Joint base Elmendorf Richardson is a midway rest stop for senior officials on the route from Washington to East Asia.
Watch this furry intruder struggle to get the trash can
Anchorage, Alaska residents recorded a bear trying to pry open a trash can to get a snack.
WASHINGTON – The summit meeting between President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin will focus on ending Putin’s war in Ukraine, with the incredible beauty and vulnerability of Alaska.
The two world leaders meet at Elmendorf Richardson’s joint base. It was a facility where I was with the airline and soldiers – a lot of moose and bears are also worthy of the location on the edge of Alaska’s vast black spruce-washed wilderness.
It’s cold, dark in winter, and snowy, brings you closer to the 24-hour sun during peak summer.
For senior officials like the president and cabinet secretaries on the route from Washington to East Asia, this is a major mid-stop stop. A flight from the East Coast to the South Coast of Alaska takes about eight hours, with mandatory pre-rest air crew limits and convenient and safe places to refuel.
Long before the air travel and the superpower summit, US and Russian leaders raided Alaska. In 1867, Secretary of State William Seward negotiated secretly with Russian officials to purchase Alaska’s territory for $7.2 million. At the time, it was ridden as Seward’s stupidity, but this deal worked for the Americans. Alaska – its people, its stunning scenery and huge natural resources – joined the union in 1959.
Before the state, the Army established a base that would become Elmendorf Richardson in 1940 during the WWII phase. Since then, along with soldiers, airmen and small units of the Navy and Marines, they have called the base home. Overall, the joint base hosts around 30,000 service members, their families and civilian employees.
Its important location is close to the Arctic resources seen by China near Russia – Elmendorf Richardson and other Alaskan military facilities have become increasingly valuable to the Pentagon. In recent years, more personnel and money have been flowing to Alaska to strengthen the North’s defenses. This base participates in some of the military’s most complex annual war games, featuring sophisticated weapons like the F-22 fighter planes.
Alaska is the finest land. The state is more than twice that of Texas. Its 46,000-mile coastline is more than the combination of the 48 lower condition. Denali’s snowy Peak Tower is located above the interior of more than 20,000 feet.
Walking around the forest of brown and black bears, moose and wolves, tundra and black spruce. Temperatures routinely drop below the interior zero where Fort Wainwright sits on the edge of Fairbanks. The dim sunlight glides in the sky for just a few hours at the depths of winter.
Cabin fever can be very real.
In summer, it is the land of the midnight sun. Permanent daylighting has its drawbacks, disrupting, irritating, and worse. Alaska is routinely ranked among national leaders in alcohol abuse and suicide.
In recent years, Alaska’s strategic remote locations have revealed its vulnerability. Suicide among soldiers who have risen to alert levels. A report by USA Today revealed that there is a lack of mental personnel to help them. The Army and Congress intervened, dispatching dozens of counselors, spending millions of millions to improve the living conditions of the military there. Suicide rates have declined.
Efforts by Chinese spies to access Alaska bases have not been reported by USA Today. The base includes military top-end weapons, sophisticated radar, which tracks and intercepts potential attacks from home and missiles.
Russia also regularly inspects the northern side of the United States. On July 22, North American Aerospace Defense Command detected a Russian fighter jet operating in the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone.
When aircraft enter the zone, they must be identified for national security purposes. Russian planes remained in international airspace, a tactic they regularly employ. Mildly provocative, the flight is recognized by Norad, but is not considered a threat.
Meanwhile, global warming thaws permafrost under the runway, rising water levels damage coastal facilities, requiring tens of millions of dollars of corrective cost accounting. A climate skeptic, Trump has been able to see its effects on himself, including cemeteries eroded by rising sea levels that absorb the casualties of flu co-op and natural PO victims for over a century. The potential release of ancient pathogens from permafrost thawing is also attracting attention from the Pentagon.
Alaska may have been Putin’s last best choice for the summit. His brutal and unprovoked invasion of adjacent Ukraine made him an international pariah. Refusing to enter Europe, he and Trump were unable to repeat their summit in Helsinki, the Finnish capital of Helsinki, a member of NATO, primarily invading.
Luckily for Putin and Trump, Anchorage is a fun city, cool in the middle of summer, far from Putin of death and destruction he created in Ukraine.
