Thursday, July 9: Day 27

Today was my mom's first full day here and it was a blast! We started out by going to Potter Marsh, which is just a few minutes south of Anchorage on the Seward Highway. The highlight there was seeing some huge red salmon spawning in the creek there. I have never seen a salmon so close that was still alive, and of that color.

Then we stopped at Beluga Point Overlook. The Seward Highway has a lot of places to turn off and enjoy amazing views. This one is called Beluga Point because supposedly it's a great place to look for Beluga whales. No such luck for us. But did you know that there are 5 colonies of Beluga Whales in the Alaska region and 1 of those is completely contained within the Cook Inlet (the inlet that leads to Anchorage)? So I know they're there...

We made our way to the Wildlife Conservation Center in Portage (fyi, Mile 79, past Girdwood). This is a place where a variety of animals are being nursed back to health, or orphaned animals like these cute baby calves. The calves were our favorite part. The first time we came around, they were laying around looking pretty sleepy. The second time, there were some employees there doing some blood work and things with them. They put little tags on their ears that made them seem a little less wild, so we were glad we were able to see them before all of that happened. I've never seen a moose buck his front legs or make any noise at all, so it was pretty interesting to see these 5-6 week old calves doing so. It was all they could do to keep them still long enough to draw some blood and tag their ears.

We saw a black bear that had climbed a tree with no signs of coming down.

Lots of caribou. Their hooves are pretty crazy looking.

Some adult moose that were extremely lazy and hardly moved an inch while we were there.

We saw three grizzlies and watched a couple of them take turns digging deep trenches around this little hut in their area. They were fascinating. It dawned on me that if it wasn't for a few little wires that made up a fence between the bears and me, I would be in one very dangerous place! (Our camera ran out of batteries, so there are no pictures of the grizzlies...)

Later that evening, Matthias and I took my mom to the Dimond Center Mall to show her how weird it is. Here is just one reason why it's unlike any other mall I've been to. You can see the row of stuff mammals and birds:

I took a closer picture of this moose to show how it's right in front of one of the stores.

This "mall" is also equipped with an ice skating rink, a bowling alley, post office, library, bank, church, a store devoted to lottery tickets, several recruiting offices, a homeschooling curriculum store, and what looks like it used to be a hotel (it's hard to explain...maybe I'll have to get a picture of it and show it another day).

And because my mom had an out-of-state ID, we had this coupon she could redeem for a $5 gift certificate to any place in the mall. Pretty sweet!