Recommended for general welding plus OSHA certified safety equipment welding. As of the date of…read morethis review the business is open at the address shown. May 4, 2016

As a beginner to in in home yoga I wasn't quite sure what to expect and TBH I was a little nervous…read morethat my house would never be perfectly clean for her visits. But Teresa put me right at ease even brought her own water so I didn't feel like I was entertaining a guest but was there to get down to Yoga business. And she brought all of her own props. Teresa tailored our sessions to my needs and moods. That was the really neat thing about working one on one, you can adjust your poses in classes but it always feels awkward not following along. But one on one it's a completely collaborative experience. At the end of each session she reviewed the session and gave me a little, manageable homework. Also, there is a little bit of get to know you paperwork in the beginning. Another great tool in my yoga toolbox.

I don't know if bittersweet is the right word but, this is one of the most scenic zones in the park…read moreand access issues are fraught. It reminds me of when I lived in the PacNW and would read about access into the Picket range of the North Cascades. There would often be 3 approaches listed, all painful, all for different reasons. For Rumble, it goes something like this: 1. Hike in about 20ish miles on Peter's Creek Trail 2. Go up and over a steep, off-trail mountain pass of questionable quality and feasibility from Eagle River Nature center. 3. Luck out and get access from a private property owner bordering the park boundary. Optionally, I've heard a decent access area might be the pass behind The Watchman (I took photos of it while I was on the summit). Anyway, I lucked out and was able to do option #3. My hope is that @mountaineering can secure legal and efficient access before I finish the 120. As I crested up over into the valley, I was bloom away by the serenity of it all. It's a magical place. I anxiously scanned for bears (I've had some encounters that were a little too close for comfort in this area...maybe they are hanging out here more now that there are less people) and started hiking up the valley. I road the tundra-cuts and consolidated snow all the way to Bombardment Pass. I was debating if I should camp at the pass or carry my overnight gear down into the (next) valley. I decided to split the difference and camp at a pretty lake about halfway down. I slept for exactly 8 hours and woke up to Rumble completely obscured from my tent. I attempted to snooze another hour but sleep wouldn't come back. The series of sheep trails winding down the pass into the valley are magic. The grade is perfectly gentle. It made me feel "fast" even though I very much am not. Finding a spot to cross the creek to keep my precious princess feet dry was initially a challenge. But I just kept following the creek uphill until I found a sturdy snow bridge. This whole area (Peter's Creek Valley?) is even more scenic than Ram Valley. It's got bright green hills of sod rolling down off the craggy peaks, dotted with massive boulders that almost resemble stonehenge. I made my way up into the long gully of Rumble and it didn't look as intimidating as I was expecting. It looked boring. A long slope of scree with old snow tongues on climber's right. Towards the end, things do get tricky. The gully funnels into a tight corridor that ends in a drop. There are probably a couple ways to scramble up. I went up some wet fourth class climber's right. It wasn't too bad but eventually I had to traverse across a very short but very scary snow tongue. it was maybe only 10 ft wide but the top was bullet-hard and 5 ft below it, where my feet were, was loose sugar. I didn't realize it till I was halfway across, so booted a platform so I could have a decent stance. I awkwardly took my pack off and more awkwardly put my aluminium crampons on. The snow was so hard that I could probably only get 4 inches of my ice axe shaft into it, but the crampons really helped I was able to take a wide step onto the wet choss on the other side. Looking back at this snow feature, I felt ridiculous. It looks so easy, why was I so flummoxed? Once above that it was just fun, choose-your-own-adventure, snow and rock ramps that were no harder than 3rd class. In classic mountaineering style, as soon as I got into the ridgeline, the sweltering sun subsided and clouds covered the south-side of the mountain. I drank a pint of my luck beer "'Scend"(it's 2/2 so far) on the summit and took in the great views of Thunderbird to Bellicose and everything inbetween. I saw a pile of rocks where the's usually a summit register, but I couldn't find one. I saw that Caltopo/Gaia/Peakbagger/OSM have the true summit marked further down the ridge so I walked over there just in case. (just eyeballing it, I don't think it's taller) I took a summit selfie, summit pano, checked-in with my emergency contacts/family (had 2 bars of LTE on Verizon on top, the only place with any signal on the trip, save Bombardment Pass) The hike out was gorgeous with light coming over the pass and shading the layered golf courses of Peter's Creek Valley various bright and shiny shades of green. Coming back to a ready-made tent with no chores (other than delicious rehydration) is really something special. Hike out was largely uneventful, save for the fact that I got my first unobstructed view of the entire massiveness that is Rumble.

On some real real REAL ish, Marcus dance master best barber in the world Freeman always be giving…read morethe BEST cuts of all time. Just went in and got a cut earlier today... and now.. my hair be hitting different literally dripping in sauce. I feel like I'm on a whole notha level. I don't let anyone else fade me up because I'm built different. That being said, hit up this place!!! Not just for cuts, dancing too! This man is multi-talented! What can he not do?!

Yukla has been on my radar since I moved to Anchorage from Portland. I heard about it in the worst…read moreway possible. Another Portland climber, Dasan Marshall, had died climbing it in January of 2015. The first thing I did was google the mountain and look upon all of the gnarly mixed ice routes on its west and north faces. I quickly decided this mountain was "not for me". I satiated my thirst for high places with pedestrian Chugach hikes, punctuated with trips to the lower 48 to grapple alpine rock in the Wind River Range and the Sierra. Then, in the early days of COVID, when we were being told to limit any and all "risky" activity, Abbey and I took a leisurely hike to Echo Bend and saw an incredible, snowy view of the mountain. I decided to probe a little bit deeper, and eventually found there were some far easier ways up it. I'm not sure what this route is called. Northeast gully? Northeast Face? Twinsicle Pass? Anyway, the line we took goes up from Twin Falls, up the Twinsicle Glacier, through the pass, and corkscrews around to the NE side of the peak. We had foolishly penciled in Yukla for the 3-day Memorial Day weekend because, that's how weather works, right? It looked like the forecast was going to improve so we decided to give it a go. Worst-case scenario, we would have a soggy and secluded backcountry camping experience. We headed out Sunday around noon. The hike from Eagle River Nature center on the maintained trail to the Twin Falls area was mostly uneventful and felt quick. We reached the creek where it was time to branch off and up into the Twinsicle drainage and...we saw an adorable squirrel. Dead. In the creek. It looked so peaceful. It looked pristine and holy, like it was just taking a nap. More weird Yukla omens, yay. A little less than 6 hours after setting off for camp, we were at the iconic boulder that most folks seem to camp near. (not to be confused with the iconic/infamous "boulder bivy" in Icicle Creek, one drainage over!) We found the flattest spot, cracked open some beers (my first time bringing my canned homebrew on a Chugach 120 mission!), and setup camp. We went to bed about 8pm for a planned alpine-ish start of 4:30 am. It felt like I had just begun to fall asleep when...I was being shaken awake? The shaking then continued. And continued. Eventually I realized it was an earthquake. Abbey had also woken up. We heard rockfall. Having had two near-miss/bad-fall/thought-I-was-dying experiences in the mountains, all I could think of in my drowsy state was "let it come." If the mountains wanted to unceremoniously smush me in a tent while I was asleep, that seemed fine for some reason. Abbey peaked out of the tent and notified me that none of the rockfall seemed to be coming near us as I was drifting back to sleep. The weather was fine. We decided to wake up and see if we could get up this thing. We started trudging up the snow towards Twinsicle Pass, it was also fine. There was no post-holing, but a little bit of softness made every step take a smidge more energy that if the snow were firm Styrofoam. Eventually we reached the start of the glacier (according to the old scanned USGS topo maps, we had our doubts). We were greeted by a prompt Pika. It was having the time of its life screaming at us. We continued up, and stayed center-left, basing our path on previous trip reports we had read. We chose not to rope up as the snow grew firmer the closer we got to the pass. Any exposed cracks we could see were very small and easily avoided. At the pass, the wind picked up and the clouds rolled in. I suddenly had most of my summit motivation blown clear off of me. I didn't want to dampen Abbey's spirits, so I didn't say anything. I then left the shelter of Abbey's great kick steps, and started corkscrewing us around the mountain onto the NE side. There was a faint but obvious boot pack from the many folks that had been up Yukla in the sunnier days before. Eventually we stopped side-hilling and were going up mostly firm snow with our crampons, axes, and whippets. We went up the false summit and down-climbed it on the other side, facing-in. As we made our way closer to the true summit, the clouds continued to clear. At last we were on what was unmistakably the true summit. Brutal exposure fell off the west side. From this point one can really see the stark contrast between the two faces of Chugach State Park: the public-facing "dense green growth on brown slopes snaked by braided rivers" and the glacial "land of always winter". When we got back to camp it started drizzling, because of course it did. We took some big swigs of plastic-flasked Scotch and tried to delay packing up the tent for as long as we could. Besides the intense tenderization of our feet from far too much time in rigid boots, the hike out was largely uneventful. Moose's Tooth pizza and beer were had, with time to spare. It really felt like we pulled one over on the Chugach.

This peak is accessed from the penguin creek trail:…read morehttps://www.yelp.com/biz/penguin-creek-trail-anchorage Depending on who you ask, it may be considered the most difficult hike in Chugach State Park. It definitely requires lots of off-trail travel and navigation, that's for sure! Here's my trip report from when I summitted it: We left the penguin creek trail shortly after and began our traverse into the hanging valley. We ended up maintaining an elevation of roughly 1400 ft before steadily ascending to 2600 ft to drop down into the hanging valley. This decision was...OK. It wasn't a sufferfest, but it wasn't exactly great. There was definitely some bad snow and some alder-wrangling. The lake of any chlorophyll in any of the foilage made route-finding through it much easier...but there was still ample grunting and rubber-banding-gunning of branches. Rather than take the full ridge up Bird, we decided to go up-valley and then gain the ridge near "Point 4800"/"Point 4840" (I've heard it called both things, and on my map it isn't either of these elevations, anyone know where this name is documented?) Anyway, we started ascending form the valley floor at roughly 60.9989, -149.3137. It was mostly snow climbing on snow of marginal quality. Lower down it was very bad wallowing, so we climbed the rock bands. Eventually the rock bands ended and we were climbing a spine of snow (reminded my of the "hogsback" from my Mt Hood climbing days!). It was straightforward ascending, but extremely bad visibility was a little anxiety-inducing. We were in and out of rolling whiteouts and there was so little contrast my camera couldn't auto-focus, ha! We kept taking the obvious gully up, and eventually were dumped out onto a flattish rock band. From there steep, firm snow climbing to gained the ridge proper. (we didn't put our crampons on for this, but we probably should have) We aggressively side-hilled to avoid going up and over Point 48XX, a decision that didn't end up saving any time. Knife-hard Icy snow slopes peppered sloppy scree fields making travel annoying, unless you're really good at crampon-changing! Eventually we were at a low-point in the ridge, where I found a sneaky route down. I was a line I had heard described in some trip reports at the end of the valley that could take you directly to the summit ridge and probably save a lot of time, if it had snow on it. There was a ton of good-looking snow on it, so I noted it in caltopo (60.9981, -149.2958) for a possible, hot-pizza-at-Moose's Tooth-preserving descent short-cut. What we did next is hard to describe, but sticking to the ridge became difficult so we started side-willing east towards the true summit. Eventually we were on and off of really bad choss that was either dusted with half-melted powder or hardened by rime ice (similar to what Kevin Downie experienced last fall: https://www.peakbagger.com/climber/ascent.aspx?aid=1524570) . I can see how this would be a fun scramble in the summer, but dodging icy gullies and scraping choss with crampons was not! Abbey found an "easy" icy ramp to the summit area (I thought it was kinda scary), and after front-pointing on some rime, we reached the snow-and-rime dome that is the Bird Peak summit...to absolutely zero views. Vis was probably at 20-30 ft? There was enough visibility for us to scout an easy snow ramp that would take us down from the summit. (Anything to avoid down-climbing the Abbey M0 variation!) Long story short, the snow ramp was also extremely hard snow. It would've protected beautifully with even vertical pickets. We just kept our heads down and slowly front-pointed down it for what seemed like forever. Eventually we got back down to the scree slopes, took the crampons off, and started side-hilling back to the ridge (west). We went right to the descent line I had marked and...it still looked pretty good. I got out and tested it a little and it was just too hard to tell what the quality of the snow would be once we got out on it. I still had some mild anxiety from the summit downclimb and wasn't interested it going down a long slope with that level of firmness (especially with my crappy ultra light crampons, but that's for another time) We talked about it and, with some hesitancy, decided to go down the way we came up. We didn't side-hill Peak 48XX this time, we stayed pretty high, and travel was much faster! We found where we were topped out on the ridge, put our crampons on, and started down-climbing. The first small section was really steep, but eventually we were quickly plunge stepping down the slopes. I decided to go left (south) down a different way than what we came up to make it a pure snow down-climb. Heavy, wet snow in this area made for perfect wet-cement, slow-and-steady glissade conditions. We then trudged through chunky-water-style snow back to our tent, and we quickly saturated our gaitered mountaineering boots. Good day in the hills? Um, kinda?

This trail shoots off from the Eklutna Lakeside Trail:…read more https://www.yelp.com/biz/eklutna-lakeside-trail-eklutna To access it, park at the Eklutna Lake parking lot. Get on the Eklutna Lakesde trail, but instead of heading towards the lake, go the opposite direction. In about 500 ft, you should see the trial marker for Twin Peaks. The official trail is about 5 miles round trip. If you're not an avid hiker (or are feeling lazy, or are short on time) a good benchmark is, well, "the first bench". It's about 1.6 miles one-way and offers one of the best places in the Chugach to sit on a bench and take in views. (the "second bench" is another mile up trail, and where the official trail ends) If you are an avid hiker, you have a ton of options: East Twin Peak: this is more of a scramble that a hike, if you're not sure what that means, it's best to attempt it when you do! https://www.yelp.com/biz/east-twin-peak-palmer West Twin Peak: a much easier climb than East Tiwn, but the approach is pretty long and obnoxious. https://www.yelp.com/biz/west-twin-peak-anchorage Pepper Peak: if you leave the second bench and keep going uphill (or, take a "secret trail" that starts at the first bench and goes straight up, with no switch backs), You'll eventually summit this peak. It's only a hike, nothing technical about it. Eklutna High Traverse: This starts at Twin Peaks trail and ends at Bold Ridge trail, hitting a half-dozen peaks along the way. It's over 27 miles long! Protip: This trail is an outstanding place to catch fall colors!

This is a small pocket park located out front of the historic City Hall and is also known as the…read moreOld City Hall Park. It is not much of a park, it is more of a green space and outdoor amphitheater (lawn seating only). You will find it right by Anchorage's Visitor Center. There is metered street parking available within a reasonable walking distance and there are also commercial lots and garages available as well. The park's programming and events are facilitated by the Anchorage Downtown Partnership. In the Summer, the park hosts Music in the Park, a weekly lunch hour music series. The also hosts Music for the Little Ones, on Mondays in the Summer as well. The park is named after civil rights activist Elizabeth Peratrovich of the Tlingit Nation. Peratrovich fought tirelessly for Alaska Native equality. She was the catalyst behind the passage of the Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945, the first anti-discrimination law in the US. The park has been known to have high urban camper activity and they use this place to congregate and sleep frequently. This park does not have much of anything. No restroom, no picnic tables, no benches, no play area. So, its utility outside of a hangout spot or outdoor music venue is limited. It is in the heart of the tourist district though and you may find yourself here catching a quick recharge and strategizing.

Park is a bit of a misnomer, it's more of a square. There's no park equipment, no trees, no…read morebenches, no vistas, no picnic tables. Just grass. This is more a gathering place during parades and other special events. There's a teeny stone patio where sometimes tiny concerts are hosted. Mostly though, it is just hobos passed out on the grass.