Posted on 10/18/2009 6:33:13 PM PDT by The Magical Mischief Tour
I guess I've reached that point in my life where you begin to think honestly about retirement.
Not happy with the current state of politics and not happy with the politics of my current home state, its gun laws, the criminal injustice system et al... I'm looking for a new home.
Fortunately its just me, no wife, no kids just me.
What are the opinions of Alaska?
I like the landscape, I love winter, wilderness and the outdoors.
I am talking with some small charter operators who own and operate small planes for a part time slot.
I've been there many times, but usually just a fuel stop as I continued onward to points in Asia.
What are the real in's and out's to Alaska living?
LOL! Don’t we all wish? It would be nice if all the men looked like Todd, too...
Why is that?
My sons have all lived in AK. The last one has been there over 18 years now and just loves it. He snowboards, plays basketball with Team Alaska, hunts, fishes, travels to the Yukon with his wife to participate in Tlingit life there, he will never be back down to the lower 48. He has an excellent job he loves and three great kids to share it with him. The deprivation of sunlight can be a pain but go to the Y and exercise. That helps them.
If you're old, forget it. It will kill you. Everything is expensive. The winters in the north are murder. Over the Arctic Circle you'll have 6 months of sun, and six months of darkness. Alcoholism is rampant. Depression is the average state of mind. Suicide is the preferred method of treatment.
If you're not committed to this lifestyle it will either kill you or you'll be back to the lower 48 fast.
Personally, I look elsewhere.
My sons have all lived in Anchorage. My youngest has been there for over 18 years now and he loves it there.
Go for it. If you don’t like it, don’t make yourself stay. Sometimes people try a place out for a some months before they take on the committment and money to relocate.
Ohhhhh yes. Are you in Anchorage?
Wonderful! Tell me a bit about life in SC. I’m curious about the unemployment rate at 10% or so. IS that due to the flood of people moving there?
I’m not sure, it’s just something I noticed. having established that I’m not an expert, I’ll rant on.
I looked at cause of death a while ago. Construction accidents, fishing accidents, drugs took a toll. It’s also a tough environment, dark, cold, wet (unless its really cold).
Some deaths came to people living subsistence lives, living off the land.
Look at the obit pages I posted, it’s pretty dramatic compared to El Segundo, where most people are over 80, plus a few traffic or ocean-related deaths.
Shhhh!!!! Dude, don’t be telling that. ;)
Alaska can make or break a person, trust me on that. i have lived here since 1992. Best area to buy land and still be reasonably close to populated areas would be north of Wasilla and south of Talkeetna, land is affordable, or if you want farming acreage go to the Point McKenzie area.
Forget Anchorage, its a liberal metropolis with sky high rent. But it also offers more employment options, where I live near Wasilla its been a tight work season, I normally have from 2-8 drivers for my fleet of concrete mixers, yesterday we delivered 65 yards of concrete for a church with just myself and the owner, two trucks doing the job of at least three and normally 4 or more.
My self I look at living in Alaska with two opposite views, love the summer, hate the winter and I swear I too will find a way to hibernate like the bears if I could. lately the option of traveling to a warmer climate in the winter has gone out the window as the lower 48 is lost, it has succumbed to a Marxist State, Alaska will survive because its too tough and difficult to invade and control, its the weakened lower 48 states like California that will be the first to follow Obama’s Grand Plan.
And I may be sharing some of Sarah Palins view of the lower 48, they don’t or won’t help themselves so why bother trying to be a leader for them? I get so many worker wannabes lately, all they do is whine and complain and ask for a raise and break my equipment, my last driver was a total driving boob, broke every truck he drove.
You can come to Alaska but be prepared for some extended time before you get a well paying job. Work is seasonal here, myself I usually stop working from dec till april depending on maintenance issues needed at work. And I absolutely enjoy it this way, only thing better would be me retired but I am 52 and just not quite ready.
My advice, don’t come up here before may, have at the least enough funds to get you through 6 months or more of frugal spending, never rent unless you actually get lucky or become a house sitter in the winter. Lots of people can live in an RV through the winter, I did with some proper preparation.Near the big towns expenses are not too bad, fuel is high though, eating out is pricy, don’t be a tourist because half of Alaska preys upon tourism.
You want a decent job? a resume works but just walking through the door and asking for work often will get you something better, because of seasonal trades like mine we often work long hours during the summer and usually cannot get enough manpower. Any construction or driving skill is helpful.
I can admit some places are better in the lower 48 but you are still in close proximity of ever growing domestic situations that may get out of control, up here we have the distance acting as a shield, of course Anchorage gets its share of problems but I really avoid having to go there unless its absolutely necessary.
I’ve spent the majority of my adult life up here - in Southeast (Ketchikan), in urban Alaska (Palmer / Wasilla), and now up here in the Bush, where I don’t list my village because everyone will know who I am, and village politics being what they are, I don’t want them to know.
Alaska is like what the United States used to be like when I was a kid in the late 1950s. That’s the say people generally don’t mess with their neighbors, the government stays out of the way, mostly, and people still wave and say hello without the threat of a sexual harassment lawsuit or meeting an angry gangbanger.
A few ugly truths:
Things are expensive up here. It’s cheapest in and around Anchorage, but the local joke is that living in Anchorage isn’t bad because Alaska is only 45 minutes out of town. Where I am, the cost of everything is fabulously out of sight - milk at $11 per gallon, gas at $5.80 per gallon, a six-pack of beer for $12. Meat means whatever I’ve managed to kill during the season. Veggies mean what is in the root cellar.
The weather sucks everywhere. Ketchikan is the most beautiful place on Earth when the sun is shining - and then you have to put up with the other 300 days out of the year. One year it rained, literally, for more than three months straight. Rusted my car to the point where water collected inside and I had to pound holes in the floor to drain the water. The low gray clouds day after day is something to behold, in a Biblical way, like the Book of Job. Palmer had a nice summer, for about 100 days, then the wind coming down the valley was like your own private little Antarctica. Up here in the Interior, my garden experienced its last frost on June 4 and its first frost of the fall on August 19. It is awe-inspiring to realize that on some days of the year there is 110 degrees of difference between one side of the window and the other. You should also see what that cold does to every piece of machinery and building you own, too.
There is a thriving subculture of drunkedness and abuse. You can avoid living it personally, but you can’t avoid running into it.
Do not expect to sit back and relax. The environment is too harsh. I like to work hard, and I’m in a place that satisfies that need. Unless you’re a Native, don’t expect a hell of a lot of government assistance for anything.
Native people, by the way, are really cool to hang with, but you’ll get to see the cancer of the modern welfare state up close and personal. Most of the racists (the very few) I’ve met up here are Natives with bad attitudes about outsiders, usually “white” people, but often the race hatred extends in all directions pointing away from Alaska.
Remember that Southeast is also the northernmost suburbs of Seattle, which means fine coffee, effete liberalism, and dope-addled artists.
Now the good points:
People are generally really nice here. The one time I moved to California, I walked over to meet my neighbors. They told me to get the hell off the lawn. Every time I arrived back here, I had a dinner set with strangers welcoming me to town within the hour. Anchorage is the only place you’ll really find that cold-shoulder so common in the Lower 48.
It’s great to be able to build, grow, and generally do whatever I want on my property - a freedom that even extends to the sort of thing that I wouldn’t want to do, like grow weed. For instance, when I wanted to irrigate my garden, I just dug a trench across the road, asked the guy across the street if it alright to get water from the slough out back, set it up and watered away. No regulations, permissions, or anything.
My wife and I might retire down around Homer, which is pretty much the banana belt for Alaska - sort of a cross between Southeast and Southcentral.
All I can tell you is that every time I leave this place, I come back. Either you love it or you run screaming back to Seattle.
Good luck in your decision.
Yeah, I bet they love it. There’s no place on earth like it. It’s wonderful.
While leaving Alaska last trip, the taxi driver said that the depression is really high in winter.
LOVE ALASKA, but I also like Vitamin D (from the sun). Personally I couldn’t take it when it never gets dark or never gets light.
And don’t believe all this crap about “dark in the winter.” Because we’re way up north, the sun’s angle to the earth means that we have (up here) about two hours of dawn and two of hours of dusk - thus explaining the “midnight sun” - and also explaining that even on the most grim days around Christmas we still see about four to five hours of light each day. Southeasterns are further south, so they get more sun, but it’s also above 20,000 feet of thick gray clouds.
I forgot to mention the mosquitoes. Don’t believe the stories that you read. They rarely exceed eight pounds.
You know, I grew up around New York. In a wierd way, Alaska is like New York. Those of us who live here choose to live here. We love to share stories of hardship and tough efforts to survive - and end the stories by mentioning how beautiful the skyline looks at night, or the northern lights.
One more thing - everything up here is personal. After a while, once you get to the Alaska Airlines terminal in Seattle, you always run into someone you know. When we go shopping in Fairbanks, we run into old friends at the stores or the movies all the time.
Alaska is the world’s biggest small town.
By the way, that also includes the bad stuff, like crime. Much of the crime is intimate - husbands and wives, brothers feuding, friends falling out. That’s why I try to stay out of village politics, which can sometimes be vicious. (It’s also why I’m not worried about Sarah Palin, who cut her teeth in village politics - and in Alaska fashion, I’ve worked with her and when I went back to college, delivered pizza to her home. The Palins are good tippers.)
Good luck again.
I’ve been investigating colder climates on the ocean to relocate to.
I considered Alaska, but rejected it.
In addition to the reasons mentioned here, statistics I found show a much higher crime rate in Alaska than in the other places I looked at.
From what I could tell, it’s natural beauty is not as varied and overall as nice as other areas, too.
For example, the falls there are pretty dull from what I’ve heard.
Best part is no income tax and it has ocean and it’s not hot, but it is too cold.
Bookmarking
>>>From what I could tell, it’s natural beauty is not as varied and overall as nice as other areas, too.
For example, the falls there are pretty dull from what I’ve heard.<<<
You must be confusing us with Delaware.
I’ve been around the world twice and have found very few places that even approach my own Alaskan back yard - Nepal, the south island of New Zealand, southern Chile. On the other hand, I know people who love London and Rome, so it’s all personal taste.
The crime is so bad that the key to my truck is in the ignition right now and we leave our house unlocked when we go to work. We did have three burglaries in town about five years ago, and we found out who did and gave him a one-way ticket out of town. Look at the details in those statistics before making a blanket judgment.
Those golden fall colors, with the snow on the mountains and that crystal blue Arctic sky, could be dull to someone. Beauty is a feeling, not a description.
Like I’ve said, either you love this place or hate it. No middle ground here. Good luck in your journey.
Ketchikan crime rates compared to New York City:
http://www.areaconnect.com/crime/compare.htm?c1=New+York&s1=NY&c2=Ketchikan&s2=AK
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