How to Visit All 8 Alaska National Parks

Jennie shares her advice for travelers on a parks quest hoping to visit all 8 of Alaska's National Parks based on her experience as a traveler, guide and planning custom itineraries for many clients on a quest to visit all the national parks.

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Transcript

Jennie Flaming: 0:00

Jennie, welcome to the Alaska uncovered podcast with me, your host, Jennie Thwing Flaming, my occasional co host and full time husband, Jennie and I bring you accurate, helpful and entertaining information about Alaska, travel and life in Alaska, before we start today's show, we'd like to take a moment to thank our Patreon subscribers for your support and Making this podcast possible. Enjoy the show. Hi everyone. It's Jennie. It is our second episode this week of national parks week, and I am so excited about today's episode I have been working for so long on pulling together this workshop about how to visit all eight of Alaska's national parks. So I'll tell you about it today. I'm also going to give you some highlights of that, because you my listeners, I want to make sure that you get at least some of this for free. So we'll talk more about that in a moment. The reason that I have put this together is that I have had so many clients in my planning business who have come to me because they're independent travelers, and they got really frustrated trying to figure out Alaska, and specifically people got really frustrated trying to figure out how to visit all eight Alaska National Parks. So today I am going to give you the highlights of exactly how to do that. If you want more detail, if you are planning a trip to Alaska's national parks, then my new workshop is going to be for you. So before I dive into this content, want to briefly tell you what that is, how much it costs, how you can get in on it. So it is a slightly longer than an hour on demand workshop, so you can watch it on YouTube. You don't need to create an account anywhere, anything like that. You just buy it in my online shop, and then you get a PDF that will direct you to where you can watch the workshop, and it goes into lots of depth about each National Park. Kind of some things to consider, in general, for a trip to Alaska's national parks, how to budget for it, how to kind of evaluate the different types of options. And we're going to talk a little bit about that in this episode as well. So this is a brand new workshop. I've been pulling it together based on, of course, my own travels in Alaska's parks, but also the experiences that I've had in the last three years helping clients plan these trips as well. And later this week, you'll get to hear from Al, who was the first person I helped plan a trip to all of Alaska's national parks, and he's going to talk about he his trip. He actually did. Decided to split it into several trips. So we're going to talk all about that here this week as well. But for today, this episode is going to focus on how to make this work. Alright? So if you want to get this workshop, there is a link in the show notes. You can also just go to my online shop, which is shop dot ordinary, dash adventures.com the workshop is$17 but this week only through Friday night, at midnight, Pacific time, you can get it for 30% off, which is pretty awesome. So there's a code for that, which is parks 30. And if you follow the link in the show notes, it'll take you straight there without having to remember the code. But if you go find it, you need to remember the code, then you can enter that parks 30. Okay, so that is just for this week, but the workshop will be available all the time, and it also includes in the PDF, it has my full resource list, so it has all the links to free information online, as well as some of the outfitters and lodges and National Park vendors and other concessionaires, all different people who operate the kinds of things that we're going to talk about today and that we talk about in the workshop. So again today, I'm basically going to give you a preview, because I'm so grateful to. All of you for listening. I want to make sure everyone has access to this information. But if you are planning one of these trips, you want to pick up this workshop at the end. I'll tell you again how to get it and how to save during National Parks week through Friday night. Okay, so if you are planning one of these trips, what do you do? Let's dive into it. So first of all, the most important thing for anyone going to any Alaska National Park, even if you're not visiting all of them, the most important thing you need to know is that Alaska parks are different, and if you've done any research, you may have already started to figure that out, or at least suspect that that was the case. Many of the parks are remote. There are only three that you can drive to, really, it's only two because for Ringel st Elias, you can't take most rental cars there. So for visitors, I feel like that one is kind of a tough call between driving and flying. We talk about that in more depth in the workshop, but that's a tough decision. So that's the rest are all you're going to be flying or taking a boat, and really that's only Glacier Bay the rest you're going to be flying to. And I feel like counting Kenai Fjords and Denali as road parks is still a little iffy, because honestly, like, you need to get out into the park and away from the road in order to really experience it. So But technically, you can get there with a rental car. You don't have to fly in. So that is really nice compared to the others, all right, so we talked about that. Also talk about more details for each park. One thing that I really want to emphasize here today is how important the human story is in the national parks. We talked about that in yesterday's episode where you heard Jay share about that better than I can. So I won't repeat that, but I just want to say that all of these parks are native land, all of them have been protected and treasured by indigenous people for 1000s of years before, before settlers and visitors came in to care for these lands, or in some cases, not care for them. But Denali has been protect protected for a long time. Most of Alaska's parks were created in 1980 which is another story that we're gonna tell sometime, and we've touched on in other episodes, but it's a little too far off the topic for what today is about, which is really, how do you get to these parks? So that's important. Each park has its own indigenous history, both past and present. Today, indigenous culture and Alaska, native culture is a big part of every national park, more obviously than it is in some parks, I in the in the lower 48 so this is something that's really different. And yesterday's episode, we talked about this in more depth. But it's also a wonderful thing about visiting Alaska parks is the opportunity to get to know the people who live there now, as well as about people who've lived there in the past. Alaska's national parks are all amazing. There are some serious challenges with trying to visit all eight of them, so I think what I'll do for today just to kind of keep this manageable and not give too much away, but still be able to help you is to talk about the different groups of parks and how to visit them. I I organize Alaska's national parks really into four groups. There's eight parks. I put them in four groups. So let's dive into that, and then I'll tell you a little bit about each one in detail. So again, it's very challenging and hectic to put this all into one trip. You can definitely do it if you've got lots of tolerance for complicated logistics, lots of time and a big budget, in my opinion, to visit all eight of Alaska's national parks, you in one trip. You need a month and the you can technically do it in like three weeks, not including your travel days, but that really leaves you no margin for error if anything Disrupt. Up to your trip with weather and small planes, which I'm just gonna tell you, that's very likely, especially if you do lots of small plane flights, you have to be ready for delays. It takes a full day to get between each park. So I would not try to do this in less than a month, it's going to and even in a month, it's going to feel quite frantic, but that would give you a few down days in between parks and make it slightly less rushed. Again, if you can split it into multiple trips. And today I'm going to talk about ways in which I recommend doing that, but I'm gonna go over the parks first, then I'll talk a little bit about how I recommend splitting them up into different trips. Okay, so let's start with the Arctic parks. So that's Gates of the Arctic and Kobuk Valley for most people, I recommend visiting those two parks together. There's two ways to do that. One is to do a flight scene tour from Kotzebue that goes into and you get to go onto the ground, weather permitting in both parks. So that's very cool. The other way is to go to one of the two remote fly in lodges that are all inclusive, that cater to national parks chasers, and you would depart from Fairbanks for both of those. Those are multiple days, and you get to visit both parks. So those are really the two ways to do Gates of the Arctic and Kobuk Valley, unless you are up for doing a back country adventure, and you have a very good mosquito net and excellent rain gear. And in that situation, you'd be with a guide and sleeping in a tent there. There is a company that offers a trip that goes to both parks, but many of them, you know, when you're on the ground and you're pack rafting or you're backpacking and you're not in the air, you still have to fly between the two parks, and that is just kind of complicated for most people to pull off. But there is a way to do it. So those are your options for the Arctic parks, and then the next group of parks I call the bear parks. So that's cat my and Lake Clark. Again. You can visit those together if you want to go to the farm Lodge, which is also a remote fly in all inclusive Lodge, which caters to people who are doing parks quests like you. It's also a great way to just go to Lake Clark and Katmai, even if you're not going into all the others. It's an amazing property. It's very expensive, but people absolutely love it. It's just incredible. So that's one way. The other way is to do a day trip flight scene from Anchorage that is significantly less expensive, but you get to be on the ground in the park for several hours, so that's another option. And then you can also do that from Homer. So you could, you could be down in Homer and go over from there. It doesn't really matter. I'd say whichever town is on your itinerary is the right one to do. And then, of course, you can also do back country adventures in both of those parks as well. One other thing that I wanted to touch on briefly is Brooks Lodge and Brooks camp in Katmai, as well as Port Alsworth in Lake Clark. So with Katmai to to stay in the lodge, you have to win a lottery two years ahead of time, or you can camp. The camping sells out like immediately when it goes up for sale in early January. So you've got to get right on that. But camping is like $20 a night, and the lodge is like $1,000 a night. So you know, you could kind of decide how much you want to camp with bears. I've done it. I've talked about it on this podcast before. I talk about in the workshop, that's a whole nother thing to talk about a different time. And then in Lake Clark, you can also camp or get a cabin in Port Ellsworth. And there are some trails that you can take in the park from the Village of Port Ellsworth. So you still have to fly there, but that is different from a back country adventure and not as expensive as a wonderful, all inclusive, full experience like the farm lodge or the other lodges I mentioned that are up further north. All right, so that brings us through the Arc de par. Bear Arctic parks and the bear parks, I'm trying to do this in the order of hardest and most expensive, most expensive to I don't want to say easiest, because none of them are easy, but easier and less expensive. Alaska is an expensive destination, as you know, these four remote parks we've just talked about are going to be they're going to be 1000s of dollars a person to visit. That's just the way it's going to be. Day Trip. Flight scene is the most affordable way. But that's still going to be 1000s of dollars a person once you add everything up. So just keep that in mind. All right, let's transition to the others. So the next two I call the unsung heroes, and they are not close to each other. Well, they're sort of close to each other, um, but unlike the others I mentioned, these ones don't necessarily make sense to visit together, and these are my two personal favorites. And I also want to mention that both in the workshop and in today's episode, I'm really focusing on folks who are going to visit all the parks, or as many parks as possible. Glacier Bay and Denali and Kenai Fjords are ones that you can visit on Alaska cruises or Alaska cruise tours. That's not really what we're focusing on today. We have other episodes about that that's much less complicated because you have someone else figuring out the logistics, at least for those three parks. So that's why we're not diving into that too much today. Okay, so let's start with Ringel st, Elias. Ringo st, Elias is an incredible Park. Almost everyone who goes there puts it in their top five in the whole country. It's a really wonderful, wonderful place. The big thing with Rangel st Elias is you're going to have to decide whether you're going to drive there, getting a more expensive rental car that you can take on the road, or whether you're going to fly there, either from Anchorage or from Chitna. And the reason that you might want to consider flying from Chetna is that you can drive to Chitna in any rental car. You can also take a van shuttle from Anchorage to McCarthy. So we talk about more of those logistics in the workshop, but those are basically your options. It's a surprisingly tough decision, because there's no super easy, straightforward answer to that. It kind of depends on your situation, but those are your options for Rangel st Elias, okay, Unsung Hero number two, Glacier Bay National Park, which I'm going to just show my hand and tell you, is my favorite park in Alaska. It's wonderful if you visit it on a cruise ship, but I'm really talking about if you go on your own and spend several days there, you will feel like you are having a ton of solitude. It never makes the list of least visited parks because there are 1000s and 1000s of cruise ship visitors who come, but you won't see them when you are there, staying several days in the park on your own Glacier Bay is amazing things to be aware of there. I'd really recommend doing that park by itself, or in combination with a trip to Juneau, that makes an amazing trip for most people, it will take just as long to get from Glacier Bay to any of the other parks as to get to the other parks from home. So if possible, you want to do this one by itself, unless you're spending the whole summer or you just are cool with a lot of logistics. I know that sounds crazy, but you will, yeah, once you start digging into it and looking at flight schedules, you'll be like, what, how? How long does it take? Gonna take to get to Anchorage from there? Um, so you have a couple options, other than cruise ships. Of course, you can take the Alaska State ferry this year. It's two days a week that it's going into Gustavus, which is 10 miles from the park. And you can also fly between Juneau and Gustavus multiple times a day. Watch out in Gustavus, if you aren't staying at Glacier Bay Lodge, just make sure that you have a way to get around, because you're not going to have a car there, and there's no like ride share services in Gustavus and Glacier Bay, all right, so this brings us to our last two parks. The road parks, as I call them, Kenai Fjords National Park and Denali. So for both of these, you know, we have other episodes about Seward in great detail. I think what's important for Kenai Fjords is this is a great place to do a hike, whether that's at exit glacier, or you're up for all the way up Hardy, nice field, or whether, you know, you do a more chill hike. But those are, those are wonderful ones. You definitely want to do the boat tour in the park. You definitely need seasickness medication for that. And then finally, Denali. So I'm not going to talk about Denali in too much detail during this episode, because we have several other episodes about visiting Denali on your own, January 2024 that episode that we did kind of has all my best advice about Denali, along with what's in the workshop, but it's really just keep in mind that it's very, very busy, and lots of people are on group tours. So I think I'll just mention that you can kind of pair Denali and Kenai Fjords, really, with any other parks, because you'll be flying through Fairbanks or anchorage anyway, and so you'll already be on the road system. Those ones go well together. They go pretty well with ringelsen, Elias as well. You know that's going to be more driving or flying, but again, you're going to be starting from Anchorage or Fairbanks, probably anchorage for Rangel st Elias. So those ones all go really well together. Beyond that, like I said, I promised I'd finish up with what parks go well together. So Glacier Bay, ideally, is a standalone one. If you are going to combine it with another, it doesn't really matter which one it is, because you're going to have to fly to Juneau and then Anchorage to get up there, I would recommend, if you are doing all these parks in one trip, do Glacier Bay first or last. Otherwise, you'll be doing a lot of backtracking flying, and that's never any fun. So yeah. And so then that leaves us with the other four remote ones. I talked about how, like Clark and cat might go well together. I talked about how gates and COVID Valley go really well together. So you can kind of mix and match those different options for what works best for you and your travel crew. So before I wrap up this episode, just want to say again, I'm so excited about my new visiting all the parks workshop and all the resources I pulled together for you. It's everything I've learned from visiting these parks for the last 25 years, along with planning trips to the parks for folks in the last three years. So you can follow the link in the show notes, you can go straight to shop. Dot ordinary, dash adventures.com, and you'll find it. It's called visiting all eight Alaska National Parks, and you'll be able to watch the on demand workshop and get that list of resources and links. And then, in addition to that, this week, until Friday night, you can save 30% it's only $17 to start with, and you can save another 30% with the code parks 30 so thank you so much for being here. Thank you for loving Alaska's national parks like I do. Please be kind this summer to staff. This is always really important. These are remote locations. You know, you're away from home for months and months, really tough places to work, also beautiful places to work. And right now, our public servants are really facing a tremendous amount of stress and kind of an impossible job to continue caring for these lands while they are under such an enormous threat from current cuts. So please be kind and encouraging. Thank people for being part of the National Park Service when you see them, whether it's in Alaska or any other park. And once again, because it's this week, I am looking forward to see you tomorrow, or being in your ears tomorrow. Have a great day. See you tomorrow.

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