I am still on that first day, telling you about what we did in Anchorage. After doing all that stuff I told you about in the previous posts, we stopped by the Inn at precisely 3:40 pm to refresh for a moment. Then we continued towards what we believed to be the COAST TRAIL. We had heard about several points that you can enter this mysterious trail. You could see the trail…. over there…. sometimes… but how to get on it was unclear. We eventually did find an entrance…near the MAGIC TUNNEL shown here positioned just left of Elderberry Park. Elderberries can be poisonous…I was wondering if there was some foreboding foreshadowing going on…. some message…. like maybe we should turn back…. but I kept my fears under wraps for fear of seeming … a sissy.
The Tunnel takes you to the trail heading south. The poison trail takes you to the north…. where we were headed. By now I had heard many tales about Moose. Moose are scarier then Bears. Moose, as I said before, can stomp the living daylights out of you. The eerie light wasn’t helping waylay my fear of encountering a Moose. I was looking over my shoulder, trying not to appear nervous, pretend cheery-talking to Richard about the beauty, how lucky we were to be in Alaska and alive etc…. all the while dreading my eminent death by Moose.
Elderberry Park has some sort of gravitational pull also…. I think Anchorage officials plant smiling kids and grandpas with kites at the park to distract from the Tilting Vortex. You could easily miss the force but I caught it on film (see left picture).
And then, over there, I could see the MUCK. We were told not to go out there. The tide can come in and within 1 hour it can climb 7 feet. If you are out there in the muck…. you can’t get out. It’s a quick-sandy type thing. Let’s just say you tell you friend… “Oh look, a pretty rock” so you go out onto the muck to get the rock and …you are stuck. Really stuck like sinking, sort of and there is suction all around pulling you into the muck and you can’t move an inch. Before, people would just die out there no matter what. Now, you have a chance, because they have some special machine thingy that they haul out there to pull you out…. that is, if you friend sees you stuck and knows who to call on the cell phone to get the machine and people out there. And that is if it isn’t already being used on someone else that was going for a rock in the muck somewhere else. If you or your friend don’t have a cell phone… and calling out into the mist doesn’t evoke anyone else… and your friend doesn’t run very fast… you should probably tell him or her to stick close by. You should hope they have brought a pen and paper so you can dictate any parting notes to loved ones.
Then we were kinda tricked into thinking we were about to get close to the water but the trail took a turn and we were headed back, skirting the edges of town on paved streets. But first we walked on this trail…. looking like what a trail should look like…
We were somnambulated by hanging flower baskets on posts and a fish fence.
.
Getting too scared.
I am off to walk the dog… tomorrow is the “Whaling Wall” after I finish the trail story. I know I said I would do it today…but… I didn’t lie… I just didn’t do it.
