xtremeteal4life
Cheer Parent
- Oct 10, 2010
- 2,902
- 3,312
Off topic but I wanna know more about Anchorage! Don't know why but for some reason I'm fascinated with Alaska and all the Alaska reality shows on TV. haha
The Northern Lights are beautiful, but the best view of them is obviously when it's clear...and when it's clear it means it's colder. Snow actually = "warmer" weather. Cars are equipped with something called a block engine heater. You literally plug your vehicle into an outlet, which are located outside every major business. Otherwise, your car wouldn't start.
This is what parking lots at grocery stores, Target, WalMart, etc. look like:

Living next door to a dog musher (dog sledding) is a nightmare = 15 Huskies, Akitas, etc. at any given time. Most of the apartments don't have central AC (heat of course, but no AC). -20degrees and -40 feel the same. Earthquakes happen regularly..I actually thought they were pretty cool. Obviously I never encountered a life-threatening one; but the building would start to sway back and forth, which I thought was cool (until one day it shook the entire foundation of the apt. instead of swayed-I think the difference felt between the two has to do with the movement of the tectonic plates-if they "slide" it produces the swaying effect, if they smash into one another-the violent shaking of the foundation-I could be wrong about that though, it might have to do with where the earthquake originally hit, what magnitude, etc.). I never saw lightning or heard thunder in my 3 1/2 years there, and to my understanding lightning in Anchorage is extremely rare...so that was very, very weird to me.
Anchorage (unlike Fairbanks) does have some light in the winter and darkness (sort of) in the summer. However, it's extremely short. If you had a 9-5 job for instance w/o windows, it's possible you'd rarely see sunlight in the winter. Sunlight comes late in the morning and sets early in the afternoon. In the summer though, we got less dark than the winter got light, and it almost never got completely dark, it looked more like late dusk. I remember waking up at 5am thinking I was extremely late to work (I thought it was 9-10am based on how light it was), when I had 2 more hours of sleep. I also went manic in the summer due to the lack of darkness. I literally didn't sleep for weeks and had to be put on sleeping pills during the summer (come winter I was fine).
The ratio of men to women is approximately 9:1 (nine men to every one female). Alaska has the highest per capita rate of alcoholism and illegal drug use out of all 50 states, the highest suicide rate out of all 50 states, and the highest rate of forcible rapes (and rapes in general) in the US..in addition to one of the highest in homicides as well.
Moose are a pain and can hold up traffic for hours. There's this cool place called gravity hill, where if you leave your car in neutral, it will pull you uphill (at least it appears that way). There's a scientific explanation for it...but here's a video of gravity hill as I've experienced it.
Here's a scientific explanation of what it really is
The Mysterious Gravity Hill -- Physicists Show "Antigravity" Mystery Spots Are Optical Illusions
I'll think of more later...but that's what I have off the top of my head at the moment... :)