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.