Part 4 in a series about our trip to Alaska in late June through mid-July, 2011. 

The main item on our list for being tourists in Anchorage was walking the Coastal Trail.  The Coastal Trail (or CT for short) is about 11 miles long and runs from downtown Anchorage, along the coast (if you hadn’t guessed that), to Kincaid Park.  I’ve walked on bits and pieces of it but never had walked the entire thing.  Rather than tackle the whole CT at once, we decided to break it up into three legs.

On Monday of our first week, we walked from Kincaid Park to Point Woronzof.  This is the longest unbroken stretch of the trail (about five miles) – once you get on, there’s no way to get off until Point Woronzof because we were basically skirting the perimeter of the airport almost the whole way.  Selah accompanied us on this leg of the trip.

And yes, she volunteered to push the stroller. It was not a requirement for getting to hang out with us.

The walk tired Ellie out and she had to take a nap, while holding her Baba’s hand.

We stopped for a little liquid snack for Ellie along the way.

As we were hiking, we saw lots of wildlife, including chipmunks,

spruce chickens (we think) (with lots of cute babies),

and a moose with a pretty good set of antlers.  Alas, we have no picture of the moose because we were more concerned with putting more than 10 feet between ourselves and the moose than taking pictures.  Thankfully, the moose was more interested in eating than in us and eventually, he moved off the trail and on to better things so that we could continue.

Finally, we reached our goal: Point Woronzof!

It was a gorgeous day for a walk.  Selah was a really good sport to walk for such a long time without complaining (or at least with only a smidgen of “How much longer?”)!

Point Woronzof is right at the end of one of the main runways so while we were waiting for my dad to pick us up, we had the fun of watching both gigantic cargo jets and little planes take off over our heads.

Even Ellie had fun!

We felt like we’d earned our dinner that night!