Alaskan Sunset
When I arrived in Anchorage, my initial plan was to go to sleep early and wake up for sunrise. The forecast was calling for rain that night, clearing up by the morning. That is not what happened. There was no rain that first night. In fact, it was quickly turning into a very pleasant evening, with fantastic scattered clouds all around. I knew it was going to be a spectacular sunset … somewhere. I made an executive decision to change the plan and stay up for sunset. I definitely made the correct decision. The next day, it rained all morning long.
Now the question was … where to go? I decided to go south of Anchorage and try to find a good spot along the Turnagain Arm. This is a very interesting area, which consists of rather interesting mud flats at low tide. It just happened to be low tide this evening too. There are many warning signs to stay off the mud flats. Why? I’m guessing it is because they are like quick sand and it is quite dangerous. I did see many footprints along them, so it might not really be all that bad, but I had no desire to get my only pair of running shoes all muddy, so I stayed off to the side. I definitely found the right spot for sunset. Any further along the Turnagain Arm, and I would have been away from the good light, from where the sun was setting in the north-west. I found a nice spot and waited.
The thing about this time of year in Alaska is that the sun rises awfully early (4:30AM), and sets awfully late (11:30PM). I found over the week that it is just too hard to get up that early for sunrise, and in fact, I did not get up early very much at all (I never got up for sunrise, but I did get up early a couple times, but only a couple times). It was much much easier to stay up late for sunset, then sleep in. They say that the winters in Alaska are awful and depressing because it is dark for much of the day. I may be wrong, but for photographers, I think that would be perfect. You could easily catch both sunrise and sunset in the winter without losing any sleep at all. In the summer, that is impossible to do. Even staying up for sunset is difficult unless you can sleep in the next day. So anyway, I stayed up late the first day I was there. I was tired from my flight, but not too tired that I could not stay up.
I was the only one out on the mudflats that evening. After the sun had set and I was leaving, I saw a couple guys come down, one carrying a big tripod and the other carrying a big video camera. They were going to video tape the sunset? They were in a hurry to catch some sunset light, but were complaining that there was no view at that location. I told them they had to get right down on the mudflats to see the sunset. There still was some decent color in the sky, but apparently they were too lazy to go down there. Oh well.
Here’s another one. I’m not sure which one I like better:
