So every year, I make it a goal of mine to visit at least one new country and one new state. Although I already had my Europe-trip planned to visit 5 new countries, the year was almost half over and I realized I had yet to pick a new state! Luckily, my friend Mark stepped in! He lives in Alaska and had some time off work and he invited me to come hang out with him in Alaska! This was perfect because Alaska was on my short list of states I wanted to visit and we all know how I like living like a local as I talked about in my last post. I wasn't feeling the whole Alaska cruise thing anyway since when I think of Alaska, I think of being remote, not among 2,000 people on a cruise ship trying to be the first in line at the omelet station. I’m pretty [obsessed] diligent with my itinerary planning, and spent a pretty long time planning my last Europe trip, so I wanted to try pulling back a little bit and let someone else do it. Since Mark has lived in Alaska four years I let Mark plan (almost) everything! Since he lives there and all.
Mark, my personal tour guide
I was also excited to do a wilderness trip! My last trip was all major European cities and I usually just prefer to be in nature, so we got to do a lot of that. Here are my top five adventures you have to have on a non-Princess Cruise Alaskan trip:
1. Glacier Cruise
How can you go to Alaska without seeing glaciers? Well I guess since there are around 100,000 glaciers in Alaska, its probably hard not to see any. But even though I wasn’t on a traditional week-long Alaskan cruise, I still wanted to be on a boat in the water and sail close to some glaciers. Mark planned our glacier cruise on Phillips Cruises going out of Whittier and cruising the Prince William Sound. We lucked out and were assigned the front seat so we had a great view the entire trip.
Our glacier cruise boat in front of one of the many cruise ships
Front seats for glacier viewing
You pass through 26 glaciers throughout the cruise and we got to see “rafts” of sea otters, seals and sea lions! At Surprise Glacier, crew from the ship pull up pieces of ice from the water that broke off the glacier and serve up Glacier Margaritas using that ice.
Glacier Margarita with ice that came off "Surprise Glacier"
One of the crew members pulling up ice from the glacier for the Glacier Margaritas
Sea lions
Sea Otters
Surprise Glacier
2. Alyeska Tram
So the only way to get to and from Whittier is to go through a 2.5 mile tunnel that only opens once every hour. We had dinner plans immediately after our cruise, but the tunnel was late opening. Even though I called restaurant to let them know we would be late, they gave our table away by the time we finally got there. Luckily, the manager came and was able to accommodate us though. And look how pretty the view was! Seven Glaciers restaurant is located at the top of a mountain in Girdwood and is apart of the Alyeska resort! It’s used for skiing in the winter. You have to take a tram up to the top of the mountain. The tram is free if you are eating at the Seven Glaciers restaurant, which is located 2,300 feet up and in the Chugach Mountain range.
View of the seven glaciers from Alyeska tram
Riding up on the tram
At the top of the tram
Seven Glaciers restaurant
Dinner views
After drinking beer and stuffing ourselves, we decided hiking up the mountains was a good idea (tip: hiking after drinking doesn't feel great). Lots of mosquitoes up there, but gorgeous views.
3. Fishing
Fishing is everywhere in Alaska! People will randomly stop off on the main highway to fish in random rivers (there are parking areas for it too). We stopped to fish on the way to and from Denali, but our main fishing adventure was in Seward. Seward is a cute port city in southern Alaska, set on an inlet on the Kenai Peninsula about two hours south of Anchorage. Seward reminded me of Maine with the boats and harbor.
Mark goes fishing on the regular and always has his waders in the back of his Trailblazer ready to throw on and jump in any and every river that has a fish (and some that don't). Since I didn’t have any waders, I wore rain boots and [I made him] he offered to carry me across water that was too high for me to walk through.
Mark and his waders
Salmon fishing is a big thing in Alaska of course. There are lots of different types of salmon, I learned from [fish snob] fisherman Mark, and the only good ones to eat, according to Mark, are reds and kings. He kept catching pinks and throwing them back because real Alaskans don’t eat pinks, don’t ya know (Mark is originally from Wisconsin). But lots of people were keeping the pinks and eating them. Later in the trip Mark made me some authentic red (not pink, people) Salmon that he caught in the Russian River.
Fishing in Seward
Seward
Ships Creek in Anchorage where they have been having a lot of reds lately
Salmon in one of the creeks on our way to Denali
Chum Salmon
4. Denali National Park
Now this, unsurprisingly, was the highlight of the Alaskan trip! 6 million acres of wilderness with only one road going through the park. Most of the park is not accessible by personal vehicles, opting to transport tourists by shuttle buses or park tour buses. Only 15 miles of the road is paved for personal vehicles and the buses can drive 92 miles into the park. The rest of the park is shut off from other people. Denali National Park is four hours from Anchorage, but obviously takes longer when you’re making bathroom stops (me) and fishing stops (Mark). A nice place to stop along the way for lunch is Talkeetna which is a charming town with about a block long Main Street which has little shops and places to eat. You can even see the Denali Mountain from there when it is a clear day. It wasn’t for us, but we did go to Denali Brewpub drink some good Alaskan beer and eat buffalo meatloaf (which is the best meatloaf I have ever had). You can even go on a brewery tour or get a picture on top of a (stuffed) moose in town, but we didn't do any of that because we wanted to be on our way to the park.
Denai Brewpub in Talkeetna
Unfortunately, when we arrived at Denali National Park it started storming so we couldn’t go on the hike around Savage River that we planned. Instead, we went to Salmon Bake for dinner located right between the park and our hotel. We liked it so much, we came back for dinner the last night! Salmon Bake is built on a hill so it has a dramatically slanted floor and random signs all over the walls. They also regularly have DJs and bands, but we had an early wake up call so we couldn’t stay out. The menu satisfied my need to eat weird things when I travel. I tried Yak quesadillas (basically a domestic ox) and on the next visit, elk burgers. But the best part was, I got to have Alaskan King crab legs!!!
We stayed at the Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge and it felt more like staying at a cabin! I loveeee staying at cabins, y’all. We saw the most gorgeous sunset around 10pm when we were running back to the car to get my charger. We didn’t have our phones to take a picture unfortunately. Check out the river and view at the lodge the next morning though.
We had a 5AM wake-up call so that we could get over to Denali National Park and do our Tundra Wilderness Tour which left at 7AM. The tour was seven hours long but honestly the time flew by! The bus goes as far into the park as the road will allow which is 92-miles. This was probably one of the best excursions I have ever done. Our guide had great stories, telling us all about a Grizzly attack that occurred a couple of years prior (a tourist was approaching and taking pictures of a grizzly while it was eating and so the bear attacked) and about a movie called "Into the Wild," filmed on the Denali Highway that is a true story based on a guy who was out in the Alaskan wilderness alone and ended up starving and dying (we actually watched the movie when we got back to Anchorage and it was really good). Our guide said that after 30 years of working at Denali National Park, what has struck him is how much the trees have grown and how often lightening storms happen when they used to be very rare. We were in the front seat of the bus so got a gorgeous view the whole way. I am usually blown away by National Parks and this was again the case. How vast, beautiful, and green everything is! And its unbelievable that so much of Denali is unexplored and some places may have never seen a human footprint.
But…the two best parts? (1) We got to see both peaks of Denali! For those of you who don’t know (although shouldn’t everyone know?), Denali is the highest peak in North America, at 20,310 feet and it is only completely visible around 20% of the time. And it came out for us!
And (2) We did the Denali Grand Slam! The Denali Grand Slam consists of seeing the “Big Five”: Dall Sheep, Bears, Moose, Caribou, and a Canidae (which is an animal in the canine family of which we saw a fox). We saw nine grizzly bears, the best of which was a mom and her cub right in front of our bus. We also saw 14 caribou, 2 moose, 1 fox, 3 sheep, magpies, ground squirrels, snowshoe hares, merlins and Ptarmigan (the Alaskan bird).
Luckily, I packed us PB&Js so that when the tour finished, we weren’t hungry and could fit in a hike at the park before we drove back to Anchorage. Since our Savage River hike got rained out the day before, we decided to do that one again since it was a fairly short hike, about two hours.
I love cabins, animals, wilderness and eating weird foods, so this portion of the trip was perfect!
5. Gold Mine
You can’t go to Alaska and not visit a gold mine! We headed to Hatcher Pass, located in the Talkeetna Mountains with 300,000 mountainous areas of back country. Mark goes [snow machining] snowmobiling there in the winter. Hatcher Pass leads to Independence Mine that has a mining town that you can tour and go in some of the buildings. Independence Mine was the second largest gold mining operation in Alaska where $6 million dollars worth of gold was mined.
We decided to climb up the mountain to the mine shaft which probably wasn't allowed since there wasn't a trail and rocks kept sliding down, but it was really fun and we got to look into the different mine shafts (Mark went in one of them). And the view was perfect! I love standing at the top of a mountain and getting that feeling of awe and complete peace. Sometimes it’s hard to do when so many people are up there with you, but since no one else was up there, it was pretty surreal (and Mark was running around in different mine shafts so I had the whole view to myself).
Entrance to the mine shaft
Mining tool that was too heavy to take off the mountain
We gathered up some of the dirt and went panning for gold when we got down the mountain (no luck).
Bonus: Road trip
I definitely recommend road tripping at least some of Alaska! It’s the biggest state in the US so getting from place-to-place can take a long time. Mark is used to driving 2-3 hours regularly just to go fish of snowmobiling. If you don’t have access to a car or to Mark like I did, there is the Alaska Railroad that will take you all around Alaska. But driving through Alaska is just amazing with all of the mountains and glaciers and open land with hardly any traffic. During our road trip, we got to stop off on the side of the road to go pick wild blueberries and see an “igloo.”
We stopped off at the random creeks to go fishing and get water from a tap that came from a glacier.
We consistently drove when it was starting to get “dark” at 10:30pm.
They also have rest stops where Mark insists taking an hour nap in the car after there are two men digging and he jokes that they are burying a dead body and then driving me back in the pitch black curvy crazy roads is normal (it’s okay, he got me ice cream and beer to make up for it). We also went to his base (he’s in the Air Force) when I got to go in a C-17 Air Force plane (that’s what he does in the Air Force) and visit the Air Force bald eagles at the base.
We even got to stop off at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, just in case we didn’t see certain animals in the wild. They have animals they’ve rescued for various reasons including buffalo, elk, bears (they even had a cub!), wolves and a lynx.
So that was my Alaska trip! No cruise ship, just Mark’s trailblazer. How great is his itinerary though? Snaps to Mark! Like I said, he planned the whole thing to give me the authentic Alaskan experience. Probably even down to that 4 on the Richter scale earthquake that I experienced the night before I left.
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