Alaska for holiday or for living

Alaska for holiday or for living: By: Rich Tong; Category: Opinion > Other; Read the article on Judy’s Book.

Living in Seattle, we see lots of folks up in Alaska and we end up being the jumping off point.

There’s a big difference between living up there and taking a holiday there. The summers in Alaska are pretty amazing. We were there for two weeks in August and the weather was incredible. We have younger kids, so worked with a travel guide service who was awesome but a good overview is at Travelalaska.com (http://www.travelalaska.com/).

The winters as everyone knows are pretty amazing though. in terms of solitude they area amazing.

In terms of places to visit, for shorter trips, here are some suggestions, the main thing points from the little we studied.

1. Alaska is just *huge*, so it is nearly impossible to visit it all, Near Juneau it is really a temperate zone with lots of fjord that’s called the Inside Passage. Best way to see is by boat. The intercoastal ferry is the roughing it way. There are also about a zillion cruise ships that go up that way from the very cute 30 person individualized to the gigantics 3,000 person cruiseships.

2. The other place is to visit the Kenai Peninsula in South Central Alaska. This is just a few hours out of Anchorage. The biggest city (at 400K). It sounds small, but this little bit of Alaska is truly massive. A tiny part has a glacier a mile thick the size of the state of Rhode Island to give you a sense. Beautiful place with fishing, you can catch 100 pound salmon or see lots of bears, etc. My personal recommendation for visiting

3. You can go north, the famous spot is the Denali which is an all day ride up to the mountain which iin the Interior. The good news is the park is huge, the bad news is the park is huge. Many folks visit there and never actually see the mountain because the weather is a little more uncertain up there.

4. Finally, there is the real out country which is the true middle of nowhere called the Far North or out to Southwest. That is much farther north to Barrow and so forth. You pretty much have to get there by ferry or by plane and it is very, very remote. Our guide for the Kenai trip we took lived in Fairbanks for years (in the center of the state), went to the university there and they didn’t have running water. So that gives you an idea.