My wife and I both wish we could commute to work by bike everyday. But because of our daycare arrangement and that pesky “You must work 8 hours a day” rule, it simply isn’t possible.
So instead we’ve worked out a complicated compromise. I bike to work early in the morning. She drives in later after dropping the kiddo off at daycare. In the afternoon, I bike over to her office and get the car. I go pick up the kiddo, and she bikes home later. So we each get to bike one way. It works out pretty well, except for one hitch: there is no good route to get from my office to her office on a bike. Its only about a mile, but I have to take my life into my hands and cross the worst of midtown traffic.
I am constantly looking for a new route that is safer, more scenic, or at least shorter. This past winter I heard about a new path being built in a lesser-known park in midtown. Could this be a missing link I needed? Earlier this week I decided to give it a try. I found the park easy enough, but I couldn’t find any trails. So I started busting through the tall grass, carying my bike.
Midtown Anchorage - Anyone know where this is?
The bad news was that in a matter of minutes, I was up to calves in muck and it was getting deeper. The good news was at least this covered up my fashion faux-pas of wearing argyle dress socks with cycling shoes. Turn around? Are you kidding? I was not about to accept defeat from a tiny park in midtown. I pushed on.
I felt bad that I was probably disturbing the wetland habitat, but I have to admit that I was loving it. The best summer adventures usually involve some degree of bushwhacking or mud-slogging, but since I’ve been injured I’ve been missing out on all that fun. I desperately needed up up my slog quotient.
It only took a few minutes to cross the bog and I found the trail (still a work in progress) on the other side. I didn’t find a magical corridor through midtown, but I did find a nice little slice of the outdoors hidden in the middle of the city. I like living in a pace where my commute from work can turn into a mud-filled adventure. And besides, its not really summer in Alaska until you’ve bushwhacked through a mud bog.
