Life in the arctic valley

We are getting pretty close to our first wildlife sighting; Sunday morning we found moose dropping all over our side walk. By the time we got back from church there was another pile. Today we heard some suspicious noises coming from the woods; we wanted to check it out, but the risk of being trampled is currently high.
We experienced our first "ice rain" today; Alaska roads are constantly icy, they don't lay salt on the roads but instead lay sand/gravel. Imagine the whole road being black ice; thats normal, but with the rain last night and this morning there was a sheet of ice over absolutely everything.

It looks like a clear truck bed liner over the whole vehicle

Many drivers are idiots and cars filled up the ditches. Daniela, was caught in traffic on the way to the base for almost an hour; when she got there they announced that the base was closed due to driving conditions. The university of Alaska was also closed. Walking out to the car, even the packed snow was like uneven ice. Daniela is lucky enough to have the garage so that she did not have to shave the ice off the car- as for the envoy, different story.

Mt Baldy

Highest point in all of Eagle

 Moon rising to the east

 

Pristine view of the city below

Sunset to the west of us

Today we went on a nice hike up Mount Baldy; it is about 10 miles north of Anchorage. The hike was surprisingly hard, it was a pretty direct route straight up the mountain on snow. It was well worth the effort, right as we made it to the top, to the east side of the ridge, we had the view of the sun setting over the ocean; on the other side of the ridge the moon was out. Either view had spectacular colors- not well portrayed by our camera phones.

Finding shelter

We arrived in Anchorage, AK on October 20, 2010 Daniela's plane landed at 1:20 pm and Jacks at 12:40 pm. The first few weeks we traveled all around Anchorage to find an apartment, our desired sq footage and original budget went up after seeing the first few places and we decided that we'd need a garage or car port. after seeing about 12 places we signed for the lowest level of a large house apt. We signed and paid a hefty deposit and had to wait one week to move in (Nov 1).
When we called the moving company to have our stuff shipped that day, but the soonest that he could get us in was on the 2nd- we were anxious but accepted the wait. On Nov 2 we woke up early to meet the movers, signed out of our hotel and at 9 am, an hour late, the moving van showed up. He took out four boxes and a pull up bar; when we called to have our "household goods" sent, they sent us Daniela's stuff from Missouri. We had to call a different moving company and they were able to bring the rest of our stuff two days later. It was disappointing and we didn't sleep well on our blow up mattress, but once everything arrived it didn't matter because we've finally moved out of the slums of West Valley... to the slums of Anchorage.