Having spent the better part of my 39 years in Alaska, I’ve heard just about all of the questions you can imagine. Before I even start, I’d just like to say, there ARE NO PENGUINS IN ALASKA.
There. Whew.
Here are some more….I’ve taken MANY pictures to prove em.
There ARE wild animals roaming around:
It is NOT dark all the time: Unless you call 19 hours a day of darkness ALL the time! See, not so bad…the sun comes up around 10ish and starts to sink down again around 3ish…in the darkest part of the year, December. But let’s think about this…if it’s dark in the winter, what do you think it does in the summer? LIGHT! That’s right, all summer long we enjoy pretty much nonstop daylight. Hence the “Land Of The Midnight Sun” nickname. Now, if I lived up north in the arctic, they DO have months of darkness. But they just hunker into their igloos and cuddle their sled dogs until spring.
We DO have giant fish:
We DO NOT live in an igloo: Nope, never seen an igloo. But I understand that in some of the more remote villages they do make them on hunting trips, if they get stuck out somewhere. But I picture them in a Cabella tent with a propane heater. I could be wrong. We DO often live in log homes though. Back in the day people lived in tiny trapper cabins, like the one below on Tustumena Lake near my home. And I grew up in the other log home pictured below.
We Sometimes DO use dog teams:We use them for entertainment purposes mostly, around here. But when I’ve gone into the villages I’ve seen them used for transport. On a serious note, often in villages dogs are not considered pets. They are staked out to a pole with only a few feet of chain and maintained much like we would maintain our car: we put fuel in it so it will go, but we pretty much ignore it most of the time. This dog below was one such animal in Good News Bay, Alaska. I thought she was beautiful.
We are not all Eskimos: In fact, growing up, I knew like 2. But would it really be so bad if all Alaskans looked like this?
We DO have lots of snow…some winters: Except on the winters where I buy a brand new snow machine or the year we build a cabin in the snow machine capital of Alaska…then it’s like the tropics.
No, I don’t know Sarah Palin: But one of my best friends half-sister is a good friend of hers…and my brother goes to her church. SO yea, we’re like best friends. Cause in a state bigger than half of the continental united states combined, we all are pretty chummy.
We DO have modern amenities: See, there is a McDonalds…right there behind those float planes! (No, we do NOT have fly through restaurants, but we DO have floating fuel stations for boats and planes.
We DO have breathtaking scenery: No words necessary here…
