Mom in the Mtns

Hi everyone!  I hope you all had a fabulous weekend!  I spent most of mine working on unpacking the apartment, and it’s looking a lot better!  My closet is pretty sweet.  Hopefully I’ll be done by next weekend and have some pictures soon!  Despite being excited about how the apartment is coming along, I had my first mini-homesickness on Sunday.  I think it was brought on because I spent all morning seeing tons of people on Facebook posting cute fall pictures and talking about races they had run today, and then I went out to my car to find it covered in frost.  It’s definitely not fall here anymore!  After working on the apartment for a while I just started to feel pretty down about everything, so my husband suggested going out for a run on the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail.  I’ve been dying to do this ever since we moved here, so we headed out the door with about 40 minutes left until sunset.  Andrew was going to walk while I ran 3 miles.  Everything sounded like a good plan, until we parked our car at Earthquake Park and started walking towards the trail – and saw this!

I feel like it’s pretty easy to tell when you’re about to have a wildlife sighting in Anchorage because you’ll see someone taking a picture and figure out that something must be there.  And that’s what was happening with these moose.  We came around the corner to see two men taking pictures.  They were so close to the babies and the mom looked pretty mad.  She was HUGE too!  Andrew and I kept our distance and watched the moose for a while.  The babies were walking back and forth all over the trail, but the mom was standing in the woods not moving which had us worried because we knew she wasn’t comfortable.  At one point a baby stated running towards us and the mom starting moving too and I was like “NOT TODAY, MOOSE!” and started power walking back to the car.  We ran into a family with a baby and they decided not to try to get any farther on the trail either.  I was all ready to give up on my run since I’d wasted 10 minutes dealing with the moose and daylight was quickly fading, but the family gave me some directions to a nearby parking area farther down on the coastal trail and I decided that I’d go for it and just cut my run short.  As we were driving we noticed a ton of cars pulled over and people taking pictures of something and I thought “Not again” until I saw what they were all looking at!

This is Denali, the tallest mountain in North America and it’s located 4 hours away from Anchorage!  When we went there on our honeymoon my husband and I started talking about moving to Alaska, so I credit it for our move.  And there it was, just hanging out on my evening run!  Denali is notoriously difficult to see due to the fact that it’s tall enough to make its own weather patterns, but you can see it late in the day from Earthquake Park and the coastal trail if it’s a clear day.  So with Denali in the background, I headed out for a quick 2 mile run before sunset!

Credit for this one goes to Andrew!  He should be my full time running photographer  🙂

A seriously awesome view from the trail.  So many people were watching the sunset!

I will definitely be coming back to this trail again in the future, but you better believe that I will be on high moose alert!  Also, it was pretty hilly so this might not be the best spot for long runs.  I fully plan on trying out every inch of the coastal trail which will probably take months to do since it’s 11 miles long.  Hopefully I don’t let any other moose cut my future runs short!

What’s the craziest reason you had to cut a run short?  What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen on a run?