We booked a hotel room in Anchorage, since finding a place to camp in a city of a quarter of a million people wasn't particularly appealing. We called in to the Caribou Inn while on the road, based on the review in our handy-dandy Rough Guide to Alaska, pulled in and took our gear into the room and fell asleep for the night. For our first day in Anchorage, we mooched WiFi off of the hotel down the road and took care of business back home. Breakfast was at the Snow City Cafe, right around the corner, then we set out for preparations for a little hike. We knew there would be snow, so we headed to REI for an extra pair of crampons. To start with, this is the biggest REI we've ever been in. Granted, we saw the HUGE Seattle REI from the freeway a few days earlier, but that doesn't count. The store was two stories... it felt like a department store. There must have been around 150 bikes lined up and hanging from the ceiling. Rentals are obviously a large part of business at REI Anchorage, since so many people just rent gear once they get to Alaska. My hunt for crampons led me to the $200+ "real" crampons. A few questions helped me realize that what Arizonans call "crampons" are actually "YakTrax" (traction aid devices), whereas crampons are heavy-duty ice climbing gear. Because they actually have ice in Alaska which one can climb, I suppose. We headed out of town for a little hike in the Chugach Mountains. The "cool" trails had two feet of snow dumped on them the week prior, making them unsuitable for hiking. Instead, we headed for some milder trails (which make up part of the Iditarod in March), which were still snowy, muddy, and mucky. Initially we joked about the pair of YakTrax we bought (the last pair they had) because they are bright orange and glow-in-the dark. We realized the rationale for the bright colors after we finished our hike and Cara was missing one of her black (mud-colored) YakTrax. We found it with some keen eyes and extensive back-tracking, but a bright orange set would have been much easier to find. We closed out our night with some fantastic pizza at the Moose Tooth Brewery. The next morning we took advantage of the Toyota dealership in Anchorage to get an oil change (since we had put over 3k on the car since our departure), perused downtown and headed for the Anchorage Museum. Overall, the museum was quite good, with a seemingly comprehensive overview of native Alaskans and Alaskan history and a very interesting movie on contemporary native politics. There are no reservations in Alaska for native people. Instead, the tribes are organized as corporations with the individual native people as shareholders and with ownership of the land and resources. Thus, they are free to buy and sell land or lease rights to its resources and are not under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Perhaps the most surprisingly biased exhibit, however, was the once praising the Trans-Alaskan oil pipeline, emphasizing all of the safety features and monitoring technologies (forgoing any mention of negative environmental impacts or questions of property and resource rights). The most blatant bias showed up in the single panel talking about the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Though I can't remember the specific wording, it was along the lines of... "Though the oil spill did hurt some wildlife, the cleanup efforts were able to supply thousands of jobs into the Alaskan economy at a time when Alaska was in a recession." Talk about a rosy view. Who paid for this? Oh, there is the sponsor panel... indeed, some organization representing Alaskan oil and energy production.