Things to do in Southcentral Alaska
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This restaurant is like a stepping into a Tuscan country inn only there's modern art all around and soft jazz floating into both dining levels and the bar. Its entrees are Mediterranean grill with an Alaskan twist, its pasta is made fresh daily and everything is served by a waitstaff that knows how the chef prepares it.
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Snow City Café
Snow City Café This busy café serves healthy grub to a mix of clientele that ranges from the tattooed to the up-and-coming. For breakfast skip the usual eggs and toast and try a bowl of Snow City granola with dried fruit, honey and nuts instead.
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Bear Creek Winery
Wineries are scarcer than vineyards in Alaska, but this impressive family-run operation bottles some fine berry-based wines, plus fireweed mead and rhubarb vino. It conducts tours and tastings daily in the summer and sells its product on-site.
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Title Wave Books
Northern Lights Center (1360 W Northern Lights Blvd); W 5th Ave (415 W 5th Ave) The best bookstore in Anchorage with two branches, both equipped with internet cafés.
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Momma O's Seafood
Momma O's Seafood is the place for a halibut fix - have it fried or, better, Cajun style - but don't discount the excellent onion rings or udon noodles.
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Arctic Roadrunner
Since 1964 this place has been turning out beefy burgers that can be enjoyed outdoors while watching salmon spawn up Campbell Creek.
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Moose's Tooth Pub & Pizzeria
An Anchorage institution serving 18 custom-brewed beers including monthly specials, and 50 gourmet pizzas.
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Sunny Cove Sea Kayaking
Though the best and most impressive paddling in the region is within Kenai Fjords National Park, getting there requires a costly water-taxi. If you're looking to save money and don't mind foregoing the park's tidewater glaciers and more ample wildlife, kayaking right outside Seward in Resurrection Bay can still make for a stunning day on the water. Sunny Cove Sea Kayaking conducts guided trips.
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Chair 5 Restaurant
The kind of bar and restaurant skiers love after a long day on the slopes. It features more than 60 beers, including a dozen on tap, gourmet pizzas, big burgers and a lot of blackened dishes like blackened halibut tacos.
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Hogg Brothers Café
The Hogg Brothers Café is a bizarre, pig-obsessed joint that serves all-day breakfasts, including 20 kinds of omelettes, strong coffee, and 30 different types of burgers and sandwiches.
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Ray's Waterfront
Hands down, this is Seward's culinary high point, with attentive service, picture-postcard views and the finest seafood above water.
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Duncan House Diner
- Homer, USA
- Restaurants › Diner
This busy downtown place fries up Homer's best bacon-and-eggs, which it serves until 14:00.
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Trans-Alaska Pipeline Terminal
Across the inlet from town, Valdez' ever-pumping heart once welcomed visitors, but since September 11, 2001, stricter security protocols have closed it to the public. From the end of Dayville Rd you can still get a peek at the facility, including the storage tanks holding nine million barrels of oil apiece. But heed the dire warnings: plenty of septuagenarian RVers have been pulled over and interrogated for getting too close.
Those truly interested in the terminal can learn more about it at Prince William Sound Community College, which for a fee offers a pipeline exhibit and thrice-daily 'video tour', featuring great photography and a narrative that amounts to little mor…
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Kennicott
In 1900 miners 'Tarantula Jack' Smith and Clarence Warner reconnoitered Kennicott Glacier's east side until they arrived at a creek and found traces of copper. They named the creek Bonanza, and was it ever - the entire mountainside turned out to hold some of the richest copper deposits ever uncovered. In the Lower 48, mines were digging up ore that contained 2% copper. Here, the veins would average almost 13%, while some contained as much as 70%.
Eventually, a group of investors bought the existing stakes and formed the Kennecott Copper Corporation, named when a clerical worker misspelled Kennicott (which is why, nowadays, the town is spelled with an 'e' while the river, …
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Kuskulana River Bridge
At Mile 17 of McCarthy Rd sits the one-lane, 525ft-long Kuskulana River Bridge, long known as 'the biggest thrill on the road to McCarthy.' Built in 1910, this historic railroad span is a vertigo-inducing 238ft above the bottom of the gorge. Though the state has added guard rails and new planks and thus taken some of the thrill out of the crossing, the view of the steep-sided canyon and rushing river from the bridge is awesome, and well worth the time to park at one end and walk back across it.
After rattling through another 43 miles of scrubby brush and thick forest - with few good mountain vistas and not many diversions en route - the road ends at the Kennicott River. I…
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Homer Spit
- Homer, USA
- Sights › Waterfront
This long needle of land - a 4½-mile sand bar stretching into Kachemak Bay - is viewed by some folks as the most fun place in Alaska. Others wish another earthquake would come along and sink the thing. The Spit throbs all summer with tourist masses in unimaginable density, gobbling fish-and-chips, quaffing specialty coffees, getting chair massages, buying alpaca sweaters, arranging bear-watching trips, watching theatrical performances, and - oh yeah - going fishing in search of 300lb halibut.
The hub of all this activity is the small-boat harbor, one of the best facilities in Southcentral Alaska and home to more than 700 boats. Close by is the Seafarer's Memorial, which…
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Exit Glacier
The marquee attraction of Kenai Fjords National Park and one of Alaska's most accessible glaciers, Exit Glacier was named by explorers crossing the Harding Ice Field who found the glacier a suitable way to 'exit' the ice and mountains. Now 3 miles long, it's believed the river of ice once extended all the way to Seward.
From the Exit Glacier Nature Center, the Outwash Plain Trail is an easy half-mile walk to the glacier's alluvial plain - a flat expanse of pulverized silt and gravel, cut through by braids of grey meltwater. The Overlook Loop Trail departs the first loop and climbs steeply to an overlook at the side of the glacier before returning; don't skip the short spu…
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Chitina
The end of Edgerton Hwy is 10 miles beyond Liberty Falls State Recreation Site, at little Chitina, the last place you can purchase gas. There's a grocery store here too, and a café, an art gallery and a ranger station. Backpackers can camp along the 3-mile road south to O'Brien Creek or beside Town Lake.
At Chitina, the McCarthy Rd begins, auspiciously enough, by passing through a single-lane notch blasted through a granite outcrop. From here 60 miles eastward you'll be tracing the abandoned Copper River & Northwest Railroad bed that was used to transport copper from the mines to Cordova. Though your around US$40-a-day rental car can usually travel this stretch during th…
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Mt Marathon Trail
According to (rather suspect) local legend, grocer Gus Borgan wagered around US$100 in 1909 that no-one could run Mt Marathon in an hour, and the race was on. Winner James Walters clocked in at 62 minutes, losing the bet but becoming a legend. The 3.1-mile suffer-fest quickly became a celebrated 4th of July event and today is Alaska's most famous footrace, pitting runners from all over the world against the 3022ft-high peak. In 1981 Bill Spencer set the record at 43 minutes, 23 seconds. Many runners take twice as long, and each year several end up with broken bones after tumbling during the hell-bent descent.
You can trek to the top several ways. At the end of Monroe St, …
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Iditarod National Historic Trail
Though the celebrated Iditarod Race to Nome currently departs from Anchorage, the legendary trail actually begins in Seward. In 1995 Mitch Seavey mushed from Seward along this well-worn path into Anchorage, where he continued with the regularly scheduled Iditarod; he finished 20th. At the foot of Ballaine Blvd, an unprepossessing sign and lonely dogsled mark Mile 0. Nearby, a paved bike path heads 2 miles north along the beach.
A far more interesting segment of the trail for hikers, however, can be reached by heading east 2 miles on Nash Rd, which intersects the Seward Hwy at Mile 3.2. From here you can follow the Iditarod National Historic Trail through woods and thick b…
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McCarthy
Most local services are in the hamlet of McCarthy, an erstwhile ghost town so funky and cool you'll want to haunt the place yourself. Facing the Kennicott Glacier's terminal moraine and just a stone's throw from the river, the tiny community is a car-free idyll, where the handful of gravel roads wind past rotting cabins and lovingly restored boomtown-era buildings.
Alas, in the past few years the place has been 'discovered,' but the summer population still hits only about 200, and just a quarter stick it out for the winter.
Once you've crossed the Kennicott River on the footbridge, follow the road across another footbridge and about half a mile further to the unstaffed McC…
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Iditarod Trail Headquarters
Near Wasilla, Knik boasts a rich sled-dog history, since it's the home of many Alaskan mushers and checkpoint 4 on the route. For more information about this uniquely Alaskan race, stop in at Iditarod Trail Headquarters. The log-cabin museum's most unusual exhibit is Togo, the famous sled dog that led his team across trackless Norton Sound to deliver serum to diphtheria-threatened Nome in 1925 - a journey that gave rise to today's Iditarod.
He's been stuffed and is now on display. Outside, you can get a short sled-dog ride (around US$10, from 09:00 to 17:00) on a wheeled dogsled. The Iditarod, a famous 1100-mile dogsled race to Nome, begins in Anchorage - but only for the…
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Harding Ice Field Trail
This strenuous and very popular 3.5-mile trail follows Exit Glacier up to Harding Ice Field, one of the largest in North America. The 936-sq-mile expanse remained undiscovered until the early 1900s, when a map-making team realized that eight coastal glaciers flowed from the same system. Today you can rediscover it via a steep, roughly cut and sometimes slippery ascent to 3500ft; for reasonably fit trekkers, that's a good three- or four-hour trip. Beware of bears; they're common here.
The trek is well worth it for those with the stamina, as it provides spectacular views of not only the ice field but of Exit Glacier and the valley below. The upper section of the route is sn…
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Earthquake Memorial
Valdez has been unduly blessed by nature, but 17:46, March 27, 1964, was payback time. Some 45 miles west of town and 14 miles underground, a fault ruptured, triggering a magnitude-9.2 earthquake - the most powerful in American history. The land rippled like water as Valdez slid into the harbor; tsunamis destroyed what was left. Thirty-seven people died.
After the quake, survivors labored to relocate and rebuild Valdez at its present site. But if you drive out the Richardson Hwy you can still see the ghostly and overgrown foundations of Old Valdez. The Earthquake Memorial, listing the names of the dead, is reached by turning off the highway onto the unsigned gravel road j…
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