Alaskan Culture

by James Staddon | Aug 29, 2013 | Stories & Expeditions, Updates & Opportunities | 0 comments

This is really odd. It’s practically 10:00pm and it’s still pretty light outside as I get ready for bed. It’s even more strange to think that at 12:00 midnight tonight there will still be vestiges of light on the horizon, as I noted was the case on the drive back from Denali National Park the other day. Yeah, the 5 hour drive got us back in Wasilla at 2:00am. In West Virginia, I wouldn’t consider such a destination as a “day trip”, but I guess that’s Alaska for you!

And oh, something else I learned about Alaska culture. At church last Sunday, I was talking with one of the locals who had lived here all her life, and when I mentioned something about “Route 1”, she stopped me dead in my tracks and said she wouldn’t know what I was talking about. “We don’t go by route numbers up here,” she said, “you’ve got to give the name of the highway to make yourself understood.” And rightfully so: when the same “Route 1” is called Glen Highway, Seward Highway, and Sterling Highway depending on what hundreds-of-miles of the state it is traversing, just giving the route number isn’t going to help much in pin-pointing where you were.

So anyway, enjoy this series of Alaskan desktop backgrounds as you chuckle about the Alaska culture.