Sunday Fun Facts

The 2010 edition of the Alaska Visitors Guide just came out, and features a few factoids:

• Alaska has 39 mountain ranges, including 16 of the highest mountains in North America. Denali (Mt. McKinley to flatlanders) is king at 20,322 ft.
• There are six mountain ranges visible from Anchorage including the Chugach Mountains, part of which is in Anchorage. The other five are the Alaska, Tordrillo, Aleutian, Talkeetna, and Kenai ranges.
• Alaska has 30,000+ miles of shoreline, more than the rest of the U.S. combined.
• We have about 100,000 glaciers; only 600 of them are named. (It doesn't say whether the others wander aimlessly, looking for handouts...)
• The Aleutian arc contains 80 volcanoes; 40+ of them are active. Mt. Redoubt erupted in 2009, Mt. Spurr (75 miles west of Anchorage & often visible) erupted in 1992, depositing a layer of ash on Anchorage which remains today).
• Alaska has 17 national parks, and the largest state park in the U.S. Wrangell-St. Elias is the largest national park at more than 13.2 million acres. That's double the size of Denali National Park, containing Mt. McKinley.
• Speaking of Denali National Park, its roughly 9,500 square miles is contained entirely inside the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, which is north of Anchorage. The Mat-Su, or "The Valley" is 23,000 square miles - the same size as West Virginia, and is one of our medium-sized boroughs.
• The Municipality of Anchorage is one of the smaller boroughs, containing 1,955 square miles - the size of Delaware.
• Chugach National Forest, part of which is in Anchorage, is 5.6 million acres - roughly the size of Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined. It's the second largest in the nation.
• The Tongass National Forest is the largest at 17 million acres, located in southeast Alaska.
• The Chugach State Park is one of the largest in the country, at 500,000 acres.
  
• And for you fisherfolk, the world record king salmon was caught here in 1985. It weighed 97 lbs, 4 oz.
• The world record halibut was also caught here in 1996, weighing 459 pounds.

That's enough oohs and aahs for one day. Don't want you overdoing it now, do we?