Alaska: A trail of wilderness and history

ANCHORAGE — "Most people encounter moose past the airport," my photocopied sheet of cycling directions tersely stated.

Too bad I had time to ride only halfway out the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail, but maybe it was just as well. Even on this perfect summer Saturday, I was alone on stretches of the waterfront path, and armed only with 21 speeds on a rented bicycle.

"A cow moose can be very dangerous while protecting her calf from a perceived threat," another brochure told me.

OK, so I stopped short of the airport. Still, I got a wonderful first taste of wild Alaska only minutes from downtown Anchorage — a relaxing way to spend an unplanned afternoon in town before I set out the next day for Denali National Park.

Anchorage boasts more than 120 miles of paved trails. Best known is the Coastal Trail, a paved path that sets out from the downtown core and meanders 11 miles along tide flats crowded with wild geese, ducks and gulls.

At the far end is Kincaid Park, formerly a Nike missile site — a reminder, with the moose, that you're on the edge of America. Dotted along the way are rest stops with benches and wide views of Mount Susitna and other peaks in three snowy mountain ranges looming over Knik Arm and Cook Inlet.

Sometimes people see beluga whales.

"That's Mount McKinley there," a local woman sitting with her children told me, confidently pointing to the one pile of clouds on the horizon. The mountain hides a lot in clouds.

I set out to pedal five miles to Earthquake Park, which marks where a subdivision slid into Turnagain Arm inlet in the devastating Good Friday quake of 1964.

At first I shared the wide, mostly flat trail with many cyclists and skaters — kids on little bikes with training wheels, a woman with a poodle in a basket on her handlebars, guys who looked like Roller Derby veterans. We clattered across wooden bridges skirting Westchester Lagoon and past a meadow where the slow waters of Fish Creek snaked beneath us.

Traffic thinned as the trail wandered into a cool wood of paper-bark birches amid ground cover of emerald horsetails and wild roses.

Marshy ponds interspersed with the birches might have had something to do with the mosquitoes that soon found me. (Go prepared. They're called the Alaska state bird for good reason.)

I didn't get bitten till I stopped at Earthquake Park. It made my stop a quick one.

You won't find dramatic scars in the earth here or old foundations twisted like Silly Putty. But there are good illustrated interpretive displays documenting the frightening quake. At 9.2 on the Richter scale, it was the strongest ever recorded in North America. (Seattle's February 6.8 shaker lasted about 45 seconds; this one rumbled for five minutes.)

You'll also see the "slump totem," a jagged concrete artwork that is supposed to represent how slabs of earth slumped into the sea. The theme cleverly carries through to zigzag patterns in walkways.

I found the clearest evidence of the quake after I pedaled back to the downtown and puffed my way up a steep hill separating Second and Third avenues on the way back to the rental shop.

Before the quake, the guide books say, those streets were at the same level.

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