June 25, 2012 - Golden Nugget RV Park, Anchorage, AK

We started the day by dropping Harry off at Petco to get groomed. He was getting so dirty from all the gravel campgrounds and roads. Now he is white again and got a haircut so we can see his eyes again. Next, we took the truck to get the oil changed. We have driven about 5700 miles at this point and I think we are about half way through the trip. A stop at Fred Meyer for groceries, a quick lunch, and picking up Harry finished the jobs.

In the afternoon we headed back into town to take the city tour. This turned out to be the highlight of our time at Anchorage. The tour driver was a retired school teacher who is married to a man who grew up in Alaska. She has lived here since the mid 70s, talked a mile a minute and kept everything extremely interesting. Her father-in-law is a retired judge who was the last appointed judge to the territory before it became a state. So she had a lot of background, personal stories of her life here, and stories from her husband and his family. Her husband was 11 when the earthquake hit in 1964. He was setting in a dentist chair on 4th Street and had to climb out the 2nd floor window, which was now at street level, when the shaking stopped.

We had a reindeer sausage hotdog at one of the little stands downtown, then went to the Federal Visitors Center and looked around for a while. They would be showing a movie called “The Day the Earth Shook” at 5:00 which meant we had a couple of hours to do other things. We drove around a little so we could take a couple of pictures of things we had seen while on the tour, one of them being a “Moose Gooser”. This was a small engine that was originally used in the construction of the Panama Channel and than shipped up to Alaska for use in building the Alaska Railroad. As the railroad was completed it was used to go in front of the larger train pull rail cars to push the moose in the rump and get them off the tracks. This was when we also got the picture at Earthquake Park. At Earthquake Park you can see where the ground has dropped away (the forest had been the same level as the street) and waves in the soil from the quake. This was a housing area built on silt and during the quake the ground liquefied and the homes slid down the hill into the bay.

The Moose Gooser

Earthquake Park - Foreground is road level and ground drops away in waves.

We then went back to the Federal building to see the movie. We were in time to see one on the gold rush in 1898 which was interesting and then we watched the one about the earthquake.