” NOPE. 25 minutes. Church started in 20, so I powerwalked it. That would have been fine… except that the high elevation soon had me panting, and surprise! HILLS. My gosh. I juuust made it on time but had to pause outside for a minute to avoid passing out. Inside, I spent the beginning of the service attempting to silently breathe heavily (impossible) and trying (failing) to stop sweating. Well, the good news is that I’ll never see any of those people again. (The bad news is that I’ve gone to church a bunch of times throughout my travels, and no matter how much time I allow to get there… I show up nearly late/panting and sweaty EVERY TIME. I guess that’s just kind of my thing now.)

This flower is crazy! And pretty! But like… what?

Ah I love this one too. (Spoiler alert: I love them all.)

After church, I made my way, at a much more leisurely pace, to the Quito Botanical Gardens. I estimated it should take 10 minutes to walk there. Ha. 30 minutes later…

Botanical gardens are the BEST because you get places like this in the middle of a city

I LOVE BOTANICAL GARDENS. I don’t know anything about plants, but I love flowers. I mean, I also don’t know anything about flowers, but sometimes, it’s nice to have something that you enjoy without needing its whole backstory. And so, I’m going to tell you a little bit about the botanical gardens in general, but mostly, just enjoy the pretty pictures. I don’t know what anything is.

This is the cactus pavilion. I just made that name up, but that’s what it is.

Also, what on earth is happening with this one?! Fascinating. (These captions are basically just going to be my internal dialogue, so apologies in advance.)

Ecuador has incredible ecological diversity, and the Quito Botanical Gardens attempt to capture that diversity in one place. There are plants from all of the country’s major ecosystems… I really appreciated the “tropical rainforest” greenhouse. I was already melting outside, and inside, it was EVEN HOTTER. It actually made the million-degree outside air feel cool when I finally exited (an effect that was, sadly, short-lived).

This is some sort of tropical plant. I know because it was in the bazillion-degree tropical greenhouse. I took very few pictures in there because I was dying.

Roses!! There was a rose garden, but it wasn’t doing especially well. I probably wasn’t there at the right time. But these are looking very pretty!

There were loads of interesting bamboo structures around, and since I had just come from Peru where they were finishing up the **bamboo roof** on our building, I was extremely excited about them.

This is bamboo, too. To make the walls, they split the bamboo and used the fragments to create a flat-ish surface. What a funky shape!

And then there’s this… I am obsessed with this. I want it in my future yard. I don’t know what the thought process was because it’s not especially functional (at least based on my assessment)… but if they were going for pretty and fun to walk through, they nailed it. Except beware because there’s an irrigation system that might surprise you with a nice drip down your back. But hey, if it’s hot enough, that will make you like it even more.

I LOVE THESE. They’re some of my most favorite flowers, and lucky for me, they’re not just found in Ecuador. I’ve even seen people growing them in our neighborhood in Pennsylvania! They’re “lantanas” which I only know because I love them so much and figured it would be good to find out what they’re called so that I can have some someday.

They come in a bunch of different colors.

Some succulents from the cactus area. I think succulents are so interesting and also am sure that if I ever got one, I’d do the impossible and manage to kill it.

I laughed at this… palm tree? It kind of looks like a ginormous aloe plant, but pretty sure it’s a palm tree? Also, those fronds are a little spiky and VERY intense

These. I love them. A part of me wants to eat them because they look a bit like a delicious candy. Also, honestly, they might just be weeds that were growing but I don’t care. I’m no flower snob.

The greenhouses are beautiful! So picturesque.

This is in the “carnivorous plants” greenhouse. When I first got to the gardens, someone went over the map with me and gave recommendations (in Spanish) for where I should go/in what order. I think that I was focusing so hard on understanding what he was saying that when he got to “carnivorous plants”, my mind was so busy translating that it said, “Wait, WHAT?” My eyes got super wide, and pretty sure I looked terrified. He laughed at me and assured me that they don’t eat people. I felt so silly afterward because DUH, I know what carnivorous plants are, but my brain just failed to process the information properly. Whoops. Oh well. Happy to entertain. Anyway, here they are. Ready to eat me.

These have to be the weirdest plants. (Also, I have to admit that even though I knew they weren’t going to eat me, being around them gave me the creeps.)

This is not a human-eating flower. It’s just a fun, pretty, dangly flower!

The orchid greenhouse was one of my favorites! There are over 4,000 identified species of orchids in Ecuador, and it has the most endemic orchid species (meaning they occur naturally ONLY in Ecuador) of any country – over 1,700! The botanical garden hosts more than 1,200 species. I didn’t know much about orchids and still don’t… BUT, now I’ve seen a ton of them, and I love them.

But remember, there are 1200 species in the botanical gardens, so this is like nothing.

They’re so interesting! They just look totally different from other flowers

Ooo these are super cool with the multi-colored top and the white bottom! And I clearly have no idea what I’m talking about. Except that they’re definitely cool.

I know that this is totally manmade, but they did a good job of making it feel like a little bit of organized chaos, just like natural nature.

THESE. I don’t have anything else to say. Just look at them!

I think that’s all for my orchid collection.

The plants suspended overhead are my favorite part

Eventually, my wanderings led me to the botanical gardens’ collection of bonsai trees. This was fantastic for multiple reasons. First, bonsai trees are fascinating. Second, they’re housed in the most incredible bamboo structure. I spent more time looking at the bamboo than I did the trees… oops. But come on, can you blame me? Check it out.

Lots of little bonsai trees on their own little podiums

I know that this is probably the dumbest thing I can say… but look at this! It’s just like a tiny tree! (Duh, Lara, that’s the whole point… I KNOW. But it’s still mind-boggling.)

Interrupting the bamboo content with another tiny tree…

Okay, last one. But this one has what looks like tiny little flowers on it, and I am in awe. It’s just like a tiny tree.

I ended my visit in the Zen garden and, since I had nowhere to be, I spent nearly an hour sitting by the pond, enjoying the peace and quiet and reading a book. The botanical gardens are in the middle of a busy park, but somehow, they block out the noise and feel like a secret, silent oasis.

Altogether, I spent about 4 hours in the gardens. I was shocked when I checked my watch. It was like a time warp! It was also the perfect way to start my time in Quito and ease back into sightseeing mode. Calm, relaxing, and beautiful… what more could you want?

Don’t you feel relaxed just looking at it? I feel relaxed.

Isabela Island – Los Túneles

Posted on February 12, 2021February 16, 2021 by Lark

Does it feel like we’ve been in the Galapagos forever? Well, there are certainly worse places to spend however many months it’s taken me to write these posts. Believe it or not, though, we’ve made it to the final full day of our trip! We had one last tour scheduled, and the day kicked off when my alarm went off at 6:30AM… approximately 30 minutes after I fell asleep after spending most of the night trying, and failing, to fall asleep through the New Year’s party happening in the town square. Anyway, suffice to say that the day wasn’t off to an ideal start.

On top of that, it was raining. Of course. I was hoping that it would be like some of the other days when it rained in the morning but stopped by the time we got to wherever we were going, but we weren’t so lucky. The good news is that it’s hard to have a bad day in the Galapagos! Even with the rain, we got to see some amazing things.

Our destination for the day wasn’t too far away. We were headed to Los Túneles (The Tunnels), an area on Isabela Island (where we were staying) that’s known for being a great snorkel spot and for its lava formations. We’ll get to that, but first… it takes about 40 minutes to get there by boat, and on the way, we saw manta rays in the ocean!! I don’t think I even know that these things existed, and if you’re like me… think stingray, but HUGE. The ones we saw were probably at most 10ft (3m) from fin tip to fin tip, but on average, they’re about 15ft (4.5m). At their largest, they can be 23ft (7m) across! Oh, and weigh 6600lbs (3000kg). HOW did I not know about them?? Man, the ocean is a CRAZY place.

For context, we were staying in Puerto Villamil (on the south coast), and Los Tuneles is about at the blue pin.

The captain stopped the boat so that we could watch them, and the guide explained that they are very curious and often stop to investigate/“play” with boats. They were sticking their fins out of the water (looking creepily like shark fins) and flipping over to show their bright white undersides. They may be intimidatingly large, but they aren’t harmful to humans. They can’t sting, and they eat plankton by filter feeding, like blue whales. To do so, they swim with their giant mouths open (the largest ones could fit multiple grown humans in their mouths… eek!) and direct plankton and water in with the help of these weird little flexible horns that they have. Everything goes through a filtering system, and food gets consumed while water gets expelled. They can also swim impressively fast. At a sprint, they can reach speeds up to about 22mph (35km/h), though they usually cruise at closer to 9mph (15km/h). One more fun fact… they have the biggest brains of any fish.

Here’s a not-great-but-best-I-have video of one of them surfacing. You can see the horns I mentioned (they’re the things sticking out of the water above its gills).

After they got tired of us, we continued along to our first stop. Los Túneles has some amazing lava formations. As its name suggests, there are lots of tunnels underneath the surface, plus caves and bridges. Remember how we’ve talked about how lava formed the islands? As we’ve seen in other places, there can be voids underneath the surface in the form of lava tubes and such. That, in combination with the erosion caused by waves crashing into the coastline, created a landscape unlike anything I’d ever seen before.

Aside from the fact that it was STILL raining, I was thrilled to have the chance to walk around. We got to walk over some of the lava bridges, and the water surrounding us was so incredibly clear that we could see all sorts of sea life swimming by! We saw a few golden rays (so, so, so cool to see them swimming! Even if they’re much smaller than manta rays), plus tons of sea turtles. Oh, what I would have given to swim in that water! But it’s a protected area, so no swimming allowed.

Rain making a strong appearance in this picture.

With the bridges and the cacti… man. What a weird landscape, right?

There were also a bunch of blue-footed boobies with some of the brightest feet I’ve seen, plus their chicks. We had seen a few newborn chicks on Espanola Island, and they weren’t especially cute… they looked a bit like dinosaur/alien babies. These ones were a little farther along, though, and they were little fluffballs.

Okay so like… prepare yourself for so many blue-footed booby pics because I tried my hardest to narrow them down, and this IS the narrowed down selection.

They don’t seem to love the rain… Also, those little piles of white fluff (one in front and one in the back) are babies. They… yeah. They don’t look thrilled.

So many pics, I just couldn’t choose between them!

Also a little mysterious/menacing maybe?

From there, we headed to the snorkel spot. It wasn’t quite as cool as near the tunnels, mostly because the water wasn’t as clear, but there was a LOT of wildlife. In some places, it was very shallow, and the bottom had a lot of loose plant matter on it that people kept kicking up with their fins which made it even more difficult to see (just a PSA if you ever go snorkeling, especially with other people around. Try to keep your feet submerged while you’re kicking so that you don’t create bubbles, and be extra careful not to move the water too much if there’s stuff on the bottom! In general, just try to be aware of your surroundings. Your fellow snorkelers will appreciate it).

Hehe I actually have a few more blue-footed booby pics, but I thought you could use a break.

We saw SO many sea turtles, and some of them were absolutely huge… practically land tortoise-sized! There were approximately a billion fish, some in giant schools, that swam so close I could have touched them (but ew, no thanks). The most exciting thing was that we got to see sharks!! I know, who am I? Me, excited to see sharks? Well, I was also terrified, but I lived through my first shark sighting at Las Tintoreras and was ready for another.

The guide pretty much guaranteed that we would see whitetip reef sharks on the tour, named for the white markings on their fin tips (creative, right?) and the fact that they generally stick to shallower areas, usually in water 25-130ft deep (8-40m). They mostly hunt at night, and during the days, they rest in caves, often returning to the same cave day after day. A lot of sharks need to swim to breathe, but not these sharks! Their bodies can actively pump water over their gills, allowing them to rest in place. We popped our heads into a few of their resting caves and saw crazy numbers of sharks lined up across the cave floor like enchiladas. We saw one swimming, and I almost had a heart attack. He was right in front of me! Came out of nowhere and we were probably within touching distance. I backpedaled a bit, he turned, and whew! I survived. Again, though, I surprised myself and was more excited than scared. Nice!

It’s pretty dark in the caves, so photo-taking isn’t the easiest, but my cousin did get this picture of one chilling close to the mouth of the cave. Note the white tip on the top fin.

The last thing we did was swim through a mangrove… grove? Mangrove forest? Through some mangroves? However you’d properly say it, you get what I mean. Mangroves grow in the water and provide a great habitat for all sorts of creatures, especially for those who are a little more vulnerable, like babies. They can hide in the tangled roots of the mangroves, out of the sight and reach of predators.

We had one last exciting sighting for the day… seahorses! The seahorses found in the Galapagos are Pacific seahorses, also known as GIANT seahorses. Get this… they average 4.5-7.5 inches in height (12-20cm). Massive, right? Like other seahorses, the males carry the babies. Females deposit eggs into a pouch, the males fertilize the eggs and seal the pouch, and after 14 days, they go into labor, pushing out little baby seahorses that are around a centimeter or less in height. They can be a variety of colors, including green, brown, maroon, grey, and yellow. We got to see three! They were clinging to the mangrove roots with their tails, and without a guide pointing them out, there’s no chance we would have spotted them. I suppose that’s kind of what they’re going for…

Seahorse photos also thanks to my cousin!

After that, we headed back to the boat and rode “home” to Puerto Villamil. To everyone’s delight, we saw more manta rays on the way back! What a great day!

That was our final full day on Isabela. The next afternoon, we took a ferry back to Santa Cruz to catch our flights to the mainland. I was headed to Quito, Ecuador’s capital, and the rest of my family was headed back to the States. We did have time for one more little exploration… near the dock in Puerto Villamil, there’s a snorkeling spot called “Concha de Perla” (Pearl Shell). It’s a sheltered little lagoon where you can swim with sea lions and turtles and rays… it’s supposed to be really great! We didn’t have time to snorkel, but we did enjoy walking there through the mangrove groves (hehe) and admiring the crystal-clear water at the other end. So, if you’re ever on Isabela, I strongly recommend snorkeling there. As for me, I guess I’ll just have to wait until I visit again someday!

Of course with some sea lions doing their best to be in the way

The church in Puerto Villamil… interesting architecture

The smaller dock used for excursion departures

North Seymour Island – walk around some blue-footed booby nesting grounds.

Las Grietas and Los Gemelos – lava tubes and other cavities beneath the surface contributed to the formations in Los Tuneles. Check out some lava tubes and collapsed magma chambers on Santa Cruz Island!

Las Tintoreras – if you’re a fan of bright blue water, you’ll love Las Tintoreras.

Sierra Negra Volcano – hike to one of the volcanos that formed Isabela Island and admire some amazing lava colors!

Española Island – go back to where our Galapagos journey began and see some baby Nazca boobies!

Isabela Island – Sierra Negra Volcano

Posted on February 5, 2021February 5, 2021 by Lark

Most Galapagos day tours have a similar pattern… boat ride, walk around and look at animals, snorkel, boat ride, home. On our second-to-last day, we did something a little different and went on a hiking tour! It was to Sierra Negra (Black Mountain), one of the six shield volcanoes that make up Isabela Island, the largest island in the Galapagos. Five of these volcanoes are still active, Sierra Negra included. Its last eruption was in 2018! The main town, Puerto Villamil, is located just to its south, but thankfully, the lava from that eruption mostly made its way north. There are, however, parts of the hiking trail that are still closed because they were covered by lava. Sierra Negra erupts approximately every 15 years, so keep that in mind when you’re planning your trip! Hehe just kidding. They’re super cautious and monitor the volcano closely, and no one is allowed to visit without a guide. I will say, though, that the previous eruption in 2005 came with no advance warning signs… sooo the only sure bet is to steer clear.

Well, I didn’t know any of that before we went, and maybe that’s for the better. We were picked up bright and early, as usual, and took a bus from Puerto Villamil to the eastern side of the volcano. The tour involved a hike up the rim, a walk along the perimeter, and then an exploration of the lava fields to the northeast of the caldera.

Sierra Negra, besides being one of the most active Galapagos volcanoes, has the largest caldera. It’s oval-shaped, and its long axis is almost 6 miles (9.3km) across! Interestingly, it’s also very shallow, only about 330ft (100m) deep, making it the shallowest one on Isabela.

The beginning of the hike was a gradual but constant uphill as we made our way up the side of the volcano to the rim. Remember, shield volcanoes are short and wide and are formed by long-duration eruption events where very flowy lava is supplied continuously. Explosive eruptions, in contrast, are shorter-lived and result in taller and steeper volcanoes. The shallower slope was fine with me! No need to rock climb our way to the rim. Even so, it reaches an altitude of nearly 4,500 feet (1,120m), so don’t be imagining some little hill!

There was a decent amount of vegetation along the way, but as we moved farther up, it began to thin. Sierra Negra is the greenest on its southern slope, the windward side, because it gets more moisture thanks to the wind. That’s also where the Sierra Negra wild tortoises are mostly found. At the start of the hike, there were green, leafy plants and trees lining the path. By the time we reached the rim, there wasn’t much vegetation taller than I am, and the wildlife sightings were limited to a few little birds.

One of the only critters we saw during the hike

Our first view of the caldera was a bit jarring. We were lucky that it wasn’t too cloudy, giving us decent visibility to the other side… which was VERY far away. I mean, I know that I told you how big it is, but to stand there and see miles and miles of black lava rocks… it’s a strange sight.

Isn’t it amazing? The dark spots are cloud shadows

The guide told us that the lava patterns on the floor of the caldera tell the story of how it was formed. I’m not fluent in lava (and honestly, I had trouble paying attention to the guide), so I can’t tell you what they say, but it is interesting to see how much variation exists in something that, at first glance, appears somewhat uniform.

Some better views of the lava variations on the caldera floor

If I told you this was another planet, would you doubt me for a second?

There are a bunch of big cracks along the perimeter, like this one

The caldera was cool, but without a doubt, the best part of the excursion was the lava fields. To the northeast of the main caldera, there’s a “parasitic cone” called Volcán Chico (Little Volcano). I’m not a big fan of that name… it sounds kind of gross. Alternatively called a “satellite cone”, it’s a location where lava escapes from fractures in the side of the volcano, outside of the main caldera, forming cone-shaped lava accumulations. The final leg of the hike took us through the lava fields to the cone of Volcán Chico.

The lava fields are… thought provoking? That’s probably an uncommon assessment, but for me, they prompted a whole series of “THAT’S CRAZY!” thoughts. For example, Isabela is one of the youngest Galapagos islands. As I walked across the barren expanse of lava, I kept thinking about the fact that at some point, all of the islands looked like that. Seeing that made it even more amazing that plants and animals managed to survive and eventually thrive there. Like… there was NOTHING at the beginning. Now, some of the islands even have rainforests!

There is a little bit of life trying to pop up

The guide pointed out various formations along the way and explained that the different colors of lava result from the oxidation of various minerals. By looking at the coloring, scientists can determine what lava came from which eruption. The least colorful stuff is usually more recent because it hasn’t had as much time to oxidize. I’ve seen a lot of lava in my life, but I can’t remember ever seeing so much color and vibrance. It was beyond amazing. And beautiful!!

There are also natural vents across the landscape, places where you can hold your hand above a hole in the ground and feel heat coming out. It’s a little spooky to think that you’re feeling the heat of the Earth’s core. Eek! Also creepy is when you see a formation that looks like it could be water, frozen in time. It’s a bit of a reality check, like, “Hey! In case you forgot, this used to be FLOWING. Oh yeah, and it wasn’t water. It was MOLTEN LAVA.” Nope. No, thank you. You can keep that molten lava faaaaar away from me.

Okay so like I said, I didn’t do a great job of listening to the guide, but he was really amped about this material on the lava… I THINK it’s sulfur, but don’t quote me.

This looks like a wave in the ocean. Okay, now imagine it’s molten lava.

A partially-collapsed lava tube in the lava fields.

Finally, we reached Volcán Chico. The view is bizarre. You can see the northern part of the island, and it doesn’t look like it belongs on this planet. Elizabeth Bay is in the distance. The best part, though, is the COLORS around the cone. I’m not even going to attempt to explain it. Just soak in the amazingness of these pictures.

Sorry in advance for the million pictures that are nearly identical… except that I’m not sorry because they’re awesome and you have no idea how many I filtered out to end up with these million that I want to show you.

I look pretty happy in this picture, but I promise you that this doesn’t even begin to do my excitement level justice.

Then there’s this… black, black, black, GOLD!

It’s like a treasure trove of the world’s prettiest lava rocks

The guides started herding us back to the bus before I was ready to go. It was like looking at really pretty fall foliage, where you wish that you could capture what you’re seeing and what you’re feeling and bottle it up forever, but since you know that you can’t, you want to stay as long as possible to try to imprint it in your brain and heart. You know? Orrr maybe that’s just me. But I guess I did an okay job because even now, I get that same feeling when I close my eyes and imagine that I’m back there, gazing out at the otherworldly landscape.

The hike back was mostly uneventful, but we did get to experience the massive difference in weather conditions between the lava fields and the volcano rim. In the lava fields, the weather was hot and bone dry. As we walked along the rim, it got wetter and wetter, and by the end, we were basically walking through a cloud. And I’m sure that at that same moment, the lava fields were just as hot and dry as when we left them. It’s all about the wind/topography/it makes my head spin!

A nice panoramic photo that absolutely does not do the caldera justice. But I had to try.

We were exhausted when we got back to town, but since it was New Year’s Eve, we went to sleep early and set our alarms for 11:30PM so that we could check out the happenings in the main square. I was only about 20% sure that we would actually wake up, but amazingly, we all dragged ourselves out of bed and joined the festivities!

Ecuador has some funky New Year’s traditions. People make effigies, either of actual people or characters or something that represents the previous year, and at midnight, they’re set on fire as a sort of cleansing ritual before the new year. You know, on our early morning bus ride to the volcano, I thought that I saw a roadside stand filled with paper mâché heads, but it seemed too weird to be true. I assumed that I was out of my mind because it was so early. Nope! Most families make an effigy, and they need to get their heads somewhere!

There were some bigger scenes prepared to be burned at midnight as well… this depicts an incident that occurred at the end of 2019 when a crane unloading a generator from a boat collapsed, spilling hundreds of gallons of oil into the ocean. Obviously, oil spills are never good, and in a place like the Galapagos, they have the potential to be extra bad. I think they contained it really quickly and minimized the damage, but still. Not good.

Here’s a video of the post-midnight mayhem, and you can see different people coming up to toss their effigies on the fire.

After that, we tried to go back to sleep, but our hotel’s great location near the center of town meant that we could hear the New Year’s party going on into the not-so-wee hours of the morning. I think I fell back asleep when it stopped at around 5AM. Ugh.

Iceland Lava Rocks – okay, not the official name of the post, but if you want to see more cool lava colors, check it out!

Perito Moreno Glacier – for a completely different otherworldly landscape, do some glacier trekking!

Mount Aragats – speaking of volcanoes, why not visit Mount Aragats, the volcanic crater that gives Armenia its tallest peak?

Isabela Island – Tortoises, Flamingos, and the Wall of Tears

Posted on January 29, 2021 by Lark

After our morning tour to Las Tintoreras, we still had half of the day free for more activities! My aunt and I went into town after a brief stop at our hotel and started asking around about renting bikes. There’s a 3 mile-long (5km) gravel path to the west of Puerto Villamil (the main town on the island) that winds past different points of interest, and we wanted to make a plan to explore it later in our stay on Isabela.

Here’s Isabela Island, for reference again. And Puerto Villamil, the main town, is on the southern coast.

Welp, as is often the case with traveling, that is NOT what happened. We talked to a few shopkeepers and realized that since the next day was New Year’s Eve, stores were going to be closed for the next two days aka the rest of our time on the island. If we wanted to bike instead of walk the 3+ miles each way, this was our last chance. There was really no question… we went back to the hotel, broke the news to the group that we were NOT going to be having a chill rest of the day, and quickly got ready for another outing.

The girl at the bike rental place gave me a map and some recommendations of where to go and in what order. I love it when someone removes the guesswork and just tells you what to do! She showed me how to get out of town and then recommended that we visit the tortoise breeding center and flamingo lake before following the bike path. There was a general “Do we really have to see more tortoises?” vibe coming from the group, but since she who holds the map holds the power, I said yes, we did. And so, off we went. Also, before you start thinking of me as some sort of travel dictator, I’ll just say that we saw a lot of tortoises on our trip and no one ever regretted a tortoise sanctuary/breeding center visit in hindsight, this time included.

Isabela is, by far, the largest island in the Galapagos. It’s nearly four times the size of the second largest island, Santa Cruz, and was formed by six shield volcanoes. Isabela is home to the most wild tortoises of any island, and due to its size and difficult-to-traverse topography, there are actually five different subspecies of tortoises found across the island. These roam freely in five of the volcano calderas.

The tortoise breeding center on Isabela was founded in 1995 after some fires in the southern part of the island reduced the southern tortoise populations. Even before that, the tortoises faced survival challenges, such as competition for food with an ever-growing population of non-native goats (these have since been eradicated from Isabela). Tortoises were brought from across the island to the center to breed, and the populations have been seeing steady growth ever since. The center protects eggs and hatchlings, and once the tortoises grow big enough to give them a good chance of survival, they’re released.

This map shows where all of the subspecies of Galapagos tortoise are from. As you can see, there are five on Isabela, and they’re each somewhat centered on a caldera.

I enjoyed this visual aid in the little information center. It shows a little timeline of human life vs. tortoise life… the human life starting with a baby and ending with a tombstone around 100 years (optimistic)… and the tortoise starts with an egg and ends with a full-grown tortoise still alive at 150 years.

Hehe I thought it was funny seeing this tortoise flopped on the ground. Looks like she’s having just one of those days, you know?

The tortoises at the breeding center are fed three times per week.

These tortoises were going CRAZY for their leaves.

This guy got scared and hid in his shell. It’s pretty cool… they tuck their heads in and then use their arms to cover/shield their heads.

LOOK AT THIS SHELL. This is a Cinco Cerros tortoise and their shells are just about as flat as they get. It’s almost comical.

After we left the breeding center, we biked a bit farther down the road to hopefully see some flamingos! Isabela has the most flamingos in the Galapagos, and they can often be spotted feeding in the many salty and brackish lakes near Puerto Villamil. We weren’t there at an ideal feeding time and thought we were out of luck when we reached the first lake and saw nothing. Luckily, there were some people coming off of a side street who told us that there were a few hanging out in the next lake over! Awesome!!

The empty flamingo lake… but even flamingo-less, it’s a pretty view!

Flamingos!! You can (maybe?) see one flamingo in the front lake area, and there are two on the far end of the second lake area.

The flamingos were pretty far away, but that didn’t make seeing them any less exciting. My camera lens wasn’t even nearly strong enough to get good pictures of them, so my uncle taught me about the “poor man’s zoom” aka take as many pictures as you can, and once you’re looking at them on a computer, crop the best-quality ones. Ha! So… I took a lot. You can judge the effectiveness of that strategy for yourself.

These two were so far away that there was really no hope

From there, we biked back to the main road and started on the bike trail. The trail started with a sandy stretch, but that thankfully became a nice, packed-gravel path. It was a super pleasant ride, mostly flat with a few uphill sections that weren’t too bad if you accelerated into them a bit.

This sandy stretch was NOT my favorite part of the path. Also, very bold move of me to take a picture while biking on this because I wasn’t feeling especially stable.

Doesn’t this look like it’s meant to be a painting?

We decided to ride to the end of the path first and then slowly make our way back, stopping at the different sights along the way. The path ends at the Wall of Tears (Muro de las Lágrimas), a memorial to one of the many sad chapters in the Galapagos human history. After World War II, a penal colony was established on Isabela as a bad solution to the problem of an oversaturated prison system in Ecuador. If you remember from the Galapagos History post, there were other penal colonies in the Galapagos throughout history, and none of them ended especially well. This one was no exception.

In 1946, about 100 inmates and 30 guards were sent to Isabela. Wooden structures used by American soldiers during WWII were repurposed into prison buildings. From the very beginning, it was a nightmare. There were significant food and water shortages. Many prisoners died from tuberculosis and other diseases. The guards made up pointless tasks to keep the prisoners occupied, the worst of which was constructing a hulking wall out of lava rocks. This process involved harvesting stones from a not-so-nearby quarry and carrying them to the wall location where they were then broken into smaller pieces and stacked on the wall… all while baking in the harsh Galapagos sun. The wall became known as the place where “the strong cry and the weak die”.

“In memory of those who suffered and died here 1946-1959”

This project was a death trap for many reasons. Those who weren’t pushed to exhaustion by the heat and exposure were in danger of injury by the not-infrequent wall collapses. With no access to proper medical care, even minor injuries could lead to much more serious health problems. The guards were cruel and unrelenting, sometimes shooting inmates for not working hard enough. Many people died, slaving over a worthless wall. In 1958, the prisoners had had enough. They rebelled, escaped from the colony, hijacked an American yacht, and sailed to the mainland. Many prisoners and guards were killed in the uprising. The event was reported in American newspapers, shedding light on the horror of the colony, and it was finally shut down for good in 1959.

Today, this portion of wall is all that remains of the prison. It was 620 feet (190m) long, 30 feet (9m) tall, and 20 feet (6m) wide at its base. People say that the wall is haunted, that you can still hear the wails and cries of those who perished, hence the name “The Wall of Tears”.

Everything that I read before we went said that you shouldn’t expect too much, that it’s not especially spectacular or impressive. I don’t agree. It has a sort of haunting beauty to it, and anyone who thinks it isn’t impressive has probably never built anything. The stones are stacked up with no mortar, hence the many wall-collapses during construction, and they’re fitted together like a puzzle. To support its height, the wall has a super thick base that narrows as it rises. Along its length, the whole thing undulates, like a snake. I don’t know whether it’s haunted or not, but there is a definite heaviness to the place. I could feel it clutching at my heart as I walked around, amplified even further by the fog that settled in while we were there.

This is how the weather conditions looked when we started our hike…

…and this is how it looked by the time we came down. That fog really just rolled on in while we were up the mountain.

Nearby, there’s a mountain you can climb for a view of the sea and surrounding area. The weather was already looking a little questionable, but by the time we got to the top, there was no more question. It was going to rain, and we needed to get back to town ASAP.

The trees looked kind of eerie with all of this moss (I assume?) hanging off of them.

We hiked approximately forever… and then there was practically nothing to see from the top.

It was cool to see the coastline, though.

The rain really messed up our plans to visit the other sights along the path on the way back to town. We made no stops, just biking and biking and trying to get back to town and out of the rain in case there was a deluge coming. So, it wasn’t quite the outing we expected, but hey, that’s life!

Santa Cruz Tortoises – if you’re not tired of tortoises yet… meet the tortoises of Santa Cruz!

San Cristobal Highlands – and if you’re STILL not tired of tortoises, meet the tortoises of San Cristobal!

Isabela Island – Las Tintoreras

Posted on January 15, 2021 by Lark

Welcome to Isabela Island! After our few days on Santa Cruz, we relocated one final time to Isabela, the largest island in the Galapagos. We’ll talk more about Isabela in the next few posts, but our first day’s adventures started just off the southern coast of the island in a small group of islets called “Las Tintoreras”. The islands are named for the white-tip reef sharks that can be found in abundance in the surrounding waters, or tintoreras in Spanish.

Here’s Isabela Island, for reference. And Puerto Villamil, the main town, is on the southern coast.

Las Tintoreras is the group of little islands that you see here, just off the southern coast of Isabela.

We had a “late” start to the day… our tour pickup was scheduled for 9AM which was a welcome change from the usual 7:30AM and earlier departures that we were used to. We actually had time to eat breakfast without having to just shovel food into our mouths while running out the door! What a luxury!

We also had a much shorter boat ride, which my stomach wasn’t upset about (hehehe get it?). We loaded up and were at the little islands in under 20 minutes.

He was running along the shore while we rode by in our little boat

Along the way, we saw a couple of penguins! Most of the penguins in the Galapagos are located at the western end of the archipelago. If you recall from my intro to the Galapagos post (and even if you don’t), there are a bunch of different currents that converge on the islands. The Cromwell Current, an upswell current from the west, brings cold water from the ocean depths, helping to create a viable environment for the Galapagos penguins. They still have to be careful not to overheat, but in the case of the penguins that live around Las Tintoreras, they’re helped by the many lava caves and crevices along the coast which they use to hide from the hot sun.

Honestly, I find these penguins to be a little creepy looking. I’m not sure exactly why, but I don’t think the red eyes are helping.

Galapagos penguins are endemic, meaning they only exist in the Galapagos, and are the second smallest penguin species in the world! They’re only about 20” (50cm) tall and weigh about 5-10 pounds (2.5-4.5kg). They also have the distinction of being the only penguins that live north of the equator! Most of them live in the southern hemisphere, but since the equator passes through the Galapagos, the tippy top of Isabela Island/penguin country is actually in the northern hemisphere. Made it by a hair! They eat mostly anchovies, sardines, and mullet and can swim at speeds up to 20mph (35kph) underwater while hunting!

Like other penguins, Galapagos penguins mate for life. They can mate up to three times per year, but this really depends on the availability of food. In years with extreme weather and food shortages, like El Niño years, the penguins forgo breeding or abandon their young. This means that their populations are seriously threatened by climate change. They’re endangered, with the current population estimated at fewer than 2,000 penguins.

I love the contrast between the lava and the water

We went ashore on the largest islet, and I was amazed by how different the landscape is from Isabela, especially when the islands are so close to one another. Some people say that Las Tintoreras looks like another planet, and I’d have to agree. The landscape is dominated by funky black and reddish lava formations coated with white and green lichens on one side due to the prevailing winds.

Lots of lichens! (They’re the whitish stuff on the lava.)

One of the highlights of the tour is “shark alley”, a volcanic crack filled with shallow water where sharks apparently like to hang out and rest during the day before they go out to hunt at night. It’s said to be the best way to see sharks in the Galapagos without being in the water with them, but unfortunately, we weren’t lucky enough to see any. Even so, it was cool to watch the little fish hanging out in the shallow water. You can practically look straight down into the water from above! I can see why it would be super cool if a shark was there.

Shark alley from another angle. I estimated that the water is about 6ft (2m) wide.

Shark alley! Or, in our case, “lots of small fish but unfortunately no sharks” alley.

There are also a TON of marine iguanas lying around. They always seem to be lounging in groups, and that’s because they form colonies of usually 20-500 iguanas but up to 1,000! We’ve seen marine iguanas before, but I haven’t explained much about them. They’re unique because they’re the only lizards in the WORLD that are adapted to a marine existence. They’re vegetarians and eat algae and seaweed. Most of them get their food from shallow areas at low tide, but larger males will actually go diving for algae! They can hold their breath for up to an hour and dive down to 65 feet (20m) below the surface.

Research has shown that they probably share a common ancestor with the Galapagos land iguanas, genetically diverging around 4.5 million years ago to become a new species. They’re different from land iguanas in a few key ways that make marine life possible. They have long, sharp claws to help them cling to rocks, resisting the tides near the shore or underwater. Their tails are flatter which makes them more effective rudders while swimming. Their dark coloring helps them to warm up in the sun after coming out of the cold Galapagos waters. Flat noses and sharp teeth make it easier to scrape algae off of rocks. They also have a special gland that removes excess salt from their blood, a necessity when eating salty algae and seaweed! It’s expelled by a sneeze-like action, and it’s not uncommon to see marine iguanas with salt-encrusted faces. Aren’t they fascinating??

This is a common sight – marine iguanas draped all over the lava and one another.

Look at his little salt-encrusted face! Definitely not cute…

One thing that marine iguanas are NOT is pretty. They were called “imps of darkness” back in the day, and Charles Darwin described them as “hideous-looking” and the “most disgusting, clumsy lizards”. Ouch! It’s true, though. On land, they are horribly clumsy, but in the water, they are incredibly graceful!

Weirdly, even with these many adaptations, it is possible, if uncommon, for land iguanas and marine iguanas to mate. There are some “hybrid iguanas” which generally have a marine iguana father and land iguana mother. Most live on South Plaza Island, a small, skinny island near Santa Cruz. It has been observed that in years when algae and seaweed are scarce, marine iguanas will search for food farther inland. On such a small island, it’s much more likely that the land and marine iguanas will cross paths. Sometimes, a male marine iguana will come across a female land iguana who is still fertile, and voila! A baby hybrid iguana is born. The hybrid iguanas are infertile and have some qualities of each parent… they usually stay on land, but they have the sharp claws of marine iguanas, making it possible to climb cacti for food. Their coloring is unique, usually dark with light speckles and a banded body which is different from both marine and land iguanas.

But I don’t know if the multi coloring makes them any less ugly…

Anyway, back to marine iguanas. The males can get territorial, especially during mating season, and they engage in headbutting competitions if their initial head bob/body stiffening/mouth opening isn’t enough to scare off the invader. These headbutt fights can last for hours and include breaks. Usually, neither iguana is injured (except for pride-wise), but in rare cases, there could be biting and scratching.

We were lucky to catch the tail end (hehe) of an iguana fight, and my cousin took this awesome video from the boat (if you listen to the audio, you’ll hear that I put my money on the underdog, and he won!).

The tour also included some snorkeling time, and this was probably my favorite snorkeling of the whole trip. We got to see so many things! We were in a big, sheltered area, so the water was calm and without any strong tides. It was about 7-10ft (2-3m) deep which was perfect. There was enough space to maneuver, but you could still dive down to the bottom easily. Also, the water was incredibly clear, partly because the bottom was far enough away that people weren’t kicking sand and such up into the water.

Blue sea star! These can grow as big as 1ft in diameter!

Chocolate chip sea star. The name is perfect, right?

We saw all sorts of awesome things! There was a lobster, one of those ginormous red spiny lobsters, ambling along. It looked like a satellite, there were so many antennae and appendages coming out of it. There was A LOT happening on the bottom… starfish and sea urchins and anemones and mostly things that I don’t actually know what they are, but they were pretty! There were sea turtles and a LOT of fish. I swam around with these huge schools of razor surgeonfish (I think) and pretended I was one of them. And I swam next to a marine iguana!

Here’s another video that I didn’t take (shout out to my cousin and uncle who manned the underwater camera and GoPro long after I decided I was finished taking my phone into the water with me) showing a marine iguana swimming!

The coolest thing? I SAW A SHARK!! It was probably 12ft (4m) away from me, and it was maybe 3ft (1m) long. I was alone, and I started yelling and trying to get anyone else’s attention so that I wouldn’t be the only one who saw it. I should have just swum after it because only one person even heard me/paid attention… but I was so happy! I saw a shark and wasn’t terrified! I was just excited!

I felt like my day was complete after that! Man, what a rush! The tour was definitely what I would call “short and sweet” because we saw all of that and then were back on Isabela by noon! That’s crazy. We still had more adventures ahead which I’ll talk about next time!

I tried to figure it out, but I have no idea what kind of bird this is. Some type of finch, but that will have to be enough.

Some sea lions posing on the dock in Puerto Villamil

Las Grietas and Los Gemelos – check out my other favorite snorkel spot in the Galapagos, Las Grietas!

North Seymour Island – take a look at the Galapagos land iguanas and imagine what a hybrid iguana might look like.

Little O’Malley, O’Malley, and Williwaw Lakes Hike

Offbeat Anchorage Tour

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Flattop, Peak 2, Peak 3, and Flaketop Hike

Alaska State Fair & Giant Cabbages

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Welcome to Alaska!

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Welcome to Quito and Quito Botanical Gardens

Isabela Island – Los Túneles

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