Is this the most beautiful rugby ground in the world?
THE RAP on the door startles us awake. “Guys, come quick, there’s a bear,” hollers Justin Green.
“Quick or you’ll miss the bear.” Clad only in our pants, we trundle down steps as quickly as we can to join Justin, his heavily-pregnant wife Melissa and a squadron of kids, trying to get as close to the young black bear nosing around their ‘garden’ as possible.
Oh yeah, and as if this isn’t startling enough an image, Justin’s front yard also happens to be a fully-functioning rugby ground nestled into an Alaskan mountainscape. Mondays, am I right?
This is the stunning Alaska Mountain Rugby Ground, climbing high into the vista over Anchorage, the largest city in the vast US state at the north-west of North America. A green haven amongst the saw-tooth peaks of this rugged landscape, this is also the site of a yearly sevens tournament, the Midnight Sun 7s, which we are here to take in.
Of course we knew all of this stuff beforehand, the bare context. We knew that we were headed for a ground unlike any we had visited before, where the wild intersects with the man-made. We also knew that we would be disorientated by a combination
