Adventures in Anchorage

Nearly 42 percent of Alaskans call Anchorage home. The other 58 percent derisively call it "Los Anchorage." They're referring to the freeways, the highrises, the lattes, and all the other Los Angeles-like things that Anchorage has but the rest of Alaska doesn't. OK, so Anchorage isn’t like the rest of Alaska, but it’s not a bad city. It’s got great restaurants, tons of cultural attractions, imaginative bars, outdoor activities galore, and raw wilderness on all sides. Whether you’re in town during the 19.5 hours of summer daylight or the 18.5 hours of winter darkness, there’s plenty to do to fill a 24-hour layover. Here’s one way to go:

8 a.m. - 9 a.m.: Dozens of greasy spoons around the city dish up sourdough pancakes, halibut and eggs, and salmon sausage for breakfast. A local favorite is Gwennie’s Old Alaska Restaurant. Like a lot of Alaskan places, Gwennie’s used to be a brothel, but not one of those dime-a-dozen Gold Rush-era brothels. Gwennie’s was a bell-bottomed, feather-haired, 1970’s-era brothel. It catered to the construction workers building the Tans-Alaska Pipeline. Now it’s a respectable joint and the reindeer sausage omelets here are huge, the waitresses ancient, and there’s a stuffed grizzly bear who greets you at the door, poised to take your head off.

9 a.m. – noon: Spend the morning catching up on the last 10,000 years of Alaskan history and art at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. In the cavernous Gallery of Alaska, artifacts are theatrically displayed in life-size dioramas, ranging from a semi-subterranean Eskimo dwelling, to a gold prospector’s cabin, to a WWII aviators’ Quonset hut. In the Sydney Lawrence Gallery there’s work by Alaska’s favorite Romanticist landscape painter, Sydney Lawrence, whose subdued, ethereal depictions of sailing ships on stormy seas, lonely cabins along frozen rivers, and – most famously – the otherworldly Mount McKinley (aka Denali) cause even the crustiest old frostbitten Sourdoughs to pause and think, “My, isn’t this a lovely land.”

Summer Alternative
When the weather’s warmer you could split your morning between the museum and the Alaska Native Cultural Center. Here you can see native dancers perform traditional dances and native athletes demonstrate age-old games of skill, such as the stick pull, the one-foot high kick, and the seal hop. At a village built around a lake, you can inspect a Tlingit clan house, an Aleut sod house, and six other types of Alaska native dwellings. Members of the various native groups populate the village, and they are happy to chat and possibly show you how to smoke salmon, build a kayak or tan a moose hide. (In the winter, the cultural center is open only on Saturday.)

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Noon - 2 p.m.: After having breakfast at Gwennie’s, which is fantastic but low-brow, you deserve an upscale lunch, and Sacks Café & Restaurant is the  place to go. The warm, airy interior suggests the American Southwest, but the fresh halibut, grilled salmon, and crab-and-scallop cakes say, “Oh, this is definitely Alaska, baby.”  The eclectic New American menu changes daily, but on it you  might find for lunch an apricot Thai curry on Israeli couscous, or a tiger prawn sandwich with avocado and bacon.

2 p.m. – 7 p.m.: Point your rental car southeast and follow the scenic Seward Highway along the edge of the Chugach Mountains and the shore of the long, narrow North Pacific inlet called Turnagain Arm. On one side of the road you may spy sure-footed Dall sheep hopping among the crags, while on the other you could spot a pod of beluga whales. This isn’t just a sightseeing trip, though. You’re headed to Alyeska Ski Resort in funky Girdwood, 40 miles from Anchorage (but still within the municipal limits, which are enormous – think Delaware). Ride the aerial tram to the top of Mount Alyeska, and then A), in winter, hitch up your snowboard bindings and carve up the mountain all afternoon, or B), in summer, strap on some crampons, grab an ice axe, and spend the afternoon exploring the crevasses, bergshrunds, and randklufts of Alyeska Glacier with a guiding outfit called The Ascending Path. I know they sound like a cult, but don’t worry, they’re legit.

Dinner 7 p.m. - 10 p.m.: Head back into the city for dinner at the Marx Bros. Café, but be sure to make reservations. There are just a handful of tables there, and the place always fills up. Despite the silly name, Marx Bros. is quite serious about food. None of the city’s other fine dinning establishments – and there are some good ones –lavish quite as much attention on each plate as Marx Bros. does. The fare is gourmet Alaskan with Asian and Italian influences, the view takes in far-away Mount McKinley (aka Denali), and the maitre d’ wheels an enormous wooden bowl through the two little dinning rooms, making Caesar salads tableside.

10 p.m. until you drop
Get in line to show the nice bouncer your I.D., then explore the legendary Alaskan watering hole Chilkoot Charlie’s. Playboy magazine once called Koots, as it’s known, the Best Bar in America. More accurately, though, you could say it’s the Best-10-Bars-Under-One-Roof-Plus-One-Bar-on-the-Roof in America. It’s like a bar-themed amusement park. Some of the bars have live bands, some have DJs, some have sports on TV, one specializes in martinis, one serves vodka at a bar made from a slab of ice, one has beer kegs for bar stools, another has tree stumps, one is dedicated to czarist Russia, and one has what must be half the bras of Anchorage dangling from the ceiling. It’s so much fun just wandering from one bar to the next, you could actually forget to order a drink.

Pauline Frommer is the creator of the new Pauline Frommer guides in bookstores now.

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