on beyond Anchorage through the Kenai Penninsula....
A land of green grass!
When I arrived the dandylions were already blooming and when I left they'd all gone to seed. 
Winter had ended with May, but snow was still at sea level in Prince William Sound. Welcome to Alaska!
I remember the first sunny day of summer, with all Anchorage turned out in force to sunbathe, run, and bike until midnight, when the sun briefly set behind the mountains to the North before rising again at 1:30am.
The old man who adumbrated another summerless year, the tourist who complained about "too many hicks and a general sense of wierdness".
Corinna, my Sackagawea in the land of Mignight sun, the final frontier, full of moose and bears and Giant Cabbage (skunk and otherwise) and pride in all of the above.
A disturbed landscape, the ecology still recovering from the Great Quake of ''64: the tsunami and land subsidence...
and the Great Oil Spill of '89....
...can be hard to believe in the context of awesome, untrammeled, wilderness.
But humans are ubiquitous. My first Alaskan Bear. (the second was flung, unceremoniously, out of a boat onto the beach where Corinna and I were having tea. The bloody carcass was butchered for its skin, paws, and gonads.)
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