Alaska 2021 Trip Recap

Our trip to Alaska from July 25 to August 10 was our first real vacation since 2011 when we went to St. Martin in the Caribbean. We had a few short trips in the interim, but no real vacations while I was running the restaurant. And while our 10-day trip across the country in 2017 was great fun, it was a cross-country move and not a vacation.

We left Oregon with a slight but concerning uptick in COVID cases. During the course of our stay in Alaska, each day would bring worse news about the surging pandemic worldwide, a pandemic that we thought we had behind us back in June when we scheduled our trip. In Alaska, each day more and more businesses required masks to enter.

During our stay, we became disconnected from the state of affairs back home in Oregon. I wondered what we would be arriving home to and if we would be in lock-down yet again. In fact, Oregon would go back under mask mandate within days of our arrival back home. I am thankful to have sneaked this vacation in between waves of COVID. My days of fogged up glasses and non-functional facial recognition on my phone seem to be back.

Alaska is the most amazing place I’ve ever been, topping even the Black Hills and the Grand Tetons in the US. I’ve never been to the Swiss Alps, so I cannot compare. A train trip through the Alps is on my bucket list.

While in Alaska, we managed to go flightseeing, walk on a glacier, hike and walk quite a lot, fish for halibut and salmon, see brown bears and orcas, ride the Alaska Railroad, visit a lot of great breweries, eat a lot of sub-par food, and take thousands of pictures as keepsakes.

I am ready to go back. Despite all that we did, there are way too many things that we left undone, a visit to Denali at the top of that list.

Post Index

Day 0: Portland
Day 1: Anchorage

Day 2: North Face Trail at Alyeska Resort

Day 3: Flattop Mountain

Day 3: Flightseeing Knik Glacier

Day 3: More Flightseeing Photos

Day 4: Portage Glacier

Day 4: Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center

Day 5: From Anchorage to Homer

Day 6: Playing the Local in Homer

Day 7: Walking the Homer Spit

Day 8: Homer Wildlife Tour

Day 8: Exploring Homer

Day 9: Homer, Eveline State Recreation Area

Day 9: Homer Harbor

Day 9: Halibut Cove and The Saltry Restaurant

Day 10: Grewingk Glacier and Homer Brewing

Day 11: Brown Bears at Katmai

Day 12: Homer, Halibut and Salmon Fishing

Day 13: Return to Anchorage

Day 14: Seward and Kenai Fjords National Park

Day 15: Alaska Botanical Garden and Anchorage Brewing

Day 16: Return to McMinnville

Random Thoughts

Alaska has no-joke mountains, more and bigger mountains than I have ever seen in my life, including the Sierra, Rockies, and Cascades. You can go from sea level to 4000 feet in 6.2 seconds. As a result, the hiking is world-class. I finally did in my current pair of Oboz shoes and a pair of Darn Tough socks.

Very few parts of the state that we visited are not down-right scenic. Even the ugly parts are beautiful.

In a season of diminished tourism, the touristy parts (mainly the cruise ship ports) of Alaska are overrun with tourists. Best to avoid these places, if you have a tourist allergy.

In my life, I have never seen so many brand new hiking boots or so much brand new outdoor clothing and gear. So many tourists, even in town, were dressed in the finest Eddie Bauer hiker-wannabe wardrobes. Out hiking, I saw way too many cans of bear spray in brand new holsters lashed to people who probably had no idea how to use it, on trails so populated that there was zero chance of a daytime bear encounter.

Alaska has some pretty good beer, even if the good breweries are very thinly spread by Oregon standards. Like many states, Alaska has some crazy alcohol rules, just different than I have encountered elsewhere. What’s up with brewpubs closing at 8pm, the three-beer (36oz) limit, and a ban on entertainment at breweries?

For a hyper-Republican state, there sure are a lot of weed dispensaries.

Yes, the summer days are long and sleep masks are awesome. Driving into the sunset with shades on at 10 pm is surreal.

For viewing wildflowers, Alaska in the summer time can hardly be beat because the flowers are just coming into their prime at a time when the rest of the country is largely bloomed out. The wildlife is pretty amazing as well. I managed to see for the first time brown bear, dall sheep, minke and humpback whales, orcas, porcupine, spruce grouse, golden-crowned sparrow, tufted puffins, glaucous-winged gulls, and black-legged kittiwakes.

Anchorage is a town best avoided. Land there and fly out of there, but get the hell away from all the tourists, paid parking, and awful tourist restaurants. Stay elsewhere. Even so, there are many places to get a decent cup of coffee or glass of beer in Anchorage.

In a similar vein, our experience is that restaurant food is pretty disappointing in Alaska. Next visit, should we stay in a location more than overnight, we will get a place with a kitchen and cook for ourselves.

Alaska Day 16: Return to McMinnville

In our hotel room in Anchorage, getting up to the annoying alarm on my phone at 0445 was no joke. Given that we were all packed except for our toiletries and sleep clothes, we brushed our teeth, finished packing, and were in the hotel lobby by 0500 only to discover that it was pouring rain. I walked down the street to fetch the car and we loaded our luggage under the cover of the hotel portico.

We had no issues getting gas or returning the rental car. We would have had issues if I had followed the directions to the rental car return on the Garmin, but despite the obnoxiously early hour, I had enough wits about me to know that we needed to return the car to the garage where we got it and not to whatever office the Garmin wanted us to visit. At 0520 there was nobody in the garage, so we left the car in the return lane and dropped the keys into the drop box.

Inside the terminal at the Air Alaska counters, there were good lines to check baggage with a lot of people trying to get bulky and overweight items through, especially guys making their commute to the North Slope oil fields. Baggage dealt with, security was a non-issue and there was a coffee stand just on the other side of the screeners. Coffee, finally, a few minutes before six.

Masked and Seated at 0645: An Exhausted Camper

We boarded without issue and we had front-row seats in first class going back. I joked with Ann that it was a very different experience than flying co-pilot in a Cessna bush plane, which we both did on our respective flights to Katmai. The climb out through the low rain clouds was uneventful. I expected worse. Above the clouds between 10-15,000 feet, we had a touch of clear air instability, but it was trivial in the grand scheme of air turbulence. Above the clouds, we had sunshine all the way into PDX, but terrifically warm temperatures when we arrived.

Check Out the Flat "Meat" Product

We preordered breakfast the day before and it proved to be somewhat edible. Ann’s omelette came with a dubious flat meat product reeking of artificial smoke. She did not partake of that particular delicacy. I preordered a pork bowl consisting of layers of black beans, shredded pork shoulder, scrambled eggs, all topped with a bit of sour cream. The eggs and pork shoulder were lame, while the black beans were nicely seasoned with salt and cumin. It might have been a touch better had it been warm all the way through.

My Breakfast was Slightly Better Than Ann's

Back at PDX, we had to wait on the tarmac for a few minutes before pulling to a gate. Like everybody else in these days of COVID, Alaska Air was having staffing difficulty. We needed a ground crew to help park the plane. Ten minutes or so of wait was enough to get us to the gate. The half-hour wait for our baggage at PDX was excruciating. All we wanted to do was get home.

Baggage in hand, we needed to get back to the Ramada to get my truck and start the trip back home. We called the shuttle number only to find out that the shuttle was not in operation, another COVID issue, I imagine. The hotel called an Uber for us and the driver met us within seconds of us getting to the pick-up area. That couldn't have gone any smoother.

The trip from the airport home was as easy as it gets and that is a major blessing from the Portland traffic gods. We skipped the ride into Portland on I-84, opting to take the I-205 bypass which dropped us on I-5 just about Wilsonville. It was a smooth ride on a route that we do not normally take.

During the hour drive home, we decided to stop at the store and grab a few things for an early dinner. After over two weeks of really pretty bad food, we were desperate for a competent meal. We needed something flavorful yet comforting, comforting being our code word for high carbs, preferably pasta. You really don't know how hard it is trying to eat well and foregoing pasta for months on end. We could live quite happily on pasta every day.

We stopped at the local Grocery Outlet, a small store that is far quicker to get in and out of than the big grocery store. GO, being primarily a seller of overstocked goods, usually has at least one kind of Italian bronze die-extruded pasta on the shelves. The markup on these pastas at specialty groceries is unbelievable and so a lot of unsold pasta gets farmed out to the overstock sellers. At our GO, we usually will not have a choice of brand or cut, but at least we can get a bag of decent pasta, unlike the grocery where Barilla is as good as it gets. Today it was fettuccine.

Grocery Outlet is only a couple minutes from the house and groceries in tow, we were in a rush to see the dogs. If you've ever been away from yours, you know the enthusiastic greeting that you get after you've been in the bathroom for a minute. Imagine the greeting after two-and-a-half weeks away!

That's a Happy Pile of Puppies!

We had planned to have an early dinner, but not eating anything since o-dark-thirty, we moved things up and I got to work making our dinner. Along with the pasta, we got a head of broccoli to put with artichoke hearts and sun-dried tomatoes from the pantry, garlic, red pepper flakes, and a big handful of fresh basil which exploded in the garden while we were away. A swirl of butter and a grating of pecorino romano finished our super flavorful and comforting dinner, easily the best meal we’ve had in three weeks.

And that concludes the saga of our 2021 Alaska trip. I'll do a brief wrap-up post next.

Alaska Day 15: Alaska Botanical Garden and Anchorage Brewing

Yesterday on the seemingly endless four-plus-hour train trip back to Anchorage from Seward, it became brutally clear that today was not going to involve any of the potential items that we had mulled over previously. We had thought to hike the Crow Pass Trail from Girdwood or to tackle the other end of the trail in Eagle River from the Eagle River Nature Center. We were both too exhausted to contemplate doing anything active on our last day in Alaska. There comes a point in almost every trip when we find we have had enough. We were beyond that point in this trip.

Although I awoke at 0630 and Ann at 0815, 0900 found us both still in bed, the last two weeks of travel having come crashing down on us in the last 48 hours. We looked forward to our dogs, being at home, and getting back into our routine again. Though the weather forecast back in Oregon was for brutal 100+ highs, topping 110 once again this summer by the end of the week, home is home.

We got out of the hotel room finally about 10:00 and walked a couple blocks to Dark Horse Coffee Company, a cute little coffee house with an impressive collection of teas lining the wall. The patrons were a mix of a few tourists like us and regulars taking a break from work, mainly the latter.

Dark Horse Coffee

Breakfast Bagel and Coffee

While we were sitting in the café eating our ham and egg bagels and sipping our coffee, we searched the internet for something low-key to do today before going to Anchorage Brewing later for a food truck dinner and our farewell to Alaska brews. In our stupor, we had forgotten based on our prior pass-by that there are no food trucks at Anchorage Brewing and that will come to bite us in the rear later today.

Ann stumbled upon the Alaska Botanical Garden and that seemed to fit our mood to a T, something leisurely and unchallenging. After breakfast and coffee, we walked back to the hotel parking lot to retrieve the car, wandering a little bit through downtown Anchorage on the way. With much of the city wiped out in the 1964 earthquake, a lot of the city features modern construction and parts of it are visually appealing.

Alaska Center for the Performing Arts

Flaming Red Pelargoniums in  Town Square Park

Alaska Botanical Garden

Our route from downtown to the Alaska Botanical Garden took us right by the Elmendorf Air Force Base end of JBER where we heard the thunderous roar of a military jet taking off. I looked to my left briefly, long enough to see an F-22 Raptor heading straight for the sky in a nearly vertical climb. We would hear takeoff after takeoff through the morning.

Alaska Botanical Garden is situated in mid-town, but on the far eastern side of town. It shares a parking lot with a secondary school. There are a few flower beds outside the tall moose fence, but the majority of the garden is inside the fence. A hardscaped walkway makes a loop around the property. A nature trail leaves the back of the garden and follows a creek for a short ways until looping back through the fence and rejoining the main loop.

After paying the entry fee, we walked the half-mile loop through the gardens twice and the 1.2-mile Lowenfels-Hoersting nature trail once. The young lady at the front desk warned us pretty thoroughly about bears, but we saw none, unfortunately. The staff seemed pretty bear averse, probably from an abundance of CYA for liability reasons. Two staffers would come racing up to us later on ATVs because they got a report of a bear. And we would see two women walking through the urban gardens with canisters of bear spray. I chuckled, just having been face to face at 15 yards with a brown bear in Katmai.

Dahlias Near the Entrance

Delphinium and Rudbeckia

Flowers Grow Tall in the Long Summer Days

Stunning Delphinium

A Tall Lysimachia

Fantastic Stone and Steel Sculpture; the Rocks Rotate

Lashed Wooden Raven Sculpture

Entry to Formal Herb Garden

Love the Two-Tone Calendula

Painted Sage, Salvia horminum

Huge Meadow Rue, Thalictrum sp.

Veronicastrum virginicum 'Fascination'

Glowing Domestic Red Currants

3-Foot Wide Leaves of Shieldleaf Rodgersia, Astilboides tabularis

Peony Seed Heads

Chinese Globeflower, Trollius chinensis

Globe Thistle, Echinops bannaticus

After walking through the manicured gardens, we took the nature trail through the woods, through the tall moose fence surrounding the gardens, down a hill along a creek, and finally back up the hill and through the fence to the paved garden path once again.

The Woods Full of Highbush Cranberry, Viburnum edule

The Ubiquitous Devil's Club, Oplopanax horridus

Bee on Fireweed

Wild Rose Hips

Beautiful but Poisonous Amanita muscaria

Western Oak Fern, Gymnocarpium dryopteris

Birch Polypore Shelf Fungus, Fomitopsis betulina

Anchorage Brewing

After a couple hours at the botanical garden, we were ready for our last beer hurrah in Anchorage and it turns out that we saved the best for last. It took perhaps 15 minutes to get to Anchorage Brewing in an industrial part in the south of town. We did not visit earlier because people in Oregon had told me that we should avoid Anchorage Brewing. On the other hand, the locals have been telling us for days that this is where the innovation and great beers are, despite their international distribution. The vibe is super chill and the beers are the best we had in Anchorage.

Anchorage Brewing

With five hazies on tap (a 4%er, a singles, two doubles, and a triple) it was hard to choose. We tried all but the triple, not really wanting to tangle with that much alcohol, and they were all tasty. I've never been to another brewery that serves their beer in the expensive and bad-ass Teku beer glasses. I wish we had more time to try other beers.

Unfortunately, there was no food truck at Anchorage Brewing and we were getting seriously hangry. We got a recommendation from our bartender for a late lunch/early dinner, a pizza place whose menu sounded wonderful. Alas, when we got there, we found them closed on Mondays, despite their Google information saying they opened at 4pm on Monday. This has been happening all too frequently with COVID: owners forgetting to update their information. And of course, we should have been calling these places to make sure that they were open.

Ann and I, we had a little hanger meltdown in the parking lot of the pizza place while searching for someplace close by. We found a local “roadhouse” with decent reviews. It was mediocre and nothing that I need write about. We had really looked forward to first-class pizza as our last meal in Anchorage.

We headed back to the Hilton to get ready for our flight in the early morning, packing everything for travel. Bedtime came early, long before dark, on our final night in Alaska in preparation for our 0445 alarm. We were beyond ready to be home.