Good Morning! Or as they say in Alaska "Good Morning!"
On our first day off of work as decided to head into Anchorage and check out the city! We headed out and went to the Alaskan Zoo, it was pretty cool! We got to see lynx, wolverines, bears, tigers, oh my! Afterwards we went out to eat at a local favorite called Moose's Tooth! It's a pizzeria/brewery and it was delicious!! We did a little shopping after dinner at the only store we can really afford right now, Goodwill. Ok we can afford more but second-hand is where it's at! To say the least it was a fun day off!
This work week has been quite a crazy one. First off we had emergency response training for the nature center on Tuesday. It covered some really good topics such as what to do if a forest fire starts, someone gets mauled by a bear, how to manage difficult customers and what to do for any emergency that requires police, fire, state troopers, etc. Good thing we covered this in training because literally the next day the fire truck and gas company had to come, we had a difficult customer AND there were a ton if bear sightings-luckily no maulings!! What are the odds?! We had some volunteers (not us) digging a hole to put a kiosk up and the put a tiny hole in a low pressure gas line...so the fire department had to come along with the gas company. Luckily there was no danger so the fire department was only there for 15 minutes and the gas company shut off the line to fix later. After all that drama we had a customer come in who you could call "disgruntled". A manager came out to deal with them but they ranted for roughly an hour. Also throughout the day we kept getting people coming in to tell us there was a grizzly bear out on the trails. Probably ten different people told us about this bear throughout the day but he never made any sign of aggression. Just went about his day ignoring people. We know this all sounds terrible but it was just a crazy day and we still are loving it here! We also had training on Alaskan Animals. The Nature Center is running a Master Naturalist course and we get to sit in on some of the classes such as Alaskan animals. It was six hours of learning and what did we cover? Polar bears, animal tracks, short eared owls and bugs...that's it! Apparently those are the animals you need to know about? Who knew!
On Thursday night we went for a hike in our park and we saw a black bear! It was way off in the woods but you could see him moving around in there! He was kind of small so we figured he was a cub and the mom was around so we decided to move on...Ashley moving really slow because she wanted to see it a bit more and Adam dragging here along making as much noise as humanly possible. Ashley thought she saw the mama bear standing up on her hind legs looking at us so we high tailed it out of there. Of course, after about an hour we decided to walk back that way to go home (Ashley's insistance) and we discovered that "mama bear" was really an uprooted tree root ball. In Ashley's defense it was really tall and black so I guess we will let that one slide. But we made it back to the nature center unscathed and at 10:30pm it was still light out. We are still trying to get used to all this light.
We know we have talked about a lot of exciting stuff but the most exciting thing happened last night! WE FELT AN EARTHQUAKE! It was around 9:50pm and Ashley was on the bed and Adam was making a fire in the wood stove and you could hear all of our stuff starting to rattle around...then you could feel the cabin start to shake! It was crazy! We were both too stunned to evacuate the cabin...but luckily it lasted only 4-5 seconds. Then everything went back to normal. We stepped outside and it was like nothing ever happened. We looked it up this morning and not only was Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash playing on the radio but we discovered it was from a 5.4 earthquake that started 82 miles beneath Denali National Park. Without a doubt one of the weirdest things we have ever felt!
After all that excitement we decided to keep the ball rolling! We are going to enjoy this beautiful weekend we are having (70 and sunny-Alaskans think this is hot) and go camping and hiking at Eklunta Lake. Pictures and stories to come in a few days!
Adios for now!
-The A-Team
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