Anchorage and the surrounding areas.

With a couple days in the Anchaorage area before heading up to the Village of Kotzebue for a flight into Gates of the Arctic and Kobuk Valley National Parks I did a little exploring. Anchorage itself was a really cool city with a very diverse population, super clean and a very vibrant downtown area. I found a couple of great local hangouts with hardly any tourists that I would highly recommend, F Street Station for dinner and Darwin's Theroy a couple of blocks away for a drink. Anchorage also makes a great place to base out of for multiple parts of and trips to southern Alaska.

I figured I had to go salmon fishing at least once while I was up here so I signed up with Cap'n Ray for a four hour outing on the Knik river about an hour north of Anchorage and managed to catch a roughly 30lb king salmon which I shipped home.

And this was Cap'n Ray. Trust me, they don't get any more "colorful" than this guy let me tell you.

The next day I went up to Matnuska Glacier about two hours north. This glacier is approximately 27 miles long starting way up high in the Chugach mountains outside of Anchorage.

Clear blue glacial water is about as pristine as it gets. This water had been frozen for thousands of years before it got to the surface and began to melt, and it tastes amazing!

The very tip of the glacier with a small glacial lake at the bottom.