Anchorage is a mid-sized metropolis at the edge of an immense wilderness.

Story David Thompson

Look out over Alaska on a clear day as you fly toward Anchorage, and you'll see enormous ice fields, too many glaciers to count, and an impossibly chaotic jumble of mountains rolling off toward the Arctic. As for civilization, you will see few, if any, signs of it. At least, not until the plane begins its descent. Then Anchorage suddenly appears, a mid-sized American metropolis at the edge of an immense wilderness.

The city spreads for 10 miles across a roughly triangular peninsula that starts in the foothills of the Chugach Mountains and juts into Cook Inlet, an inland reach of the North Pacific. Founded in 1915 as a railroad construction camp, Anchorage grew rapidly, like one of the 75-pound rutabagas that grow during the short but sun-soaked Alaska summers. Nearly 300,000 people, or 42 percent of all Alaskans, live in Anchorage today. By Alaskan standards, that makes it a Big City, and something thoroughly un-Alaskan.

Alaskans in other parts of the state love to hate Anchorage. As one old joke goes, Anchorage isn't in Alaska, but you can see Alaska from there. The city is low-rise, automobile-dominated, and thoroughly 20th-century. But if at street level the city seems like Anytown, USA, just look up. The rugged peaks of the Chugach Mountains rise up in the east like a 3,000-foot-tall backyard fence. Look south across Cook Inlet, along the Aleutian Range, and you'll see the billowing steam clouds of two active volcanoes. Look to the north, toward the Alaska Range, and you can see The High One itself, Mount McKinley, the tallest peak on the continent, 130 miles away. In all, six different mountain ranges are visible from the city. You really can see Alaska from Anchorage. The city may be somewhat of an ugly duckling, but it's a supremely located one.

Many travelers regard Anchorage as little more than a gateway to "the real Alaska." But Anchorage also makes for a fine base camp for day trips beyond the city's orbit. You can hire a bush pilot to fly you to a remote, gin-clear creek for a day of salmon fishing. You can ride the Alaska Railroad to the port town of Whittier and then take a tour boat to see the tidewater glaciers of Prince William Sound. You can drive south to the Kenai Peninsula, don a dry suit, grab a paddle, and go for a rollicking whitewater rafting trip down an icy river clouded with glacial silt. You can do any of these things and still get back to the city in time for dinner at an outstanding restaurant, live music in a crazy bar, and a good night's sleep at a first-class hotel or homey B & B.

Technically, though, you don’t even need to leave the city limits to find the real, authentic, un-urbanized Alaska. The city's municipal boundaries stretch deep into the Chugach Mountains, covering 1,955 square miles in all. That's an area larger than Delaware, and one that adds an estimated 60 grizzly bears, 200 black bears, and 2,000 moose to the municipality's population.

Above: Sailboat in Blackstone Bay, Prince William Sound.

The first 40 miles of the Seward Highway, which runs along the narrow shoreline between the cliffs of the Chugach Mountains and a fjord called Turnagain Arm, trace the southern edge of the city limits. It's a spectacular drive. On one side of the highway, you might spot mountain goats, dall sheep, waterfalls, and rock climbers (who become ice climbers in the winter and scale the frozen waterfalls). On the other side, you might see windsurfers and beluga whales, small, melon-headed, white whales that travel in pods, chasing salmon up Turnagain Arm in the late summer. Beluga Point is an especially good place to stop and look for them. Archaeologists sifting through the campsites of ancient native hunters there uncovered piles of charred and scraped beluga bones, evidence that people have been watching for whales at Beluga Point for a long, long time.

Another good stop along Turnagain Arm is Bird Creek, where you can witness the Alaskan sport of "combat fishing." When a fishing spot is so popular that anglers line up along the banks elbow to elbow, getting on each other's nerves and sometimes getting their lines tangled, that's combat fishing. If something less testosterone-soaked sounds more appealing, trailheads along the highway lead to peaceful hikes through coastal spruce and willow forest to alpine tundra, high mountain lakes, and 3,000-foot peaks.

One must-see on a trip to Anchorage's outer limits is the funky forest town of Girdwood, which is snugly tucked at the back of a deep valley near the head of Turnagain Arm. Girdwood's biggest draw is 3,939-foot Alyeska Mountain, home of the Alyeska Resort. An aerial tram whisks passengers to the complex near the summit year-round. In the summer, after the mountain’s 65-foot base of snow has melted, you can wander around the alpine tundra and drink in the breathtaking view and cool, clean mountain air. There's a small glacier below the summit, and a local guide service called The Ascending Path leads treks across it twice a day; crampons, pickaxes, and instruction on how to avoid getting swallowed by a crevasse are included. To get off the mountain, you can ride the tram, hike, or, if you’ve got the nerve, take a crash course in paragliding and fly down strapped to your flight instructor.

Girdwood hasn't always been the hip ski-town/suburb of Anchorage that it is today. The town originated in the late 19th century as a supply point for gold miners. Deep in the valley you can visit Crow Creek Mine, a weathered but remarkably intact gold-mining camp that dates to 1898. This is not one of those gussied-up historic sites, but rather an authentic, time-worn slice of Alaska's gold rush past. You can wander there among the sagging, leaning bunkhouse, mess hall, blacksmith shop, meat cache, and other old log buildings. And the creek rushing through the property isn't tapped out, it's estimated that there is still more gold in there than has been taken out. For a few bucks you can rent a shovel and pan and keep whatever gold you find.

You may or may not spot wildlife while driving along Turnagain Arm, but you're guaranteed to see some if you stop at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, a few miles beyond Girdwood. This 140-acre, drive-through wildlife park takes in orphaned and injured animals that wouldn't be able to survive on their own in the wild. Moose, lynx, bear, bison, caribou, elk, eagles, owls, musk ox, and Sitka black-tailed deer are among the residents. The animals have plenty of room to roam, so bring binoculars to get a close-up look.

At the very furthest edge of Anchorage's extended municipal boundary, you can visit Portage Glacier and confront climate change in Alaska, face to thawing-glacial face. When the multimillion dollar Begich, Boggs Visitor Center opened on the shore of Portage Lake in 1985, it offered visitors a fantastic view of the frozen attraction across the water. Ten years later, the glacier had retreated around a point, out of sight from the visitor center. Today, it's pulled back to a far corner of the 800-foot deep lake it carved. To see it now, you take a boat tour aboard the MV Ptarmigan, which bumps through the icebergs in the lake several times a day on its way to the melting glacier.
Anchorage's municipal boundaries may cover a vast area, but buildable land is scarce and mostly built upon. Most of Anchorage's growth in the past few decades has spilled beyond the city limits to the north and into the Matanuska Valley, turning the twin towns of Wasilla and Palmer into bedroom communities.

Palmer's history is especially interesting. It was the center of a Depression-era federally financed experimental farm-ing cooperative called the Matanuska Colony. In 1935, 203 farm families from the upper Midwest moved off the dole and into the Matanuska Valley to farm. Agriculture has been going strong in the valley ever since. (This is where the 75-pound rutabagas, as well as the 60-pound celery, the 100-pound cabbages, and the 1,000-pound pumpkins, come from.)

At the Williams Reindeer Farm, kids can feed and pet reindeer, if the animals are not busy appearing in TV commercials or getting into reindeer sausage (a breakfast favorite in Alaska). At the Palmer Musk Ox Farm, you can get face-to-face with a hardy Arctic ungulate that takes ice ages in stride. Musk ox, which look like they're related to bison but are actually more goat-like, are raised for their ultra-warm undercoating of wool, known as qiviut. Native women in remote villages weave the qiviut into hats, gloves, scarves, and other garments, which are sold in Anchorage at the Oomingmak Musk Ox Producers Co-op in downtown Anchorage.

Downtown Anchorage

While getting around the rest of the city can be challenging without your own wheels, downtown Anchorage is delightfully compact and walkable. A handful of gleaming office towers and business-class hotels rise above a few busy blocks of street-level shops, restaurants, bars, and coffee houses. In the summer, hundreds of flower baskets hang from light posts, and the sod roof on the downtown Log Cabin Visitor Information Center turns bright green and looks in need of a mowing. On Saturdays and Sundays, an open-air bazaar called the Anchorage Market and Festival brims with life, music, and 300 or so outdoor vendors. It’s a great place to sample a hot reindeer sausage and shop for souvenir T-shirts and native crafts. You might pick up a cribbage board fashioned from a walrus jaw, a pair of Eskimo dolls dressed in his-and-her genuine fur parkas, or an exquisite black Inuit basket woven from whale baleen.

At the Anchorage Museum, you can wander through 10,000 years of Alaskan art and history, with artifacts ranging from wooly mammoth tusks to a section of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. The museum hosts up to 20 traveling exhibits a year and has a busy schedule of films, concerts, classes, and openings. During the summer, artists and artisans from around the state sell their work in the museum’s atrium.

A collection of more than 900 native artifacts and ivory carvings awaits you at the Alaska Heritage Museum at Wells Fargo, as well as an extensive selection of fine art by prominent Alaska artists. Don't forget to check out the huge gold nugget weighing in at 46 troy ounces.

For living, breathing native culture, head to the Alaska Native Heritage Center, 10 minutes east of downtown. There you can often see live demonstrations, ranging from tanning a moose hide to smoking salmon to weaving a hat out of cedar. You can also enjoy performances by native storytellers, dancers, musicians, and athletes, and even get a lesson in native drumming or dancing. And you can wander through an unusual village made up of reproductions of traditional dwellings, including a Tlingit longhouse and an Aleut sod house.

Anchorage has a lively restaurant scene and a wild bar scene. For dinner with a view, dine at the Crow's Nest. Located on the 20th floor of the Captain Cook Hotel, it's got smashing views of Cook Inlet and the surrounding mountains, along with a 10,000-bottle wine cellar and a seemingly endless list of original martinis. The French and American menu is rich in seafood, game, red meat, and poultry.

For a more down-to-earth meal, try the Marx Bros. Cafe, which occupies one of the city's original downtown homes and has just 14 tables. The kitchen turns out exquisitely prepared dishes, such as Kodiak scallops tossed in king crab butter or halibut crusted in macadamia nuts, while the maitre d’ chats with guests and tosses Caesar salads tableside in an enormous wooden bowl.

For nightlife, Chilkoot Charlie's has 15 bars under one roof, plus one bar on the roof. There's a bar for just about every occasion: bars with live music and dance floors, an NFL bar, a martini bar, a daiquiri bar, a Russian ice bar (the bar is literally made of ice), a lingerie bar, a rooftop bar, and so forth. It's like a theme park for drinkers, with lots of live music, DJs, and dancing.

Before leaving town, take in a final, sweeping view of the city from Flattop Mountain, a 3,550-foot lobbed-off mountain peak 20 minutes from downtown. This is the city's favorite day hike. Even if you don't feel like tackling the 3.5-mile climb to the summit, drive up to the trailhead anyway. The view from the parking lot at 2,200 feet is stunning, and the city, which may seem like a humdrum American metropolis at street level, looks absolutely beautiful from above.

Northwest Travel Magazine January/Februray 2008