Alaska: G's Birthday on the Frontier

While I was somewhere between a moving truck and a mild existential crisis about Florida, G was in Anchorage watching glaciers calve into turquoise water. We have different approaches to life transitions. Hers involve mountains.

She went with a friend for her birthday in mid-May. Three nights at the Hotel Captain Cook in downtown Anchorage, the hotel that has been the hotel in Anchorage since 1965. Named after the British explorer (the city takes the Captain Cook thing seriously, his name is on half the landmarks in the region), the Captain Cook sits at the corner of 5th Avenue and K Street, walking distance to most of downtown. It's one of those properties that operates like the grande dame of a city that doesn't have many grande dames. The lobby has dark wood paneling, nautical decor, and the kind of bar where you expect to see someone nursing a whiskey at 3 PM on a Tuesday and nobody bats an eye.

The rooms on the upper floors of Tower III are the ones to request. West-facing rooms look out over Cook Inlet toward the Alaska Range. On a clear day, and in mid-May most days are clear, you can see Denali from the hotel. It sits on the horizon like something out of a painting, snow-covered and absurdly large, over 200 miles away and still dominating the skyline. On an overcast day, you can see the beginning of a cloud system that might contain Denali. Alaska plays by its own rules about what's visible and when.

May is one of the best months to visit Anchorage. The days are absurdly long: by mid-May the sun is up by 5:30 AM and doesn't set until nearly 10:30 PM. That's 17 hours of daylight, and it only gets longer through the solstice in June. The temperature hovers around 50-55 degrees during the day, cool enough for a jacket in the morning, warm enough for a long walk in the afternoon. Snow is mostly gone at sea level but still visible on every mountain surrounding the city, which gives Anchorage this constant backdrop of white peaks against blue sky in every direction you look.

The Tony Knowles Coastal Trail is an 11-mile paved path that runs along the coastline from downtown out to Kincaid Park. Walking, running, or biking it gives you constant views of Cook Inlet with the Alaska Range in the distance. Moose sightings along the trail are common, and not in a novelty way. In a "that's a 1,500-pound animal standing on the path and you need to wait for it to decide you're not interesting enough to charge" way. Don't approach them. They look docile. They are not. Moose injure more people in Alaska than bears do.

The Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center is about 45 minutes south on the Seward Highway and worth the drive. It's a rescue and rehabilitation facility for injured and orphaned animals: brown bears, black bears, moose, bison, elk, musk ox, eagles. It's not a zoo. The animals are there because they can't survive in the wild anymore, and the facility gives them space that feels closer to their natural habitat than anything in a typical enclosure. You can get remarkably close to a brown bear here in a context where neither of you is in danger, which is not how most brown bear encounters in Alaska go. The drive down the Seward Highway itself is one of the most scenic stretches of road in North America. It runs along Turnagain Arm with mountains dropping straight into the water on both sides. Pull over at one of the lookout points and just sit there for ten minutes. You'll see why people move here and never leave.

For a day trip, the Portage Glacier area is about an hour south. The glacier has retreated significantly over the decades (it's no longer visible from the visitor center, which tells you something about the timeline we're all on), but the boat tour across Portage Lake takes you right up to the ice face. The blue color of glacial ice in person is a shade that doesn't exist anywhere else in nature. It looks fake in photographs. It isn't. The Begich, Boggs Visitor Center near the glacier has exhibits on the ice field and the surrounding ecosystem and is free to enter.

For a longer day trip, the drive to Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park is about 2.5 hours south through Seward. You can hike right up to the glacier face, and the markers along the path showing where the ice was in previous decades are sobering. G and her friend did this one and came back wrecked from the hike but with photos that looked like they'd been to another planet.

Anchorage's food scene is small but pointed. Simon & Seafort's overlooking Cook Inlet has been the go-to since 1977. The halibut is line-caught, the king crab legs are expensive and worth every dollar. G's birthday dinner was there, window seat, and the sunset (which in May means around 10 PM) turned the Inlet from gold to pink to a purple that hung in the sky for what felt like an hour. At that latitude, it actually does.

Moose's Tooth is packed every night for a reason. Get the apricot and cream cheese pizza (it sounds wrong, just order it). And Snow City Cafe does a breakfast with reindeer sausage and king crab eggs Benedict that's worth whatever wait they throw at you.

G came back from Anchorage with photos of mountains, a birthday dinner story involving king crab legs and a stranger who insisted on buying her a drink because "it's Alaska and that's what we do here," and a list of reasons we need to go back together. We haven't yet. But it's on the list.