7 Epic Day trips from Anchorage

Jennie shares why staying in Anchorage and doing day trips hits all the Alaska boxes and is a budget friendly way to visit. Whether you're planning a trip to Anchorage or just have a day or two there, Jennie covers some great ways to spend a day based in the city.

All the Alaska Uncovered Podcast listener discounts

Join the Alaska Uncovered Planning Club! 

Get on my Alaska Insider Newsletter email list

Shop all Alaska Travel planners and premade itineraries 

Book a planning session with Jennie

Have Jennie plan your trip for you

Follow Jennie on Instagram

Music credits:  Largo Montebello, by Domenico Mannelli, CC.

Transcript

 Welcome to the Alaska Uncovered Podcast with me, your host, Jennie Thwing Flaming, my occasional co-host and full-time husband, Jay, and I bring you accurate, helpful, and entertaining information about Alaska Travel and life in Alaska.

Hi everyone. Today we are talking about Epic Day trips from the city of Anchorage. So before we get into them, and there are seven that I'm gonna talk about specifically, I'm. I wanna tell you a little bit about why I am recording this episode and also some things about logistics related to getting around.

So the main reason that I'm making this episode is because frequently people ask me for the least expensive way to visit Alaska, or they'll say, is it reasonable to do this in my budget or. Some variation of that. And . Angie, if you're listening, she's a listener that I have helped with some planning in the last month.

And Angie, you've really re inspired me to make this episode actually. Because all of our conversations about how to make a trip really epic from the city of Anchorage and work in the budget that you have with two teenagers and one going off to college. I really thought, you know what, we should talk about this kind of more generally for everyone.

So that's, so thanks for the inspiration, Angie, and, we're gonna go ahead and jump into these things. So, I. I, my firm belief is that the most affordable and relaxing way to see Alaska is to get a vacation rental in Anchorage or Fairbanks or Juneau or any other place actually, and stay there for a week.

And sometimes people are like, well, how could I stay in this one place for a week? And what I would say. Is that all of those cities I just mentioned today, we're gonna focus on Anchorage. But all of those cities are places where you'll save a lot on lodging, especially for a family and a vacation rental compared to two hotels.

And you'll save money by staying in one place for a longer period of time, and it's super chill because you don't have to pack and unpack all that kind of thing. And all three of these cities, you can have so many incredible, incredible adventures. So today we're focusing on Anchorage, but I may do episodes about Fairbanks and Juneau like this as well, especially if you all like it.

So let me know. Send me a text in the, from the show notes and let me know what you think about this idea. In general in this scenario, I think it's best to rent a car. Now you can do it without renting a car, but if you're, if you want to stay in a vacation rental in a neighborhood and take advantage of different day trips, then I'd recommend renting a car.

I am gonna talk for each day trip about which ones can be, how to do them both with and without a car. Some of them are really fun to do without a car. We'll talk about that when we get into each one. But, um, just to start off with, I just wanted to say don't sleep on this as a vacation idea. You know, people wanna come to Alaska to see glaciers, wildlife, mountains, scenery.

You can get all of that with, these day trips I'm mentioning. And there are some great things just within the city of Anchorage as well, but. We've talked about that in other episodes, things to do in Anchorage. This is specifically about using Anchorage as a base camp and doing really epic day trips from there.

So let's dive in. So I mentioned I have seven suggestions for you. And so all of these, by the way, if you're not using Anchorage as a base camp, but you have a day there before your flight, or you're gonna be there for a couple days before or after a cruise. Or you're just gonna be there for whatever reason.

These are also all fantastic ideas, even if you have a shorter trip. Okay, so let's jump into this. So number one is any kind of hike. It's not, it's not that you can't do hikes on these others, but if you're a hiker. Especially if you're a hiker. Using Anchorage as a base camp and doing a hike every day is just such an incredible way to see Alaska.

So if you go back to episode 65, which is May 8th, 2024, Matt Worden from Go Hike, Alaska, and I talked about hikes near Anchorage and the all the ones that we talked about would be totally doable day trips from Anchorage, you could fill. And Matt does lead tours, but that episode was about hiking on your own also, um, and great hiking suggestions.

So that's one. Number one is just if you're a hiker, you could just do hikes every day and in two weeks you would not even come close to running out of hikes. To do that are just within two hours of Anchorage or 10 minutes of Anchorage. Okay, so that's number one. Number two. Is, I'm calling it Girdwood, Whittier, and Portage.

So I'm gonna explain kind of some different options. You could easily make this multiple days. You could stay in Girdwood instead of Anchorage and spend several days doing this. But I'm gonna talk about different options. The reason I rolled these up together is they're all. Quite close to each other and in the same direction from Anchorage.

So you can kind of choose your own adventure here. So if you're driving, you would drive down the Seward Highway. Girdwood is about 45 minutes from Anchorage. It's a ski town, and then Portage is not exactly a town. It was before the 1964 earthquake, but these days it's really, just a train depot and then also the visitor center at Portage Lake, the Forest Service Visitor Center, which is where Portage Glacier is.

So these two things and. Are about a 10 minute drive, maybe 15 between each other. There's also the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, which I would highly recommend. It's a fantastic place. You can see. Basically all of Alaska's land animals there, they have, they have muskox in, they have bears, they have wood bison, they have wolves, they have reindeer, um, they have moose.

Some of those animals are really hard to see in the wild, and it's a wonderful place and you can support the center as well because they rescue, wildlife that are injured or for whatever reason, not able to live, in the wild on their own for the most part. And then you've also got wittier. Which is the same area.

So all of these places I'm talking about are a long tourin arm or just kind of past the end of Tourin arm. Tricky bit about Whittier is that you need to the tunnel. And I know if you're like, what the heck are you talking about, Jennie? So there's a tunnel and it's shared between traffic in different directions and trains.

So every hour you can go one way through the tunnel to Whittier and. On the half hour, then you can, no, it's the other way around. I think it's a half hour going to Whittier on the hour coming back. And so even though Whittier isn't far from Anchorage, that's something that makes it a little complicated.

'cause you have to get there before the tunnel time, pay the toll, wait for the light, and then you get to go through . Whittier itself. There isn't a lot there as far as a town goes. There are a couple of kind of food truck cafe style things, but there aren't any hotels there at the moment. That could change in the future, but there are some very cool things to do in Whittier.

You can do the 26 glaciers cruise, which either the longer or shorter version of it. And both of those are really awesome tours. If you go back to episode 92 on November 13th, 2024, we talked, um, with Scott and Tom from Phillips Cruises, which is the company that operates that. And you can combine that with a train or a bus as well.

So Whittier is a place you can go without a car. You can also drive to Whittier. There's also Lazy Otter Charters in Whittier. There are fishing charters in Whittier and there are kayak tours in Whittier. So even though it's, it's a. Small, mostly port community. There are definitely things to do there, so that is a great place to go.

There's also some wonderful hikes in Whittier, especially Portage Pass, which is one of my favorite hikes in Alaska. It's just on the far side of the tunnel. So yeah, those are some things for Whittier. And then at Portage Lake you can take the boat cruise. It's just an hour. It's at like a much lower price point.

I think it's $60. It's an hour than kind of longer glacier cruises. So if you don't have time for that or you don't wanna deal with going through the tunnel. Then doing the Portage Lake cruise is a wonderful way to get up to a glacier, up close to a glacier in a short amount of time, and there's no chance of seasicKnikss because you're on a lake, a fairly small lake, actually, there's also a visitor center there that is about Portage Glacier.

But I think it's important for you to know that Portage Glacier has retreated out of view of the visitor center, so you can't. You can't see the glacier unless you either go round and hike Portage pass on the other side of the tunnel, or you do the Portage Glacier cruise, which is really wonderful.

There's also several hikes in that area. There's the Trail of Blue Ice, which is a completely flat boardwalk. There's also the Byron Glacier Trail, which again is a beautiful trail, but you don't go like right to a glacier. On it, which a lot of people think you do. There are some ice caves there, there are some safety issues around that.

But anyway, some great hiking there, but also great activities for people who are not hikers, like the boat tour. And then going back to GERD Woods. So again, these places are all roughly an hour, 45 minutes to an hour from Anchorage if you're driving. And I would say of those places, Whittier is the best one to go to without a car.

The others are better with a car. You can also take a car to Whittier, , in Girdwood if it's a clear day. The tram, the view from the Alyeska tram is absolutely spectacular. It's just wonderful. There are some hikes you can do in Girdwood. There are some great restaurants in Girdwood, like the Bake Shop for breakfast.

Double Muskie and Jack Sprat are really excellent restaurants that are just open in the evening. And then there's chair five for like pizza and beer kind of stuff. So fun things to do there. Okay, so let's move on to number three. Number three is Eklutna Lake. And this is another place, this is more of an outdoorsy, focused day trip, but Eklutna lake is about 45 minutes away from Anchorage and you can.

Also stay there. So we, the episode that we did in July of 2024 with, Russ and Teal from Blue Water Base Camp is a great way to learn more about Eklutna. We're talking about day trips in this episode, but we talked a lot about the area in that episode, even though. Teal and Russ have, a property where you can stay.

So Eklutna is a great place. It's really popular with locals. It's not on the visitor circuit. You can get there in 45 minutes to an hour from Anchorage.. It's a place where you can rent bikes from lifetime adventures. You can also rent kayaks from Lifetime Adventures. You can also do a bike or kayak tour there, and there's even a combo where you can like paddle out to the end of the lake and then bike back.

That's kind of fun too. So a bunch of different options there. Many wonderful hiking trails like the Twin Peaks Trail. It's a really popular one. You could walk along the lake. There are days when there are ATVs allowed and ones that there aren't. So you'll probably wanna look at the schedule if you're gonna be walking, but you could also do an a TV tour out there, which is pretty fun.

So that is number three. We're sort of going in roughly the order of how far away these things are from Anchorage, by the way. Not, not exactly, but roughly. So the next place we're gonna talk about is Palmer. And Palmer's about an hour to a little more from the city of Anchorage. There are some, hotels in Wasilla.

There are vacation rentals in Palmer, but there aren't a ton. So if you're visiting Palmer, you're probably staying either at Blue Water Base Camp or in Anchorage or in was, most likely. Anyway, so Palmer's known for the state fair, and that of course is really fun when that's going on in late summer.

But Palmer is a great place to visit anytime. There are wonderful hiking trails there. Like the Butte Trail, pioneer Peak, which is a really tough one. The Butte is a little more chill. There are farms in that area. There's the Muskox farm, so you can learn about muskox in, there are some great restaurants.

It's a pretty cool, a pretty cool place to visit. You can also drive out to. Uh, Knik Glacier, you don't, you don't actually drive to the glacier, but you can do a helicopter tour kind of from the end of the road there past Palmer, which is a really pretty drive. And then you can do a helicopter tour with Alaska Helicopter tours up onto Knik Glacier, but also just driving up that road has some really beautiful views of the river.

It's a really cool thing to do. All right number. Let's see. We're on number five. Alright, so for number five, let's talk about Matanuska Glacier. There's a couple different ways to do Matanuska Glacier. The important thing to know is to go onto the glacier, you have to be with a guide. So period. You can see Matanuska Glacier from the Glen Highway.

It's about, uh, between a two and three hour drive, depending on like weather, traffic. You know, all of these drives are on two lane roads with no alternate routes. So if there's construction or there's an accident, you know, things can take a really long time. So you have to keep that in mind. Yes, so Matt, but you can see it from the road, but if you're gonna drive out there, you really want to get out on the glacier.

So there's a couple ways to do that. There's a company, that offers tours that start there. So you drive yourself out there and then you go with them. There are also companies like, salmonberry Tours and Greatland Adventures who have both been on the podcast, who also do tours from Anchorage out to Matanuska Glacier.

So in that case, that would be a good one for if you're not driving. Right, because you, they'd be giving you a ride. Or if you want a smaller group experience, and even if you have a rental car, this would be a great thing to do. The day before you fly home or whatever, after you return your rental car can be kind of a cool activity.

So those are different ways to do Matusko Glacier. That is a year round, activity. You can do winter, you can do summer. Pretty neat. Okay, number six. Let's go to Seward. So Seward is real popular with visitors. It's very difficult to find a place to stay there unless you plan really far ahead. It's very expensive.

Camping is very squeezed. It's just, it's a challenging it. A place to stay overnight. It's awesome, but it's, it's challenging. If you want to avoid that, but you still want to visit Seward, then a day trip is a great way to go. So if you're going to day trip to Seward, there are, three different ways to do it.

One is to drive. Advantages of that are you can stop wherever you want and it's a beautiful drive, so that's pretty cool. You can also go out to Exit Glacier and the Harding Ice Field, which is about 10 miles from town. So if you're there without a car, it's tough to get out there unless the shuttle is running.

So you can look into that. If you don't have a car, or again, you wanna do this on your first or last day before you pick up your car or after you return it, or you just don't feel like driving, then you can also get there on the Park Connection, which is a bus service or on the Alaska Rail. Now on the Alaska Railroad, it's a very long day.

It's like 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM but it's beautiful. This is a really wonderful train ride. Once you get down to Seward, there are lots of different options of things to do. One of them is to do a boat tour into Kenai Fjords National Park. Highly recommended. That's a great thing to do. Also, kayaking Sonny Cove, kayaking and Seward, which has been on the podcast before Stephanie shared about that, and so did Danny and Andrew.

So we've had two different episodes that related to Seward and Sunny Cove. Danny and Andrew are also podcasters. They have the Last Frontier podcast, so. And there, that's a great company to go kayaking with and you get a little bit of a discount, of being a podcast listener. And I'll put the discount page in the show notes 'cause I've mentioned several things that you get, discounts for with.

Codes for the podcast, the codes are all slightly different, so I'm not going to read through all of them, although I did read through all of them. When was that episode when I did that? I think that was earlier this year. Yes, episode one 10 on March 17th, 2025. I actually read through every single discount you could get as a podcast lister with the codes, so go back and listen to that if you'd prefer to listen, rather than follow the link in the show notes.

Anyway, so those are two awesome Seward activities. Kayaking boat tour into Kenai Fjords National Park. You can also hike there, which is wonderful. There are some fun restaurants and shops in Seward. Really fun harbor. There's often a. One or two cruise ships there. There are also lots of RV travelers.

It's a very busy, bustling place. Be prepared to wait a long time in a restaurant. So if you have a hard deadline, like a train or bus to catch, , make sure when you enter the restaurant that you ask them if you'll be able to eat, before that time because you might not be able to, and they will tell you.

All right. Last but not least, we've got Talkeetna. And last week we talked a little bit about Talkeetna. We talked about staying in Talkeetna. So this time we're just talking about a day trip. And I mentioned last week. I would talk about that today. So to do a day trip to Talkeetna, once again, you have the same three options you have for Seward.

You can drive. You can take the Alaska Railroad or you can take the Park Connection Motor Coach. So. Talkeetna is really the only way to do a day trip to Denali National Park. Now when you're in tna, you are not in the park and you are about three hours drive from the park entrance area. However, if you do a flight with K two Aviation.

They've been on the podcast several times. You get a discount code with them for 10%. You can fly over the park and then land on a glacier, and that is a really cool way to get into the park without many other people. And also a way you can do it in a day trip from Anchorage. You can do day trips to Denali, from Fairbanks, no problem, but not from.

Not from Anchorage, other than, flying in from Talkeetna. So other things to do in Talkeetna if you don't wanna do a flight. There, Talkeetna is a really fun town. There is another great tour there, ma Hayes Jetboat tours. They take you up. The SNA River. They have several different tour options that are really fun.

You can go kind of just sit by the river and look at the view of the mountain. If the mountain is out, you can do that for. A long time. You can go for walks and hikes around tna. There are also lots of great restaurants there. There are fun little shops like Aurora, Dora's, Northern Lights Cabin. Dora has been on the podcast too, sharing her story, which was just wonderful.

So, , if you go to Talkeetna, you've gotta go in her cabin for sure. So there's good food in Tell Kea, and then you can get back to Anchorage. So again, with deciding whether you're gonna drive, take the train or the bus to Talkeetna, it really comes down to flexibility in your schedule and how many stops you wanna make.

So if you're on the train or riding the coach. It's beautiful, but you're not gonna be making picture stops kind of wherever you want, like you can, um, when you're driving. So I'd say that's the main thing to consider when you're deciding. Okay, well there you have it. Seven. Epic days, uh, based out of Anchorage.

So hopefully I've convinced you to consider a trip like this. It's a really wonderful way to see Alaska and you can do it any time of year. You can go to Talkeetna all year long. You can go to Matanuska Glacier all year long. You can go to Palmer all year long. You can go to Seward. Some restaurants in Seward are closed and some tours are closed, but there are some tours that start in March in Seward.

So, um, Eklutna is year round, hiking and or snowshoeing is year round and Whittier practically. It kind of doesn't make sense to go there in the winter, but both Portage and um, Girdwood are also places you can go in the winter. So  📍 there you have it. I'll see you next week.

 





if you are enjoying the podcast, please leave us a rating and or a review. It really helps other people find us. And if you want to join the Alaska Planning Club, it's super fun. It's a private podcast feed where I answer all your questions. You can find that over on patreon.com/alaska uncovered.