Best known for its luxurious Alyeska Ski Resort and the fabled Girdwood Forest Fair (www.girdwoodforestfair.com) – a much-anticipated romp that occurs on the first weekend of July near town, featuring food, crafts and music aplenty – Girdwood is grand. Enfolded in mighty peaks famed for skiing, and overlooking the beauty of Turnagain Arm, the town is a magnet for epicurean urbanites, artists and hippies successful in spite of themselves. It has fine restaurants, great hiking, a colorful town center and not one but two trams.
Category: Alaska Toursim
North of Anchorage, George Parks Hwy passes through the commuter town of Wasilla, just past the Glenn Hwy (Hwy 1) turnoff. A dramatic detour, the Fishook-Willow Rd between Palmer and Willow goes through Hatcher Pass , an alpine paradise with foot trails, gold-mining artifacts and panoramas of the Talkeetna Mountains.
A spread-out, low-rise city, Fairbanks features extremes of climate, colorful residents and gold fever. In a city that can hit -60°F (-70°C) in the winter, summer days average 70°F (21°C) and occasionally top 90°F (32°C). Downtown is roughly centered on Golden Heart Park, and Cushman St is more or less the main street.
From the crossroad with the Steese Hwy at Fox, just north of Fairbanks, the Elliott Hwy extends 152 miles north and then west to Manley Hot Springs, a small settlement near the Tanana River.
One of the better-preserved boomtowns of the Alaskan mining era, Eagle is a quaint hamlet of log cabins and clapboard houses, inhabited by folks who seem disarmingly cosmopolitan. The original settlement, today called Eagle Village, was established by the Athabascans long before Francois Mercier arrived in the early 1880s and built a trading post in the area. A permanent community of miners took up residence in 1898. A year later, the US Army decided to move in and build a fort as part of its effort to maintain law and order in the Alaskan Interior. Judge Wickersham established a federal court at Eagle in 1900, and the next year President Theodore Roosevelt issued a charter that made Eagle the first incorporated city of the Interior.
Commercial fishing has made Dillingham the largest community in the Bristol Bay region. The first cannery was built in 1884 and today Icicle, Peter Pan, Trident and Unisea all operate fish-processing plants in the city, handling mostly salmon.
This breathtaking wilderness area, which includes North America’s highest mountain, attracts a million visitors a year. A single road curves 91 miles through the heart of the park, leading to off-trail hiking opportunities, wildlife and stunning panoramas. The Denali Park Rd can be used only by official shuttle buses, which have limited seating. Numbers of overnight backpackers in the wilderness zones are also strictly limited. This means Disneyland-like crowds at the entrance but relative solitude once you’re inside.
For most visitors, Delta Junction is notable for a technicality: it proclaims itself the end of the Alcan, as the famous highway joins Richardson Hwy here to complete the route to Fairbanks. The community began as a construction camp and picked up its name from the junction between the two highways. Nowadays it’s an overtly religious place (among the multitude of churches, some have special RV parking), functioning as a service center for travelers, for the area’s burgeoning agricultural community, and for nearby Fort Greely, a key cog in America’s nascent missile-defense shield. The big Deltana Fair, with giant vegetables, livestock shows and parades, is on the last weekend of July.
There are precious few adventures to be had while sitting down – but then, most road trips aren’t on the legendary Dalton Hwy. Also known as the Haul Rd, this punishing truck route rambles 414 miles from Alaska’s Interior to the North Slope, paralleling the Trans-Alaska Pipeline to its source at the supergiant Prudhoe Bay Oil Field. The highway reaches further north than any other on the continent, and is the only way to motor to the stunning Brooks Range and the Arctic. If you’re steeled for multiple days aboard a gravel rollercoaster – dodging hell-on-wheels big-rigs, risking bankruptcy if you need a tow, and (almost) reaching the edge of the Earth – it’s a helluva trip.
At the eastern end of the sound, this beautiful little town’s population of 2600 doubles in summer with fishery and cannery workers. First settled by the nomadic Eyak, who lived on the enormous salmon runs, Cordova became a fish-packing center in 1889.