Going to Alaska
in Travel
Heather and I have been to Alaska twice. We love it. Here are our tips.
General
Eat the halibut. Fried.
Eat the salmon.
The microbreweries are pretty good. We love Single Engine Red by Denali Brewing Company, and Alaskan Amber is a classic too.
The Alaskan Railroad is a blast. They go all the way from Fairbanks to Anchorage to Seward. Enjoy the scenery, the food, and the nervous narration from the summer interns.
Don’t let the weather report get you down, and don’t get overconfident if the weather is nice. The weather changes all the time. Simply be prepared for sun, rain, shade, wind, and bugs.
Be ready for bugs. Mosquitos especially. DEET 30% works pretty well. Your concern is not so much for the diseases, but because they really swarm and it can be incredibly irritating.
In summer, it doesn’t really get too dark at night. It’s energizing and pushes you to do more and more. After the first few days, you’ll start to feel pretty tired, then you’ll realize you’ve hardly slept at all. Consider a sleep mask and/or melatonin.
South Central
Seward and Kenai Fjords
We love Seward! Plenty of activities, dining, and friendly people. Look out across the bay and watch glaciers spilling out of the mountains while clouds dance across the peaks. Unreal.
We like to spend 2 nights there to get the most out of it.
Take the Major Marine Tour 8-hour tour that goes all the way into Aialik Bay. Across the 2 times we’ve been, we’ve seen all kinds of sea birds, bald eagles, Humpbacks, Orcas, and Fin whales. You’ll get up close to huge tidewater glaciers and see a totally unreal landscape. The 4-hour version doesn’t leave Resurrection Bay, and you’re missing the whole show.
The Seward SeaLife center is cool. Learn about the birds and other wildlife. A good complement to the cruise.
Railway Cantina is one of the more affordable places in town, with huge portions that fill you up after a big hike.
Go to Thorn’s Showcase Lounge and get the Bucket of ‘But (Halibut).
On the 4th of July they have the Mount Marathon Race, where people dash up the 3,000 foot mountain and back in about 45 minutes. The whole town fills up for it, so it’s either a great time to take in the spectacle or a good time to be somewhere else. It’s televised in the South Central region. We watched it at a sports bar in Girdwood.
We once took a kayaking tour from Lowell Point to the old military installation at Caines Head. It was neat to be on the water among the amazing scenery.
Exit Glacier
See Exit Glacier! It’s a spectacular setting and accessible by road. You have a few options.
You can hire Exit Glacier Guides to take you climbing on it. We don’t recommend getting on the glacier without a guide and equipment.
You can hike up to the face of the glacier. It’s an easy, flat hike. Either drive out there yourself or hire Exit Glacier Guides to give you a lift in their van (it’s about $10 per person).
The Harding Ice Field Trail is one of our favorite hikes of all-time. It starts at the bottom of the glacier and goes all the way up to the root of the glacier, giving you a view of the Harding Ice Field, which is some 700 square miles of ice about 4,000 feet thick. The trail has amazing views all along it, and tops out in tundra and light snowfields. It’s a hard trail though, climbing 4,000 feet in only 4 miles. Ever since our first time, we use it as a benchmark for trail difficulty.
Since the Ice Field Trail has great views throughout, you can choose to climb as much as you like and then head back down when you want.
Lake Clark
We visited Lake Clark in 2013 on a weeklong backpacking trip, hiking from Turquoise Lake to Twin Lakes. After the floatplanes dropped us off, we didn’t see another soul until the end. It was an incredible experience. We were led by Alaska Alpine Adventures. Our guides were excellent.
In addition to backpacking, they run tours that are oriented around a kayaking. One famous trip is based in Twin Lakes and tours by kayak, hikes up to the hillsides, and so on.
Out on Twin Lakes is the cabin of Dick Proenneke. He settled alone out there for decades, building his cabin and tools pretty much from scratch. His experience in the wilderness puts Thoreau’s Walden Pond to shame, and his writings about his time there are excellent as well.
It could be fun to hire a bushplane operator out of Anchorage or Port Alsworth to visit his cabin, although it will not be cheap. The bushplane experience is something else.
