One of the funniest failures of US school system is the fact they are legally obligated to teach us all the states but they never actually show how big Alaska is like I have actually had teachers tell me that Texas is the biggest state. We have all just convinced ourselves that Alaska is that small shrunken down thing on most US maps and the people that know it's the largest state can almost never accurately describe how large it is.
For context here is a picture
what
It has a national park that’s bigger than maine. Or Switzerland. A park.
I lived in Alaska for two years and I will never get over the sheer overwhelming bigness of it.
Nights where the sky is clear you can see clusters of stars or the Northern Lights dancing. When the lights are rippling especially strong and fast you can hear a static crackle in the air. When the moon is out after it’s snowed, you don’t need flashlights to see. Everything glows and glimmers like polished quartz.
But when the sky is clouded over so you can’t see the stars, you can kind of almost sense the mountains towering over you and helping to block out the light, these giant monoliths acting like this void darker than your soul. I’ve never experience night like Alaska night.
Everything is big, the mountains, the sky, the valleys.
And the dark.
what the fuck
It literally looks like the mountains are coming down from the sky like the ships in Independence Day. Scary af.
i worked in alaska for a summer and it was cool as hell bc for the first two months we were above the arctic circle so it was just, daytime the whole time
for two months
like it got quite warm actually! sthg no one tells you is that oh yah ofc, when the sun is out 24hrs a day it gets warm and STAYS warm. july in alaska actually feels quite similar to august in bc or oregon and washington, temperate rainforest during the dry season and temps just gradually tick up to the 80s at midday
and like i got there mid may just a few weeks after the last snowpack melted, and left early september right before the proper snows started again — one of the bus drivers joked that "oh yeah we have all four seasons up here, winter, june july and august" — but after the sun started getting low enough to go behind the mountains and we were, not in darkness or even twilight, but in **shadow**? it snowed one night.
IN JULY.
and it got to 75 the next afternoon so it didnt last more than 12 hours but like, what. WHAT
by the end of the summer we had cycled through twilight hours to where we were just starting to have actual night again for an hour or so, and oh also all the trees started turning orange and losing their leaves. i went from full on autumn at the start of september up in denali back down to portland where it was still summer. wild transitions
anyways so also moose are about three times bigger than you think they are