Growing up in ALASKA

I grew up in Alaska for the first 14 years of my life. Me, my older sister (by two years), younger sister (also by 2 years) and younger brother (by 4 years) took full advantage of finding new and exciting ways to test fate and the limits of our bones and vital organs in our adventures.
I lived in Anchorage, South-Central AK. One of the least Alaskan parts of Alaska, being more densely populated and urban than the other 97% of the state.

SLEDDING.

Our national sport. The idea is that if you sit on something smooth, you can go fast.

My siblings and I, of course, were unsatisfied with the relative simplicity/safety of sledding, and so we came up with what we called SLED WARS.

The idea was to pack the four of us onto 2-3 sleds, start at the same time, and by the bottom of the hill, be the only one left on top of a sled.
Common techniques included sled flipping and if you were good, you could drag their sled horizontally in front of yours and just run them over;
making sure to grab the edge of their sled and flip it at the same time.
Use of snow to encourage someone to abandon sleds was also encouraged, as tumbling to safety was preferred to ice being grated into your eyes.

Things got even better when we had two large sleds. We would tie the ropes of the two together to maximize potential for physical contact/altercation, and we would start by hanging one down the hill backwards, so that there was an inevitable initial collision.

Ice was best for this, as it offered little resistance, and small bumps turn into tailbone-shattering impacts that provide vital opportunities for those prepared to forcibly dismount you from your sled. And with ice, the threads on the sled did not matter so much, and you could exercise far more creative maneuverability in your attempts to maximize your percent of your parent's inheritance.

CULTURE

There was a massive presence of Native Alaskan culture when I grew up there. I loved it. The stories and history added a sense of wonder and imagination that I have yet to find anywhere else I've lived. One of my favorites was the legend of Sleeping Lady, an island off the coast that resembles the silhouette of a woman laying on her side.
The legend, simplified, tells of a woman named Susitna and her husband to be, Nekatla. They are at war with tribes farther north, and he decides to travel there without weapons, in an effort to broker peace. She vows to wait, and marry him upon his return. She then went to sleep, and after some time, news came that they would not be returning. They did not wake her, and she continued to sleep, in wait of Nekatla to return, and the legend says that she will wake when peace is brokered, and Nekatla will return so that they can be married.
Being able to visit completely intact villages and speak with those who grew up in tribal environments was incredible to me.

Outside of that, in school, the second language was Japanese, and taught as early as 4th grade to the special, different, important 'immersion' half of my elementary school, giving impressionable children a nice early head start to classism and giving half of the students something special to bond and unify with, and the other half of the students a perpetual reminder that they're not as important.
The immersion kids had bean bags instead of desks, and a double sized class room.
They didn't need homework.

We had desks and a perpetual sense of inadequacy.

I'm not bitter.

Sleeping Lady

SNOW

TWO KINDS OF SNOW.

Dry snow (colder/below freezing): Fun, soft, light, pretty.

Wet snow (above or close to freezing temperatures): Heavy, soaks your clothes, wants to kill your extremeties with hypothermia and make you slip a disk as an 8 year old trying to shovel it. It wants you to slip, it wants you dead, and it has a personal vendetta against tendons near your groin that keep you from doing the splits, which this icy hell snow often forced you to do.

Snow was beautiful. The picture above shows how bright it usually was during the winter. No actual sun, just kind of lit enough to see.

Snow offers a unique experience. It absorbs sound very, very well. So you go outside, and it's silent, and there is not sun or movement, other than the snowflakes. If you are still enough, you can actually hear the gentle, quiet murmurous roar of all the snowflakes impacting the ground.
And when the sun does shine through, the snow glitters, it looks white, but if you focus, each pinprick of light is a different wavelength of light that's been split by the prisms of the ice crystals.
It was beautiful.

WILDLIFE

It either ignored you or wanted you dead, hardly any in between.

MOOSE: Massive. Will total your car and walk away unscathed, and if one decides to dead you, they can and will. Where I lived was relatively populated, but that did not stop meese (plural of moose) from wandering in and around. Even downtown, seeing a moose casually walking down a sidewalk was not unheard of. Moost of the time, they didn't want to bother you or care. But when there was a mooslet, they were very aggressive and would charge you just to remind you of how small, weak, and slow you were.

Moose pellets were about the size and density of corks, except more aerodynamic.

So naturally my brother and I would playfully arm ourselves with them, and slingshot them at each other.

IF you found the right density, they'd explode into a bark-y dust (That's most of what moosen ate) on impact.

Other than that they just left welts on my brother.
I was good at dodging. And he was like 6 when I was 10.
Good times.

BEARS: I never saw one in the wild up close. They can smell you from miles away, and if one finds you, it almost definitely wanted to, and intended to eat you or the food you have. Wilderness and animal safety was incorporated into all levels of education.

SUFFERING/DIP NETTING
OR
WHY ALL OTHER PAIN IN LIFE PALES IN COMPARISON.

Imagine going camping.
Now imagine you are camping on a cold, lumpy beach.
Now imagine the sand granules range from the size of peas to the size of ants.
And they get into everything.
And you perpetually get more wet, but never dry, as there is no heat source significant enough to make the moisture evaporate.
And when you're wet, the sand sticks to you.
Your clothes.
Your socks.
Inside your underwear
The wet, cold inside of your sleeping bag.
The smell of the fish carcasses that are filleted right there on the beach, and then devoured by an endlessly squawking flock of poop-launching sky rats.
Perpetual noise.
The smell of rotting flesh.
Covered in rashes as the quartz slowly grated your skin away, and your body became one giant clammy prune
and you dad is having the time of his life.
That's all I have to say about that.

Alaska wants to kill you. In many ways.

Your car can get too cold to start in the middle of nowhere, and you have to go to great lengths not to freeze to death.
It has actual quicksand. Or more accurately, silt, on huge stretches of the beach. It will suck you in and kill you.
Water and rivers, even frozen, kill tons of people. The coldness sends you into shock, and very VERY quickly saps you of both strength and heat.
I've gotten to the point myself where it starts to feel very warm, and comfortable, and I get very relaxed and feel like taking a pleasant nap.
Do not nap in Alaska water.
Also the beach itself was largely steep, resulting in a deadly undertow that would drag you under and spin you around until you died.

COMMON MYTHCONCEPTIONS AND A FEW STORIES

MYTHCONCEPTION 1: ALASKANS HAVE HOUSES.

This is absolutely not true. We all live in igloos. The cost is far too great for the wood to be shipped that far north. You may ask, "Well what about pine trees?". Pine trees are actually a type of mineral. If they were a plant, they would freeze and die.

MYTHCONCEPTION 2: ALASKANS HAVE CARS

Gasoline freezes in Alaska, so we transport ourselves almost exclusively by dogsled, and more recently by snow machine. After corgis were introduced, we were actually able to cram a series of hamster wheels and belts into the hoods of some vehicle frames where the engines would be, and they propel the cars forward in that manner, another scarcely known fact.

MYTHCONCEPTION 3: I CAN SEE RUSSIA FROM MY HOUSE

Not even almost. It's way, way too far. You would need to travel to a building at least 4 stories high to see far enough to catch a glimpse of Russia, and igloos are incredibly unstable past 2 floors.

STORIES:

Well there's the snow luge my dad made once. We had a hill in our back yard, so my dad shoveled the snow into a kind of mound travelling down the hill, turning 90 degrees the bottom (including a 45 degree tilt to account for the g-forces), and had me, with a bunch of additional weights, slowly take the sled down it, making sure to carve a clear, deep path into it. He then takes his propane blow torch and proceeds to flame the crap out of the length of it, melting it and then allowing it to freeze. It was no longer a sledding route. It was a, "Lets see how fast this goes before unexpected factors turn this into something outlawed by the state". My sister decided to lean over going down the slope with me once, to see past me. She saw a tree, briefly.
She was covering her face and crying as we got to the bottom. My parents told her she was okay, and got her to move her hand from her face.
After a moment of "oh, you're fine", a strong, thick, dark red spray of blood lets loose.
Snow is great because it can immediately ice/insulate the wounds it causes.

AHNOLD

Once, my parents took us to visit some friends of theirs, who apparently were acquaintances of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The mutual friends were wealthy, and had a house on a lake with snow machines. I do not know why I was allowed, but me being me, well, I rode the snow machines, and apparently gave Arnold Schwarzenegger's kids a ride on it too. I'm told he was visiting for the winter olympics. EDIT: There are no Winter Olympics as of yet. I have been misinformed, or I remembered incorrectly. The important detail is the Arnold's kids thing. (You think someone would do that? Go on the internet and tell lies?)

This post will probably be followed by a series of edits as I come up with more stories and details to include.

TLDR Alaska is cold and pretty and fun and deadly.

FP EDIT:
THANK YOU.
I'm glad so many of you enjoyed this! I had fun writing it!

PART 2: http://imgur.com/gallery/1PXRl