Alaska — April 2025
Alaska has been on the list for a long time, and when we finally went — just the two of us, no kids — it delivered everything we'd hoped for and then some.
We flew into Anchorage on the 11th and spent a couple of days getting our bearings, visiting the Anchorage Museum and adjusting to the scale of the place. Alaska does something to your sense of distance. Everything is further than it looks, bigger than you expect, and wilder than you're prepared for. On the Sunday we drove out to Whittier, which requires passing through the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel — the longest combined road and rail tunnel in North America, and one-way only. Traffic lights on the hour let you in heading west, on the half hour heading east. There's something almost ceremonial about it, queuing in the dark waiting for permission to enter. Whittier itself sits at the end of Prince William Sound, and we'd booked a boat tour with Lazy Otter Charters. We motored past two glaciers, the chunks of calved ice bobbing and grinding against the hull, and then — quite without warning — we watched a section of glacier face collapse into the water in front of us. An ice fall, live, loud, and over in seconds. One of those moments where everyone on the boat goes very quiet and then starts talking all at once.
[PHOTO: boat on the water with glacier face and floating ice]
Monday was the Matanuska Glacier. Our guide snowmobiled us to the base — already an experience in itself — and then we walked. Properly walked, deep into it: through narrow ice canyons with walls of blue-white either side, scrambling over what the guides call pressure waves, huge frozen ridges where the glacier has pushed up against itself over centuries. It's not like any landscape I've stood in before. The ice is alive in the slowest possible way, cracking and shifting and groaning, and you're aware the whole time that you're standing on something that's been moving since long before anyone thought to name it.
[PHOTO: walking on the glacier, ice canyon walls]
[PHOTO: wide view of Matanuska glacier from the surface]
The final act was the Arctic Circle. We joined a two-day fly and drive tour with Northern Alaska Tour Company out of Fairbanks, heading north up the Dalton Highway — the only land route to the Arctic — past the Yukon River crossing and on to Coldfoot. From there we drove a little further to Wiseman, a gold mining settlement of twelve souls, founded in 1908 when miners abandoned Coldfoot and moved a few miles up the Middle Fork Koyukuk River. Robert Marshall, who spent fifteen months here around 1930, described it as "the happiest civilisation of which I have knowledge." Having been there, I think I understand what he meant. We met Jack Reakoff, who has spent his entire life in Wiseman by choice — trapper, naturalist, Arctic expert, local legend. The kind of person you only meet at the edge of the world. We stayed the night hoping for the northern lights. April is late in the season but not impossible. The clouds had other ideas. We stood outside in the dark with a small group of fellow hopeful travellers, warming ourselves around a strange double-chambered oil drum fire that looked like it had no right to work but threw out a fierce heat. The lights never came. We laughed, we chatted, we stared at the sky anyway, and eventually went to bed. Some nights the not-quite-moment is the story. The next morning we flew back to Fairbanks in a small plane from the local airstrip — the landscape from the air, the Brooks Range stretching away in every direction, was the perfect final frame.
[PHOTO: oil drum fire at Coldfoot/Wiseman in the dark]
[PHOTO: landscape on the Dalton Highway heading north]
Alaska surprised us both. We knew it would be spectacular — we didn't expect it to feel so human. The people you meet up there have made a deliberate choice to live at the edge of things, and that gives every conversation a particular quality. We'd go back in a heartbeat, and next time we'd stay longer.
