East Coast got Memorial Day plans? Go to Anchorage!

by Grant Martin on

Memorial Day is right around the corner people and if you haven’t got plans yet you’re late to the party. I personally took advantage of some tickets from New York City to Mexico City, where I’ll be hanging out with my girlfriend in Teotihuacan and eating tacos until I turn green.

I booked in early March; holiday fares usually dry up well before the date, leaving latecomers high and dry by a few weeks out.

Lucky for you though, there’s a mini fare war for flights to Anchorage this May, which happens to include Memorial Day in the available dates. That means you east coasters still have a chance to book that last minute getaway to the nation’s largest state.

Departures are from Philadelphia, centrally located among DC, New York City and Baltimore for a paltry 385$. It also works in the other direction, so if any of you moose want to visit the City for a weekend we’ll have you. Book soon though, this fare has been live for a few days now so it won’t last much longer, especially during a holiday weekend.

You can do a flex search on Kayak to easily find dates around Memorial day or other times in May.

Stop and visit Blogger Catherine Bodry while you’re up there, I hear she leads ice climbing expeditions up the north face of Mt. McKinley.

Airline mistakenly carries passenger on outside of plane

by Kent Wien on

Passengers have recently complained about their seat assignments and being bumped from first class, but this story just may put everything in perspective.

It seems that 26 year-old Christopher Griffin was taken for the ride of a lifetime while trying to be a good Samaritan. Griffin worked for the Big Creek Fish Company in Egegik, Alaska when a MarkAir Express Cessna 207 landed on the beach near the fish processing plant.

Griffin jumped in his truck to meet the airplane and offload any supplies it may have brought. After unloading about a dozen boxes from the airplane, the pilot started up the single engine Cessna and taxied to the end of the beach.

The plane struggled to turn around the in the muddy sand and the nosewheel became stuck. The pilot then asked for help. It seemed his plan was for Griffin to push down on the horizontal stabilizer at the back of the airplane, which would raise the nosewheel, while the pilot added enough power to get out of the sticky situation.

“Take your hat off, it’s going to get pretty windy!” Griffin recalled the pilot saying. That turned out to be understated a bit.
Griffin obliged and pushed down on the front of the airplane’s stabilizer while facing towards the back of the plane. This effort paid off and the airplane began to move. The stabilizer–the small wing at the back of an airplane–caught him in the abdomen, but he figured the pilot would stop once he was able to get out of the muddy area.

Amazingly, the pilot continued to accelerate until lifting off the ground. Griffin considered letting go even after the airplane was in the air, but decided against it since the “water was too shallow near the beach.”

The plane leveled off and turned back to another beach before landing again. The pilot, who no longer works for MarkAir, jumped out of the airplane and asked Christopher why he didn’t let go.

“Why didn’t you stop?” Chistopher asked.

The pilot then flew Griffin back to his truck–this time inside the plane. The pilot asked him to keep it between the two of them.

FAA spokeswoman Joette Storm said she wasn’t sure what regulation the pilot may have violated. “There’s no safety provisions for a human on the outside of an aircraft. I don’t think it would fall under our regulations.”

The CEO of MarkAir Express, Neil Bergt, tried to play down the hype. “I don’t think it was that much of an incident. No one was hurt and the airplane wasn’t damaged.” Bergt said.

I wonder how many frequent flyer miles would be appropriate for Christopher Griffin when he submited his letter complaining about his treatment. Or did MarkAir Express insist on charging him for the round trip flight?

Message in a bottle takes a 21-year journey: Mine took less than that

by Jamie Rhein on

Twenty-one years ago, a 4th grader named Emily Hwaung put a message in a plastic bottle and sent it sailing on the ocean near Seattle via a guy with a boat. The bottle was released along with several others as part of a class project. Emily’s bottle was recently picked up in Alaska by Merle Brandell while he was walking his dog in his fishing village town, Nelson Lagoon. Due to his diligent pursuits, Brandell was able to locate Emily, who is now Emily Shih, and well past 4th grade. At age 30, Emily doesn’t remember the bottle project all that much but is tickled her message has come full circle and is not still part of the ocean’s pollution.

The article chronicling this latest bottle-sent /bottle-found story mentions how rare it is for bottles dropped into the ocean to ever be found. This makes me feel even more gleeful about my own experience. The summer after I graduated from undergraduate school I was taking a night ferry from France to Ireland as part of a two-months plus backpacking trip.

After sharing a bottle of wine with fellow travelers, we decided to write a message, seal it in a bottle and send it on a journey. I can’t remember what we wrote–or if we felt guilty throwing a bottle overboard, but I do know that some time later I received a letter from France. A couple had been walking along the beach and found it. I can’t remember which beach or how long it took for the bottle to be found. I’m not even sure where the note is. I did keep it, but with moves and travels, the note is buried in a box somewhere. You’ll just have to trust me that it’s there. I wonder if Emily knows where her 4th grade teacher is. I’m sure the teacher would be thrilled to know that this project did end up with a successful ending despite the other bottles still out there. [via AP]

Have increasing travel costs affected your travels?

by Catherine Bodry on

I usually fly to Seattle three times a year — it’s where I’m from and where my family still lives so I try to make one trip in the spring, another in the fall, and a third for either Thanksgiving or Christmas. This year I was planning to fly down in April, but ticket prices have gone up $100 from last year. To give you some reference: when I first began flying to Anchorage in 1999, the average summer ticket was $250. That price slowly crept up to $350. Now the average is hovering around $450, though it’s possible to score the random ticket in the three-hundred-dollar range. And mileage tickets have gone up as well. It used to be easy to get a mileage ticket for 20,000 miles, but I can only find a 40,000-mile flight except for the worst dates and times.

Then, gas prices have gone up. It’s a 126-mile drive to the airport, so the cost of catching my flight has gone up considerably in the last couple of years as gas prices have risen.

The result of these higher prices for me is one less trip a year. Instead, I’ll try to make my fall trip longer than the usual long weekend. I didn’t think all the buzz about the cost of travel meant anything until I tried to buy my most recent ticket. I’m definitely bummed, but at those prices I can’t afford to be taking so many trips.

Has your travel been affected similarly?

Where does the Iditarod start? It depends on the weather

by Catherine Bodry on

You’d think a race that’s been taking place since 1973 would have a starting line that never changes, but that’s not the case for the Iditarod — it has several starts, and some of these change from year to year.

The National Historic Iditarod Trail begins right here in Seward (see photo). Originally a mail and supply route, the trail became, in 1925, “a life saving highway for epidemic-stricken Nome. Diphtheria threatened and serum had to be brought in . . . by intrepid dog mushers and their faithful hard-driving dogs.” This one trip inspired today’s Iditarod, or what is called “The Last Great Race.”

The ceremonial start of the race is 125 road miles north in downtown Anchorage, and this past Saturday mushers took off down 4th Avenue while an announcer introduced each musher and team. Snow is trucked in so sleds can roll along the road, and bundled-up crowds gather on both sides to cheer the mushers and their teams on.

Mushers ride to East Anchorage, where they load their teams in trucks and drive even farther north for the official start (or “restart”) of the race the next day. This location is what changes from year to year — usually the competitive start has been in Wasilla, a bedroom community of Anchorage. This year, however, the start was in Willow — 30 miles north of Wasilla. Msnbc reported in January that the move to Willow was due to urban sprawl and a warming climate — and is permanent.

The conditions have been so terrible that the race hasn’t restarted in Wasilla since 2002, and in 2003 the restart actually took place in Fairbanks — 200 miles north of Wasilla.

If Alaska continues to warm up, the Iditarod may be no more, but until then I imagine the competitive start will continue to be pushed north until there’s nowhere left to go.