Anchorage

The Cook Inlet shore was home to Alutiiq people for thousands of years before the Dena'ina Athabascans arrived around 500 AD, fishing the streams in summer and hunting moose and Dall sheep in autumn. In 1778 James Cook's expedition anchored near a creek it called Ship Creek, in a vain search for the Northwest Passage, and in a bad mood named the southern arm River Turnagain. Gold found along Turnagain Arm in 1888 brought prospectors and small settlements such as Girdwood and Spenard.

The city itself began in 1915, when the mouth of Ship Creek was chosen as the construction port for the Alaska Railroad and a tent city grew up there. A land auction that year laid out the downtown grid, and Anchorage was incorporated in November 1920. The railroad, finished in 1923, carried the economy through the 1920s and 1930s, until Elmendorf air base and Fort Richardson were built in the 1940s and the military became the main employer.

On Good Friday, 27 March 1964, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake struck. The city stood on glacial silt that liquefied in the shaking; roads cracked, large areas of land collapsed, and in the Turnagain neighbourhood dozens of homes on the bluff dropped to sea level. The discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay in 1968 then made Anchorage the business centre of the oil industry. In 1975 the city merged with the surrounding borough, which brought Eagle River, Girdwood and the mountains into a single municipality covering nearly 2,000 square miles.

Anchorage is Alaska's meeting place. Five Alaska Native regional corporations have their headquarters here, the Alaska Native Medical Center serves people from all over the state, and the Alaska Native Heritage Center presents the dance, games and building traditions of eleven cultural groups. The city's Dena'ina name is Dgheyay Kaq'. Alaska Native residents live alongside Filipino, Samoan, Korean, Hmong and Latin American communities, and in 2010 Spanish and Tagalog were the most common home languages after English.

Winter has its own calendar. Fur Rendezvous, known as Fur Rondy, is a late-February festival of sled dog sprint races and ice carving, and on the first Saturday of March the Iditarod's ceremonial start brings dog teams down Fourth Avenue. In summer the Alaska Baseball League's Anchorage Bucs and Glacier Pilots play at Mulcahy Stadium under the evening light.

Outdoor life shapes the city's identity. Residents fish for salmon in Ship Creek beside downtown, ski the trails of Kincaid Park and camp out on Flattop at the solstices. Wildlife is part of everyday life: a few hundred moose live in the Anchorage Bowl in summer and many more in winter.

The 2020 census counted 291,247 people in the municipality, nearly 40 per cent of the state's population, and the wider metropolitan area, including the Matanuska-Susitna Borough to the north, had about 398,000. Most live in the Anchorage Bowl between the inlet and the mountains, in suburban houses, with Eagle River and Chugiak to the north and smaller communities along Turnagain Arm to the south.

The economy rests on government, the military and transport. Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson employs about 8,500 civilian and military personnel. The airport is one of the busiest cargo airports in the world and a regular stop for freighters crossing the Pacific. Oil companies, the Native corporations and hospitals are other large employers.

Daily life is organised around the car, the season and the light. Summer evenings are spent on the trails and rivers; winter brings ice-covered roads, short days and skiing on lit trails. The high cost of living is a common local concern.

Anchorage eats like the rest of Alaska, only with more choice. Wild salmon and halibut appear on many menus, grilled, smoked or fried in a sandwich, and king crab is the expensive treat. Halibut sandwiches and halibut burgers are served at some of the city's casual burger stands, and in summer anglers carry salmon home from Ship Creek beside downtown. Reindeer sausage turns up at breakfast, sometimes beside sourdough pancakes; in Alaskan slang a 'sourdough' is a long-time resident.

Summer weekends bring the downtown Anchorage Market and Festival, an open-air market with local seafood, produce, cooked food and crafts. In autumn wild blueberries cover Flattop Mountain, and berry picking is a popular pastime.

The city's mix of residents shows in its food: Spenard has Himalayan and Indian cooking among its diners and bars, and the many immigrant communities run restaurants of their own. Several brewpubs downtown brew their own beer, and the city has many microbreweries.