Museum sights in Alaska
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Fort Abercrombie State Historical Park
This military fort and its pair of 8in guns were built by the US Army during WWII for a Japanese invasion that never came. In the end, Kodiak's lousy weather, not the army's superior firepower, kept the Japanese bombers away from the island. The fort is now a 186-acre state historical park, sitting majestically on the cliffs above scenic Monashka Bay. Between the guns is Ready Ammunition Bunker, which stored 400 rounds of ammunition during the war. Today it contains the small Kodiak Military History Museum.
Just as interesting as the gun emplacements are the tidal pools found along the park's rocky shorelines, where an afternoon of searching for sea creatures can be spent…
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Alutiiq Museum & Archaeological Repository
Preserving the 7500-year heritage of Kodiak's indigenous Alutiiq people is the Alutiiq Museum & Archaeological Repository. The exhibits display one of the largest collections of Alutiiq artifacts in the state, ranging from a kayaker in his waterproof parka of seal gut to a 19th-century spruce-root hat. Take time to explore 'Sharing Words,' an intriguing interactive computer program that uses village elders to teach Alutiiq words and songs in an attempt to save the indigenous language.
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Museum of the North
Museum of the North at the University of Alaska rivals the Anchorage Museum of History & Art as the state's most impressive cultural center. A $42 million expansion added a Alaska Native art gallery and a sound-and-light theatre that features the northern lights. But the most popular exhibit is still Blue Babe, a 36,000-year-old bison found preserved in the permafrost.
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Fairbanks Ice Museum
Certainly the most bemusing sight in the city's downtown - and by far the best place to chill out - is the Fairbanks Ice Museum . This hour-long experience takes place in the historic, musty-smelling Lacey Street Theater, which you'll likely have largely to yourself. First comes the screening of the film Freeze Frame, which employs dramatic editing to chronicle the World Ice Art Championships, an ice-sculpting contest held in Fairbanks each March.
Then the lights come up to reveal an array of life-sized crystalline carvings ringing the theatre. They're all stereotypical Alaskan scenes - howling huskies and bears wrestling salmon - and some are slightly melted or broken. I…
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Alaska Native Heritage Center
Experiencing Alaska Native culture first hand in the Bush is logistically complicated and expensive. Instead, come to this 11-hectare (26-acre) center and see how humans survived, and thrived, before central heating.
The main building houses exhibits on traditional arts and sciences. It also features various performances. Among them, the staccato Alaghanak song, lost for 50 years - the center collected bits and pieces of the traditional song from different tribal elders and reconstructed it. Outside, examples of typical structures from the Aleut, Yupik, Tlingit and other tribes are arranged around a picturesque lake. Guides explain the ancient architects' cunning technolo…
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McCarthy
Most local services are in the hamlet of McCarthy, an erstwhile ghost town so funky and cool you'll want to haunt the place yourself. Facing the Kennicott Glacier's terminal moraine and just a stone's throw from the river, the tiny community is a car-free idyll, where the handful of gravel roads wind past rotting cabins and lovingly restored boomtown-era buildings.
Alas, in the past few years the place has been 'discovered,' but the summer population still hits only about 200, and just a quarter stick it out for the winter.
Once you've crossed the Kennicott River on the footbridge, follow the road across another footbridge and about half a mile further to the unstaffed McC…
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Iditarod Trail Headquarters
Near Wasilla, Knik boasts a rich sled-dog history, since it's the home of many Alaskan mushers and checkpoint 4 on the route. For more information about this uniquely Alaskan race, stop in at Iditarod Trail Headquarters. The log-cabin museum's most unusual exhibit is Togo, the famous sled dog that led his team across trackless Norton Sound to deliver serum to diphtheria-threatened Nome in 1925 - a journey that gave rise to today's Iditarod.
He's been stuffed and is now on display. Outside, you can get a short sled-dog ride (around US$10, from 09:00 to 17:00) on a wheeled dogsled. The Iditarod, a famous 1100-mile dogsled race to Nome, begins in Anchorage - but only for the…
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Fairview Inn
Closed in 2005, it would be a travesty if the Fairview Inn failed to reopen. Though not an official museum, it might as well be. Founded in 1923 to serve as the overnight stop between Seward and Fairbanks on the newly constructed Alaska Railroad, the inn is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Its old plank-floored saloon is classic Alaska: its walls are covered with racks of antlers, various furry critters (including a grizzly on the ceiling) and lots of local memorabilia. One corner holds Talkeetna's only slot machine; another is devoted to President Warren G Harding. When the railroad was finished in 1923, Harding arrived in Alaska and rode the rails to …
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Circle District Historical Society Museum
One of the best museums of any small Alaskan town is the Circle District Historical Society Museum in Central. Established in 1984, the main portion of the museum is a large log lodge that houses a miner's cabin, exhibits on early mining equipment and dog-team freight and mail hauling, and the Yukon Press - the first printing press north of Juneau, which produced Interior Alaska's first newspaper.
The most interesting display is the museum's collection of gold nuggets and gold flakes recovered and donated by local miners. This display, more than anything else, will help you understand why they continue to tear away at the hills and streams in an effort to find the preciou…
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Fairbanks Community Museum
Fairbanks Community Museum , though not thrilling, merits a visit on a rainy day. This homespun place traces the city's history mainly through old photos and newspaper clippings.
More interestingly, the museum is also home to the Yukon Quest Cache, with a gift shop and displays devoted to the city's seminal dog-sled race. Like a handful of other Alaskan towns, Fairbanks bills itself as the dog mushing capital of the world. The Yukon Quest, taking place each February, covers 1023 miles between here and Whitehorse along many of the early trails used by trappers, miners and the postal service. Though less famous than the Iditarod , mushers will attest that the Quest is tough…
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Anchorage Museum of History & Art
Pardon all the dust. The museum is undergoing a multi-million dollar renovation that will almost double its size when finished by 2009. Until then, this is still Alaska's best cultural jewel in a rough-and-tumble state.
The first floor is devoted to the arts and includes the Art of the North Gallery with entire rooms occupied by Alaskan masters Eustace Ziegler and Sydney Laurence. The Alaska Gallery on the second floor - the best way to learn your Alaskan history - is filled with life-size dioramas that trace 10,000 years of human settlement from early subsistence villages to modern oil dependency.
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Remembering Old Valdez Annex
Operated by the Valdez Museum, the Remembering Old Valdez Annex is dominated by a scale model of the Old Valdez township. Each home destroyed in the Good Friday Earthquake has been painstakingly restored in miniature, with the family's name in front. Other exhibits on the earthquake and subsequent tsunamis and fires are moving, but none are as heart-wrenching as the recordings of ham-radio operators communicating across the Sound as the quake wore on.
This is a fitting memorial to the lives and countless memories lost on Valdez' darkest day.
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Prince William Sound Museum
Heading back toward the waterfront along Eastern Ave, you'll come to the rather extravagantly named Prince William Sound Museum, which occupies an ill-lit room beside the Anchor Inn Grocery Store. The space has lots of displays about Whittier's military history, but the most fascinating exhibit is about the man who engineered the town's tunnel, Anton Anderson. A Swedish-Australian immigrant, Anderson discovered he had a knack for carving holes through mountains, and then found he had a knack for politics, eventually becoming the mayor of Anchorage.
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Sullivan Roadhouse
Across the parking lot from the visitor center is Sullivan Roadhouse. The classic log structure was built in 1906 and served travelers along the old Fairbanks-Valdez Trail until 1927. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 and in 1997 was moved, log by log, from Fort Greely to its present location in the Triangle.
Now a museum, the roadhouse displays historic photographs and excavated artifacts in several exhibits dedicated to travel in Alaska in the early 1900s, the so-called 'roadhouse era.'
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Baranov Museum
Housed in the oldest Russian structure in Alaska is Baranov Museum, across the street from the visitors center. The museum fills the Erskine House, which the Russians built in 1808 as a storehouse for precious sea-otter pelts. Today it holds many items from the Russian period of Kodiak's history along with fine examples of Alutiig basketry and carvings. The gift shop is particularly interesting, offering a wide selection of matreshkas (nesting dolls), brass samovars and other Russian crafts.
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Carrie McLain Museum
To the east of the visitors center on Front St is Carrie McLain Museum in the basement of the Kegoayah Kozga Public Library. Though there are displays on Native culture and local reindeer-cultivation efforts, the focus is the gold rush and Nome's history in the early 20th century. Don't miss the preserved body of Fritz the sled dog, one of the leaders of the famed 1925 race to deliver diphtheria serum to Nome, which was the inspiration for the Iditarod.
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Bering Land Bridge Interpretive Center
The center is dedicated to Beringia, the 1000-mile-wide landmass that linked Alaska and Siberia until about 10,000 years ago. Archaeologists believe that the first people to arrive in Alaska, along with a variety of animals, used this land bridge. The center has displays on mammoths, early Alaska Native culture and reindeer herding, and a collection of short videos that are shown on request.
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Museum of the Aleutians
The impressive Museum of the Aleutians, within easy walking distance of the Grand Aleutian Hotel, traces the Aleutian culture from prehistory and the Russian America period to WWII and the present. The museum is best known for its collection of Aleut grass baskets, but for many visitors the most interesting exhibit is devoted to the mummy caves of the Aleutian Islands.
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Colony House Museum
The thought-provoking Colony House Museum was a home built in 1935 during the original settlement of Palmer and its eight rooms are still furnished with artifacts and stories from that era. To bring the living-room piano to Alaska, members of one pioneer family left behind their luggage and stuffed their clothes in it, the only way to make their weight allotment.
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Tongass Historical Museum
Sharing a building with the Ketchikan Public Library is the Tongass Historical Museum, which houses a small collection of local historical and Alaska Native artifacts, many dealing with Ketchikan's fishing industry. Outside the museum you'll find the impressive Raven Stealing the Sun totem and an observation platform overlooking the Ketchikan Creek falls.
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Seward Museum
The eclectic Seward Museum has an excellent Iditarod exhibit, a rare 49-star US flag, and relics of Seward's Russian era, the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake and 1989 oil spill. There are also lots of amusing antiques, including an ancient electric hair-curling machine and a 'cow raincoat' designed for the oft-drenched cattle at the now-defunct Seward dairy.
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Arctic Interagency Visitors Center
A world apart is the Arctic Interagency Visitors Center, on the opposite side of the highway to the Frozen Foot Saloon. This impressive $5 million structure opened in 2004 and features museum-quality displays about the Arctic and its denizens. It has ultrahelpful staff, a schlock-free gift shop and nightly nature presentations - the best show in town.
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Prince William Sound Science Center
The dockside Prince William Sound Science Center has a few interpretive panels outside that, among other things, will help you untangle the fisherfolk's strange lingo, which is laced with words like 'openers,' 'IFQs' and 'sternpickers.' Inside there's not much for visitors save for an impressively enormous gray-whale skull suspended from the ceiling.
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Isabel Miller Museum
Within the Centennial Building is the Isabel Miller Museum, which is one room with a good portion of it a gift shop. The rest is crammed with a collection of relics, a model of the town as it appeared in 1867 and displays on Russian Alaska. Outside between the museum and the library is an impressive handcarved Tlingit canoe, made from a single log.
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Soldotna Homestead Museum
This museum includes a wonderful collection of homesteaders' cabins spread through six wooded acres in Centennial Park. There's also a one-room schoolhouse (that probably looks a lot more fun than the school you went to), a torture-chamber collection of early dental tools and a replica of the $7.2 million check the US paid Russia for Alaska.
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