Alaska surprises with endless sun, giant mosquitoes, and wild bears | Joe Crawford

Table of Contents

I recently decided to surprise my family with a trip to our nation’s 49th state, Alaska.

I say “surprise” because I asked them where they wanted to go the most this summer, and they mentioned somewhere hot with beaches, an ocean, and lots of sun. Well, at least they got the sun.

Alaska is so far north the sun never sets for part of the year in the summer. You also need to apply lots of lotion, too. I don’t mean sunscreen lotion; I mean mosquito repellent lotion. You need it to keep the world record-setting mosquitoes from treating your body like a pin cushion. Mosquitoes are so large there they almost became the state bird.

You have to be a different breed to make it in Alaska the entire year. It is a land of extremes: extreme cold, snow, and darkness in the winter and an extreme amount of daylight in the summer, along with an extreme amount of alcoholism. You have to survive very long and cold winters, and summers are so filled with daylight you need extra dark window shades and an eye mask (or two) if you think you’ll ever get any shut-eye. You can’t look out the window and tell what time of day it is, either. It will only tell you it’s summer. After that, you’re on your own.

The reverse is true in the winter. If you like being in the dark (like me, most of my life), spend the winter in Alaska. Solar panels don’t sell so well there either.

If you are afraid of bears, Alaska is not for you. They have practically every North American species Mother Nature produced: black bears, brown bears, grizzly bears, Kodiak bears, and polar bears. Hikers are encouraged to learn the following mnemonic rhyme to remember how to deal with each type should they encounter one on a trail who is asking for directions to the nearest moose. “If it’s black, attack. If it’s brown, lie down. If it’s white, nighty-night!”

You have a better chance of surviving an IRS audit than a polar bear attack, and some IRS agents carry guns. Just let that sink in, a minute. We did not venture far enough north to encounter any of those white bears, and I am not disappointed. I don’t think we would get along if we did. What I mean to say is that we are polar opposites. I thought I saw a polar bear, and it scared the northern daylights out of me.

An interesting tidbit. Polar bears are thought to be the only bears that don’t hibernate during the winter season. Male humans are thought to be the only bipeds who hibernate during the football season.

Did you know after Russia stole Alaska from the Eskimos, we stole it from Russia? Alaska is the largest state and will remain so unless Vladimir Putin demands it back. Maybe we could trade Greenland for it and let Denmark deal with him. That is, after we have finished extracting all the gold and oil from the ground. We’ll leave the bears, though.

Interestingly, Russia was motivated to sell Alaska because it had just lost a war in Crimea, a land they stole from Ukraine a few years ago. History is just cruel sometimes, isn’t it?

The selling of Alaska to the United States is probably in the Guinness Book of World Records as the biggest case of seller’s remorse in history. Russia was laughing its way to the bank back in 1867 with the $7.2 million we paid for it in gold, when later even more gold and, even better, oil, were discovered in mass quantities by the new owners, namely us.

Suddenly, the laughing stopped in Moscow and started up in Washington. They’re still smarting over that one.

Anthropologists theorize that ancient people from Asia migrated over an icy land bridge and discovered Alaska well before Columbus did. They may have been chasing the now-extinct woolly mammoths and mastodons and trying to get away from the Russians, as everyone else seems to be doing nowadays. How they slipped past the polar bears is anybody’s guess. Maybe they were enjoying the northern lights and were distracted.

Perhaps the most localized food we ate there was reindeer sausage. Santa Claus would not be happy with me because I had a few helpings, especially at breakfast, and it tasted all right.

And finally, I highly recommend doing a glacier tour like we did.

It can give you a good feeling for how our government operates since they move at the same pace: glacially.

Joe Crawford is an award-winning columnist and longtime Alton resident who frequently writes columns for The Telegraph. He can be contacted at crawfordjo@aol.com