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I just got home last night from a 10 day road trip through south-central Alaska, and I had some thoughts that some of you might be interested in.
Mrs72 planned this trip, and TBH she plans pretty much all of our trips. She's a travel agent and actually specializes in Alaska, and this was her third time there (my 2nd). Her goal in the trip plan was to get there for the absolute last week before everything shuts down for "winter", which is why we picked these dates. Rough itinerary was fly in/out of Anchorage, drive down to Seward to start, then move our way up to Talkeetna, Denali, and finally two nights in a place called "Moose Creek" which is outside Fairbanks, then drive back to Anchorage for one more night and head out at a 6 am flight.
First day we landed and then picked up our rental car. As usual, I requested we rent a Wrangler, since that's what I'm used to driving and I had a hunch we'd benefit from ground clearance and 4WD. Unfortunately, it's just not really possible to rent a Wrangler in Alaska unless you're on an hourly rate day tour, which is nuts. We wound up waiting an hour at the rental counter for them to have our "full size car" ready, which was a Chevy Malibu. The car would have been an acceptable, if completely characterless, transportation appliance, if it were a normal trip to a normal place with stuff like consistent pavement. For Alaska, it should be a state law that they only rent 4WD SUVs. I can't believe they even allow vehicles with less than 8" ground clearance on public roads. This limitation we discovered basically immediately when we left Anchorage.
FYI Anchorage has about 40% of the state's population, at under 300K people. Alaska is the frontier, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Imagine if Texas were over twice as big and the largest town by far was Lubbock, with 40% of the population in that one town. Anchorage actually reminds me a bit of Corpus Christi in terms of the feel of the town, and it's just a bit smaller than Corpus.
The drive down to Seward, and then south a bit to Lowell Point where we stayed, really opened our eyes to what was going to happen in AK. There is ONE highway that runs from the Kenai peninsula up to Fairbanks, AK 3. And then ONE road that goes down to Seward, AK 9. And big parts of both were under construction. It's a gloriously beautiful trip down the Kenai peninsula, but on a motorcycle it would have been deadly given that there were miles of this road under construction where our Malibu scraped its undercarriage routinely and banged the floorpan on the rock underlayment. Where there was pavement, a lot of it was grooved and would dump a motorcycle in a heartbeat. The road had frequent signs saying "motorcycles use extreme caution", which should have said, "motorcycles, turn back". Once we got through Seward and started down to Lowell Point we came upon the only road that leads down there which was loaded, and I mean LOADED, with 2-3 ft diameter, 10" deep potholes. And given that it's a rain forest, these were all full of water, or sometimes there was a huge pond over the road concealing hidden potholes that swallow car tires whole. We bounced that poor car off the pavement between potholes at under 5mph the whole way and were shocked it made it out without requiring a tow truck.
We stayed in a lodge on the bay in Lowell Point for a couple of nights and it was gorgeous. We thought we were in Disney World every time we had to buy food. Gas was $4.50-6.00/gal and even a road-side burger stand cost over $50 for the two of us to pick up lunch. We did a boat tour of the Kenai Fjords which was very nice, but having been on an Alaska cruise, it was nothing new for me.
We left the highway a few times to go explore on our way down to Seward. I was glad I had brought our 9mm with the bear-specific ammo, since we did run upon one fresh mound of bear poop right on the trail we were hiking. But fortunately we didn't have any close encounters with bears.
Hiking up to Exit Glacier was amazing. In general, Alaska is gorgeous. Kenai Lake will make you swear you are in Switzerland. Anyway, after a couple of days in Seward, we headed up and stayed one night in a very tiny, totally rustic tiny one-room log cabin in Talkeetna. I loved it, but it's not for the 4-star crowd. It was a notch above camping, and wholly appropriate for the area. Fun fact, Talkeetna is the town that the TV show Northern Exposure was based on. But it's nothing like the show. It's more like Alaska's version of Fredricksburg. All boutiques and antiques, tourist spot.
Along the route to Talkeetna, we took a side route over to Hatcher Pass. This is a spectacular drive that should be blocked for all but high-clearance 4wd vehicles. It's a miracle we made it in that Malibu. It would have been a walk in the park in my Wrangler, but there's a big difference when you have 33" tires and 13" of ground clearance when trying to drive through 3 foot 12" deep potholes on a road surface that approximates Swiss cheese.
After that we headed up to Denali, about a 2 hr drive or so from Talkeetna. We hiked a bit at the park, then took a "transit bus" to the end of the open park road (43 miles) and back just for sightseeing. BTW, I was a bit irritated about the whole renaming debacle. I actually think Denali (the mountain) may have been the start of "cancel culture". Here we had a mountain named in honor of a US President, McKinley. Then another US President (Obama) decided to change the name back, removing this honor from McKinley who had been dead for over a century. However you feel about the initial renaming, changing it back was the wrong thing, IMHO. But anyway, we did get to see the mountain, which apparently is not very common. And we have a zillion pictures. We stayed in Denali Bluffs lodge, which was lovely, and I wish we had stayed the entire time in that one place. It was such a nice place, gorgeous view, worth it. And they have a pizza pub just down the hill, along with one of the best beers I've ever tried, called Golden Dall. Oddly enough, you can't find that beer here. Alaska is like a whole other world.
BTW the park road actually goes for over 90 miles into Denali and still doesn't come close to the mountain. That national park is over 6 million acres. It's bigger than Massachusetts and New Hampshire combined. We saw 3 of the 350 known grizzly bears and a dozen moose. Private vehicles can't go past mile marker 15, so there really is very little of the park you can see without getting on the bus. The bus goes to mile 43 and back, because there's a bridge that's been out at mile 60-something that they have not repaired. If you want to take a private vehicle past mile 15, you have to have a minimum 3-day camping reservation at one of the backcountry campsites and then you can drive to it, but you had better have a 4WD or at least some kind of truck because the road is unpaved and barely maintained.
We packed up and drove up to Fairbanks to our next cabin in Moose Creek. This drive was far less spectacular than the rest had been. Fairbanks is basically nothing. It's a third the size of Georgetown, TX, with 1% of the charm. But we were intent on seeing the Aurora Borealis, which we also failed to do in two nights of trying. The cabin there was bigger, had a full size kitchen area and a sofa and all that kind of stuff. More like an efficiency apartment size place. And it was clearly decorated by a woman, had stuff on the walls and a polished concrete floor, throw pillows, that kind of thing. Really didn't feel like a cabin at all, even though above the foundation it was an authentic pine-log and mortar cabin. It was remote enough that I did worry quite a bit about animal encounters while out at 3 in the morning looking for northern lights. We heard wolves howling. Alaska will get your attention.
After missing out on the northern lights at 4:45 AM we started the 8 hour drive down to Anchorage in the dark and in the rain. Here's when we began to notice that #1 everything is so remote, how does anyone possibly live there? It's an hour drive to a gas station, 2 hours to groceries. A 6-pack of Coke Zero is $16. Gas is $6/gallon. And #2, there are abandoned/wrecked cars everywhere, that have been there for years. My guess is when you crash or have a stall out in the middle of those wilderness, the towing bill likely exceeds the value of the wrecked/broken-down car.
Once we got near Denali park everything got spectacular all over again and we stopped constantly to take pictures. Then we arrived at Alaska's Corpus Christi and set our alarm for 3:30 am so we could make our 6 am flight the next morning.
In summary, I think I would really love to go back and book a campsite in Denali so we can get up there and do backcountry hikes near to the mountain. I absolutely would do this in the last week they are open, the week after Labor Day, like we did. I'd recommend renting a 4WD lightweight camper van like a Sprinter conversion for this kind of trip. I don't want to be in a tent or roof-top tent right next to those bears. And for another half of the trip, I think a motorcycle trip from Anchorage down to Seward would be amazing. But I would totally skip Fairbanks. For my perfect interior Alaska tour, I'd fly into Anchorage and rent an adventure camper van, drive it up to Denali and camp 3 nights in the van as far into the park as I could book a campsite. During those three days, I'd pack them with hiking as much as I could stand. Then I'd drive back down to Fairbanks and check into an airport hotel, rent an adventure bike and pack one night's worth of gear, ride down to Seward and stay one night in Lowell Point, turn around and come back. Then head home from Anchorage after spending another night in my Anchorage hotel and picking up all of my luggage. That's a week in AK that would satisfy any motorcycling adventure junkies. Just bear in mind, it was under 50 degrees the entire time we were south of Anchorage and once you get out of the park entrance area Denali was like 30 degrees and snowing, even the week after Labor Day. So plan accordingly.
That was our Alaska trip. We'll probably go back, maybe I'll talk mrs72 into the above itinerary, but I doubt it. No way she'd ride on the back of a motorcycle for 2-3 hours each way in 40-degree rainy weather and she can't ride her own. She's 4-star, I'm zero-star. That's what makes life interesting.
Mrs72 planned this trip, and TBH she plans pretty much all of our trips. She's a travel agent and actually specializes in Alaska, and this was her third time there (my 2nd). Her goal in the trip plan was to get there for the absolute last week before everything shuts down for "winter", which is why we picked these dates. Rough itinerary was fly in/out of Anchorage, drive down to Seward to start, then move our way up to Talkeetna, Denali, and finally two nights in a place called "Moose Creek" which is outside Fairbanks, then drive back to Anchorage for one more night and head out at a 6 am flight.
First day we landed and then picked up our rental car. As usual, I requested we rent a Wrangler, since that's what I'm used to driving and I had a hunch we'd benefit from ground clearance and 4WD. Unfortunately, it's just not really possible to rent a Wrangler in Alaska unless you're on an hourly rate day tour, which is nuts. We wound up waiting an hour at the rental counter for them to have our "full size car" ready, which was a Chevy Malibu. The car would have been an acceptable, if completely characterless, transportation appliance, if it were a normal trip to a normal place with stuff like consistent pavement. For Alaska, it should be a state law that they only rent 4WD SUVs. I can't believe they even allow vehicles with less than 8" ground clearance on public roads. This limitation we discovered basically immediately when we left Anchorage.
FYI Anchorage has about 40% of the state's population, at under 300K people. Alaska is the frontier, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Imagine if Texas were over twice as big and the largest town by far was Lubbock, with 40% of the population in that one town. Anchorage actually reminds me a bit of Corpus Christi in terms of the feel of the town, and it's just a bit smaller than Corpus.
The drive down to Seward, and then south a bit to Lowell Point where we stayed, really opened our eyes to what was going to happen in AK. There is ONE highway that runs from the Kenai peninsula up to Fairbanks, AK 3. And then ONE road that goes down to Seward, AK 9. And big parts of both were under construction. It's a gloriously beautiful trip down the Kenai peninsula, but on a motorcycle it would have been deadly given that there were miles of this road under construction where our Malibu scraped its undercarriage routinely and banged the floorpan on the rock underlayment. Where there was pavement, a lot of it was grooved and would dump a motorcycle in a heartbeat. The road had frequent signs saying "motorcycles use extreme caution", which should have said, "motorcycles, turn back". Once we got through Seward and started down to Lowell Point we came upon the only road that leads down there which was loaded, and I mean LOADED, with 2-3 ft diameter, 10" deep potholes. And given that it's a rain forest, these were all full of water, or sometimes there was a huge pond over the road concealing hidden potholes that swallow car tires whole. We bounced that poor car off the pavement between potholes at under 5mph the whole way and were shocked it made it out without requiring a tow truck.
We stayed in a lodge on the bay in Lowell Point for a couple of nights and it was gorgeous. We thought we were in Disney World every time we had to buy food. Gas was $4.50-6.00/gal and even a road-side burger stand cost over $50 for the two of us to pick up lunch. We did a boat tour of the Kenai Fjords which was very nice, but having been on an Alaska cruise, it was nothing new for me.
We left the highway a few times to go explore on our way down to Seward. I was glad I had brought our 9mm with the bear-specific ammo, since we did run upon one fresh mound of bear poop right on the trail we were hiking. But fortunately we didn't have any close encounters with bears.
Hiking up to Exit Glacier was amazing. In general, Alaska is gorgeous. Kenai Lake will make you swear you are in Switzerland. Anyway, after a couple of days in Seward, we headed up and stayed one night in a very tiny, totally rustic tiny one-room log cabin in Talkeetna. I loved it, but it's not for the 4-star crowd. It was a notch above camping, and wholly appropriate for the area. Fun fact, Talkeetna is the town that the TV show Northern Exposure was based on. But it's nothing like the show. It's more like Alaska's version of Fredricksburg. All boutiques and antiques, tourist spot.
Along the route to Talkeetna, we took a side route over to Hatcher Pass. This is a spectacular drive that should be blocked for all but high-clearance 4wd vehicles. It's a miracle we made it in that Malibu. It would have been a walk in the park in my Wrangler, but there's a big difference when you have 33" tires and 13" of ground clearance when trying to drive through 3 foot 12" deep potholes on a road surface that approximates Swiss cheese.
After that we headed up to Denali, about a 2 hr drive or so from Talkeetna. We hiked a bit at the park, then took a "transit bus" to the end of the open park road (43 miles) and back just for sightseeing. BTW, I was a bit irritated about the whole renaming debacle. I actually think Denali (the mountain) may have been the start of "cancel culture". Here we had a mountain named in honor of a US President, McKinley. Then another US President (Obama) decided to change the name back, removing this honor from McKinley who had been dead for over a century. However you feel about the initial renaming, changing it back was the wrong thing, IMHO. But anyway, we did get to see the mountain, which apparently is not very common. And we have a zillion pictures. We stayed in Denali Bluffs lodge, which was lovely, and I wish we had stayed the entire time in that one place. It was such a nice place, gorgeous view, worth it. And they have a pizza pub just down the hill, along with one of the best beers I've ever tried, called Golden Dall. Oddly enough, you can't find that beer here. Alaska is like a whole other world.
BTW the park road actually goes for over 90 miles into Denali and still doesn't come close to the mountain. That national park is over 6 million acres. It's bigger than Massachusetts and New Hampshire combined. We saw 3 of the 350 known grizzly bears and a dozen moose. Private vehicles can't go past mile marker 15, so there really is very little of the park you can see without getting on the bus. The bus goes to mile 43 and back, because there's a bridge that's been out at mile 60-something that they have not repaired. If you want to take a private vehicle past mile 15, you have to have a minimum 3-day camping reservation at one of the backcountry campsites and then you can drive to it, but you had better have a 4WD or at least some kind of truck because the road is unpaved and barely maintained.
We packed up and drove up to Fairbanks to our next cabin in Moose Creek. This drive was far less spectacular than the rest had been. Fairbanks is basically nothing. It's a third the size of Georgetown, TX, with 1% of the charm. But we were intent on seeing the Aurora Borealis, which we also failed to do in two nights of trying. The cabin there was bigger, had a full size kitchen area and a sofa and all that kind of stuff. More like an efficiency apartment size place. And it was clearly decorated by a woman, had stuff on the walls and a polished concrete floor, throw pillows, that kind of thing. Really didn't feel like a cabin at all, even though above the foundation it was an authentic pine-log and mortar cabin. It was remote enough that I did worry quite a bit about animal encounters while out at 3 in the morning looking for northern lights. We heard wolves howling. Alaska will get your attention.
After missing out on the northern lights at 4:45 AM we started the 8 hour drive down to Anchorage in the dark and in the rain. Here's when we began to notice that #1 everything is so remote, how does anyone possibly live there? It's an hour drive to a gas station, 2 hours to groceries. A 6-pack of Coke Zero is $16. Gas is $6/gallon. And #2, there are abandoned/wrecked cars everywhere, that have been there for years. My guess is when you crash or have a stall out in the middle of those wilderness, the towing bill likely exceeds the value of the wrecked/broken-down car.
Once we got near Denali park everything got spectacular all over again and we stopped constantly to take pictures. Then we arrived at Alaska's Corpus Christi and set our alarm for 3:30 am so we could make our 6 am flight the next morning.
In summary, I think I would really love to go back and book a campsite in Denali so we can get up there and do backcountry hikes near to the mountain. I absolutely would do this in the last week they are open, the week after Labor Day, like we did. I'd recommend renting a 4WD lightweight camper van like a Sprinter conversion for this kind of trip. I don't want to be in a tent or roof-top tent right next to those bears. And for another half of the trip, I think a motorcycle trip from Anchorage down to Seward would be amazing. But I would totally skip Fairbanks. For my perfect interior Alaska tour, I'd fly into Anchorage and rent an adventure camper van, drive it up to Denali and camp 3 nights in the van as far into the park as I could book a campsite. During those three days, I'd pack them with hiking as much as I could stand. Then I'd drive back down to Fairbanks and check into an airport hotel, rent an adventure bike and pack one night's worth of gear, ride down to Seward and stay one night in Lowell Point, turn around and come back. Then head home from Anchorage after spending another night in my Anchorage hotel and picking up all of my luggage. That's a week in AK that would satisfy any motorcycling adventure junkies. Just bear in mind, it was under 50 degrees the entire time we were south of Anchorage and once you get out of the park entrance area Denali was like 30 degrees and snowing, even the week after Labor Day. So plan accordingly.
That was our Alaska trip. We'll probably go back, maybe I'll talk mrs72 into the above itinerary, but I doubt it. No way she'd ride on the back of a motorcycle for 2-3 hours each way in 40-degree rainy weather and she can't ride her own. She's 4-star, I'm zero-star. That's what makes life interesting.
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