Wilderness Wandering

We are on a great Alaskan adventure to see all eight National Parks located in Alaska over the next four weeks. 

I did all the planning for this trip.  It was very intimidating and I procrastinated a long time, but one day back in January I picked a day on the calendar to begin and here we are!

Day 1 July 22, 2025 

Getting to Alaska

Since we were going to do all eight parks in one trip, we will be gone 4 weeks. We decided to drive to Madison and leave a car at a friend’s house. We then took a bus from Madison to Chicago O’Hare for a non stop red eye flight from Chicago to Anchorage. 

We took off about 1 AM and landed at 4:30 AM Alaska time (7:30 AM Central). The flight was smooth. 

Day 2 July 23, 2025

Anchorage

We had a VRBO lined up for 1 week in the Anchorage suburb of Sand Lake, which is near the airport. We couldn’t check in until 4 PM.

We were a little tired, but wanted to do some exploring. We thought we packed light for a month trip where we would be experiencing some rainy and cold weather. We shared one carry on suitcase and each had a backpack. Fortunately, there is luggage storage at the airport. We stowed our suitcase and one backpack. 

Next, we worked on figuring out the Anchorage Public Transit System. It is a bus system called The People Mover. You can ride any segment of their extensive routes for $2.00 or buy a daily pass for $5.00. We downloaded the app and bought two daily tickets. Next we found where we could get on The People Mover. 

When we got to the location, we saw the route number bus we needed to get downtown would arrive in about 10 minutes.  As I showed my ticket to the driver, she asked if we were seniors. We replied, “Yes.” She responded that seniors are free on Wednesdays. Yay!

We arrived downtown around 7:00 AM. Not much was open so we decided to go to breakfast. We asked someone on the street where a good breakfast place was and they pointed us to the White Spot Cafe. 

It was a classic diner with the cook visible behind the counter.  Tim tried reindeer sausage. Breakfast hit the spot. 

Right at 8:00 AM we found the Visitor Center. As you would expect, they were very  kind helpful people. 

They recommended the Anchorage Trolley Ride. The pick up point was in front of the Visitor Center. So we purchased our tickets and off we went.  Our trolley driver/tour guide was Alice. She did a fantastic job of regaling us with a vast amount of Anchorage history in an entertaining way.  We highly recommend the tour as a great way to get oriented to the layout of Anchorage and a flavor for the lifestyle. 

The Visitor Center also recommended the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center. After the trolley tour, we walked over and put in our reservation for the 12:30 departure.  Then we grabbed lunch. We went to Glacier Brewhouse, which had great Yelp reviews. A gentleman we talked to on the flight also recommended it.  We shared some fantastic halibut and a very tasty rootbeer brewed on site.  We walked back to catch our tour to the Wildlife Conservation Center.  Our driver was very informative about the scenery along The Seward Highway. The highway runs along Turnagain Bay which has the 2nd highest tidal change in the world at 20-40 feet. He told us not to walk on the beach along there. The glacial silt is much like quick sand and people do get stuck and have drowned. 

At the Center, we saw rescued moose, reindeer and black and brown bears. They appeared to be lovingly cared for in a very natural setting.

When we got back downtown, we caught the People Mover back to the airport and got our luggage and then Ubered to our VRBO. We asked our Uber driver if he would stop at the grocery store for us on the way and he was a sweetheart and did. The VRBO is very nice! We had flatbread for dinner and watched a movie and unpacked and went to bed. 

Day 3, July 24, 2025

Anchorage

We both slept great. We were up about 6 AM (9 AM at home). At this point in the summer the sun sets around 11 PM and rises about 5:30 AM. 

Rental cars are EXTREMELY expensive in Alaska. In the remote areas the roads are bad and there are roads that rental car companies don’t allow you to drive on or it voids your agreement. Tim has done the vast majority of the driving to all the National Parks. He often misses much of the scenery on the drives because he has to keep his eyes on the road. I decided that we would do this entire vacation without a rental car. 

So, we called an Uber to take us downtown to start our day. We started our day at the Trek bike rental kiosk in downtown Anchorage.  We rented our bikes and found the start of The Tony Knowles Coastal Trail. The trail is a highly acclaimed 11 mile paved trail that runs along the Cook Inlet.  The weather was cool and overcast. The trail was gorgeous and wound along the water and alternated between coast and dense forest.  Along the way we met a woman also on a bike who had spotted a bear just ahead on the trail.  She was a flight attendant from Atlanta on a layover.  We stood a safe distance away and made noise and waited a while  for the black bear to move off the path (and took photos). Then we continued. 

There is an option to connect four different trails and they call it the Moose Loop. It’s about 30 miles. But it goes more through town. We decided to just ride the reverse of the trail. We didn’t see any other wildlife. The trail got quite crowded later in the morning.  After the ride, we walked over to another bike rental place that also runs a shuttle to a great hike called Flattop Mountain.  The owner of Downtown Bicycle runs a van from downtown to Chugach State Park most afternoons for tourists without a rental car.  The hike is 3 miles round trip with 1345 feet of elevation gain. The first 2/3 of the hike are moderate to a plateau. The last 1/3 is very strenuous with lots of scrambling. We did make it to the top! There were people parasailing back down. We spoke to one man who said he has climbed Flattop 3000 times and parasails down 90% of the time.  We watched him. Then we took our lives in our hands and descended the mountain the way we came up. I spent a lot of time on my butt! We hiked with a nice young Chinese couple.

Once the van returned us downtown, we walked to Humpy’s Alaskan Ale House and ordered pan fried grouper. It was fantastic! Then we walked to Wild Scoops ice cream and ordered a flight of four scoops of ice cream. We had an active day and thought we deserved it. Delicious!!! We ate it listening to some live music at the Live After Five event. The band was Wiley Post and they had a great female lead singer.  Then we Ubered back to the VRBO. The public transit does go to Sand Lake, but from the nearest stop, it is still a 2 mile walk to our VRBO.  What a great day!

Day 4, July 25,2025 

We woke up to a rainy forecast for the entire day. We decided to do some indoor things today. We took an Uber downtown to the Anchorage Museum. The museum is a Smithsonian Affiliate and celebrates Alaska Native cultures through presenting stories and cultural heritage pieces from the Smithsonian Institute. We were blown away by the fantastic exhibits! We would highly recommend it if you are ever in Anchorage!

We went to lunch at the very popular Snow City Cafe. We were disappointed they were out of their seafood chowder soup of the day, but their tomato bisque was fantastic and we enjoyed their crab cake po’boy.  We stopped back at Wild Scoops for Tim to enjoy another scoop of their Rhubarb Crunch ice cream. 

Then we visited the Alaska Public Lands Information Center. It was a nicely done visitor center about the wild life and National Parks of Alaska. I was able to get our National Parks Passport stamped for Lake Clark which we will see tomorrow. I won’t be able to get the Park stamp inside the park, because we will be fight setting and we aren’t able to visit the actual VC of the park because it is in a different place. 

The bike shop owner who took us to Flattop Mountain a few days so raved about the Anchorage Public Library. It was built almost entirely with a public grant. I am a sucker for libraries, so we took the People Mover the three miles to check it out. It is a very nice, modern library. There was a grocery store nearby, so we grabbed some bananas and dinner to take home and took an Uber back to the VRBO. 

Day 5, July 26, 2025

Today we visit Lake Clark National Park. Lake Clark is a rather difficult park to visit. There are no roads to the park. The park and preserve encompass 4 million acres and protect mountains, important fishing rivers and lakes, and bear territory. We were up early. We ate breakfast and I went for a walk around our neighborhood. We called an Uber and went to the small airplane airport and Rust Flying Service. We checked in. They have about 15 small prop planes. 

Our pilot Jim called the five of us with him and we loaded into our plane and took off to Lake Clark NP. The flight was smooth. Jim gave a little narration of what we were seeing.

We landed on Crescent Lake in Lake Clark National Park and taxied to the dock of Redoubt Mountain Lodge. We were greeted by Wyatt our guide. We took off on a pontoon boat and scoured the lake for bears. We saw several eagles and different kinds of ducks but never saw any bears.  The lake is breathtaking!

We went in to the lodge for a delicious lunch of fresh sockeye salmon, rice and salad prepared by Shara, who is also in charge of the bear guides. While we ate lunch, Shara spotted a bear. So we were very hopeful of seeing at least one as we took off for our afternoon session. We quickly found a single bear fishing. We had a lot of fun watching that bear.  Wyatt had told us about a sow brown bear and cub he had seen the day before that chased a black bear away the day before. A little while after the single bear departed, we found the mom and cub. The cub was about a year old. We had a great time watching them. The cub was quite playful. They didn’t have to work too hard to get fish. Some fishermen had cleaned their catch and left the skins and heads behind in the water. The sow was bringing in all these fish already filleted and we were so impressed! We were wondering how she was doing that! Wyatt finally told us that the fish were dead and she was just picking them up. In a few weeks when the sockeye salmon are dying, they’ll just be floating on the water. I guess it’s a real feeding frenzy then. 

Right before we headed back we saw the single bear again. It put on another good show for us.  Then it was time to head back. 

Jim picked us up and we had an uneventful flight back. It was quiet as we all enjoyed looking at the hundreds of photos we took throughout the day!