Moominmama's Adventures: Anchorage, Alaska

Wherein Moominmama visits the Alaska Native Heritage Center and is forced to turn back during a hike near Hatcher Pass...

Anchorage is home to the Alaska Native Heritage Center, which provides information about the 11 major indigenous cultures of this vast land. It's also an indigenous youth employment program and allows teens to both learn about their own cultures as well as share with visitors like Moominmama.

Since these are living traditions, new works of indigenous dance and art are flourishing at the center. The dance troupe here wears a common costume featuring an eagle and a raven designed by a modern indigenous artist. 

But each dancer creates meaningful additions to the blanket cloaks they wear, and they learn and perform both modern indigenous choreography as well as traditional dances from their varied tribal backgrounds.

The center has space for performances, native artists at work, various displays and a large outdoor area with a path that takes visitors to five different "villages" arrayed around a pond, showing the traditional buildings that would have been common in different parts of Alaska prior to Western influence. 

Here is our young guide showing us how to properly back in through the door of a meeting house that might have been built by the Tlingit, Haida, Eyak or Tsimshian people. 

These are coastal tribes famous for leaders who showed their status at potlatches where they distributed generous gifts. These buildings, and traditions like the totem pole, are possible because of access to the coast's enormous spruce trees.

Further inland, at higher elevation, the trees thin. Central Alaska is home to many Athabascan peoples, and they would build a structure like this to store meat or other foods. By adding bear grease on the poles, they would discourage animal invasion thanks to the smell of this intimidating predator.

But perhaps the most interesting were the structures that Yupik or Inupiak would have built with dirt or sod in the western tundra where there are no trees.

There, living spaces would be underground with a tunnel-style entrance like that of a beaver lodge, preventing cold air from rushing in.

The heritage center, for safety reasons, frames these structures with planks and makes it a little easier to enter by running the tunnel through the side rather than up through the floor, but it was still a tight squeeze!

Moominmama got to see many traditional crafts including traps made with a strip of a whale's baleen, sealskin drums, various bone tools and kayaks. 

Our guide passed around a piece of caribou fur and invited us warm it with our hands. As we discovered, the hairs of a caribou are hollow and will retain heat inside!

The heritage center was a high point of the visit to Anchorage, which has a few popular tourist spots but otherwise feels pretty gritty. There were a startling number of homeless people in the streets and multiple homeless encampments. Security guards are posted in the public library, apparently to keep them out! Even in summer, Anchorage was wet and cold. I can't even imagine how these folks manage in the winter. And I am sad if they're not allowed access to the public library.

On a day when the fog and rain lifted, Moominmama hopped in the car for a hike near Hatcher Pass north of Anchorage. A hike called Reed Lakes came highly recommended, and Moominmama set out with water and sandwiches to get into these peaks I'd seen from afar.

The start of the trail was stunning and only gradually got steeper, but I was headed for those bare rocky peaks above, and it got challenging!

The photo below shows what greeted me as I got to higher elevations. Cold swift streams and giant boulders -- in some cases both at the same time.

Moominmama tackled the rocks, finding footholds, lunging across divides, easing down one side only to search out a way up the next, all in hopes that getting past one giant rockfall would put me in the clear on the other side.

Except I didn't. It was boulders all the way. And at some point, I realized, I'd have to make this trip all the way back. I decided to bail before I hurt myself. I may have missed Reed Lakes, but I took in some beautiful mountain scenery and lived to see another day!

My next hike was a tame visit to Portage Lake for a boat ride and an easy hike to Byron Glacier, which hardly deserves to be called a glacier at all. Maybe there's some glacial ice underneath, but from above, it's just a giant snow pile. Which doesn't mean some of the tourists didn't have a whole lot of fun just the same!