Did you know?

Did you know that for a brief time period after the great Eskimo Wars that moose were used to plow the fields? .... Now you do.

Second pic is of the Chugach Mountains. When the sun hits them just right, they turn this bright green (usually in the evening), it's really cool, but I haven't got a very good pic of this phenomenon, yet.

The last two are of the Chugach over Winchester Lagoon while it was raining.

How NOT to store your artifacts

Our off site storage is a mixture of shipping containers and the great out doors! Some of this stuff is historic airplane parts, and some is just random airplane parts. Can you tell the difference? I sure can't. I'm hoping to drag someone out here and help me record which is which.

Morning commute

Here are a few pics of my morning commute along the inlet. It's about 3 miles to the museum from where I'm staying. Someone lent me their bike, so I've actually been exercising! The last two are pics of Earthquake park, through which I ride, where the 1964 Good Friday earthquake turned the bluff along the inlet into this undulating landscape, which make really good bike trails!

Lake Hood

The first image is downtown Anchorage (that is a pond, not Lake Hood). Anchorage is around 300,000, or about half of Milwaukee, but with NO surrounding suburbs. It's a strange city; there is no old town, as it is less than 100 years old, and much of it was destroyed in an earthquake in 1964. There are a few scattered tall buildings downtown, and within blocks you run into these one room cottages (I need to get a pic of one). It's a very odd place, though everyone is friendly.

The last three are of Lake Hood, which the Museum is adjacent to (in the top right image, the large white building on the right is the outdoor hanger). It is the busiest float plane airport in the world and you can watch planes land or take off every few minutes. There was a crash the week before I was here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVwlodvWh7w "Ruined a perfectly good airplane" is the general consensus of those who mention it.

Living in the mountains

This past weekend, we drove down to Kenai lake, where my host whom I'm staying with, has a cabin on 12 acres. It was absolutely beautiful. I went Kyaking, biking, 4-wheeling, and boating as well as a lot of sitting. It was great! The summer soltice was Saturday, and it was still light at midnight! And yes, the water really is that color.

Alaska Air logo

Benevelent third world dictator or Eskimo? You decide.

McGuyver was here!

Surprisingly, these phone books are archival quality :)

(I know this photo isn't as clear as it chould be, but the bar is holding a rack of uniforms and heavy leather flight jackets)

That's a lot of work!

Here are a few pics of the main collection's storage room. There is maybe 30% that has any associated documentation (and what that entails is deed of gift or loan agreement that may be laying on top or underneath the objects). I have four pages of an accession list that someone made in 1995 and four file cabinets along with stacks and stacks of boxes of "archival material" but no idea if any of it relates to the artifacts. My job is to organize and catalog as much as I can. This is more like a ten year job, rather than a ten weeks.

From the Air

I'm not sure if this was Canada or Alaska, but we flew over miles and miles and miles of mountains and glaciers. These pictures are a pale image of what it was.

Ghost of Elvis

I arrived here in Anchorage around 3:00 local time. It was a beautiful sunny day, and warmer than the Milwaukee that I left behind. I now know what jet lag is. I read somewhere that it stems from the fact that your soul hasn't quite caught up with your body, yet. I got a tour of the museum and met several of the volunteers. As we sat around B.S.ing Mitch, who is from Memphis (almost everyone here is from somewhere else) was talking about when he grew up there, and could go see the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Jonny Cash and others in the local dives. My favorite story he told was that right after Elvis's first record came out, there was some sort of outdoor juke box, and Elvis was there playing his song over and over again, and Mitch's brother got a little fed up with it, and the whole affair ended up with them tossing Elvis into the duck pond. "And that's the last time I saw Elvis Presley, in person anyway."