Picture this: clear mountain streams, alpine flowers, and bears fishing for salmon. Wide open tundra where musk ox roam, glaciers winding up to the heavens, and cornucopias of cloudberries. You may have an image of the Brooks Range in your head, or possibly our very own Chugach mountains. When I think of these distinctly-Alaskan images, however, I picture a different place. A place rarely visited due to its remoteness, ruggedness, and inaccessibility on the People Mover. No, it’s not the Alaska Range. Nor the Talkeetnas, but good guess. No, these images immediately bring to mind one place and one place only: South Anchorage, the true Last Frontier.
As I nibble on my focaccia from the Fire Island in Airport Heights, I consider the idea of the ‘Last Frontier’. It’s sort of a B.S. concept, anyways, because Native Alaskans have been living in Alaska for at least 15,000 years. The only place in the state that I think the concept still truly applies is South Anchorage. The feeling I get when I drive down the Seward Highway and enter the wilderness that is South Anchorage is truly unparalleled. Goodbye civilization, hello prehistory. I half expect to glimpse a woolly mammoth wandering down the side of Rabbit Creek Road. A good proof of my claim that South Anchorage is the true Last Frontier is that, to this day, I have never met anyone who has been there. Ask yourself, have you?