#anyway. alexa play alaska by sky sailing

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

hiiii tell me more abt alaska plz

Alaska is hecking huge. like... ENORMOUS. there's a mostly-in-jest rivalry with Texas, which is the next biggest state. like... this is a huge genre of T shirts, I'm not even kidding

and because AK is so massive, it's extremely normal to go on VERY long drives. to the point that most Alaskans don't bat an eye at a one or two hour car trip, that's just like... the weekly trip to the grocery store.

and the road system is a hot mess. like, there's basically one way in, one way out of most places. for instance, if the Parks Highway gets closed for some reason (it's happened a few times due to wildfires alongside the road), a LOT of people who live in like... Houston or Talkeetna or any of the other tiny towns north of Wasilla/Palmer/Anchorage (Houston/Willow is where the Iditarod starts each year and TKA is the closest actual town to Denali, so they're easy to remember lol) won't have access to full-service grocery shopping or medical help unless they're airlifted out. which is like... a tad frightening to think about, but at the same time it has to do with the very small population density in AK. there aren't that many people per capita, so there just... aren't that many roads. a lot of people just straight-up own planes (like, bush planes) and fly around fairly frequently. I lived across a field from a small airstrip for awhile when I was a kid, it was great because the little planes would fly in low right over my house and if the pilots saw someone waving at them from the ground, they'd tilt the plane back and forth and wave back.

also this spot, here, Valdez:

is #1, the end of the road system, #2, the end of the Alaska oil pipeline, #3, Prince William Sound (which Valdez sits on) was the site of the infamous Exxon-Valdez oil spill, and #4 — the original town was destroyed by a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami in 1964 and the town had to rebuild a few miles up the road in order to not get washed out again. I'm mentioning this solely bc of my interest in seismological history, but also it's pretty cool to see EXACTLY where the literal End Of The Road is on a map tbh.

ok and one more fun tidbit: the World Ice Art Championship is held every year in Fairbanks AK

which is not only a huge tourist attraction (this is what I was talking about in my tags on that attractions post — North Pole is the actual name of a town that's basically a suburb of Fairbanks. they have like a Santa's Workshop type touristy thing that like, yeah it's kinda goofy but also they do have really good fudge skskdjsk) but ALSO a big deal for people who live IN ALASKA. people drive in from all over the state to walk through the park where they host the competition. they have like, ice slides and mazes and everything gets lit up at night, including the sculptures:

(top 4 pictures from, I believe, 2015 and 2017. bottom two, the same sculpture in daytime and then at night, was a presumably multiblock entry from 2021 that I couldn't find the name of who carved it/which team it was)

anyway part of my point here is: Anchorage/Wasilla/Palmer is a main population center in AK, people annually drive to Fairbanks for the Ice Festival, it's like a 5/6 hour drive. nobody is fazed by this. long distances to Alaskans are a minor inconvenience tbh.