The Case for Visiting Alaska in the Winter

02.01.2024 - 15:49 / cntraveler.com

It was the first week of April, the dawn of spring in most of the Northern Hemisphere, but in Anchorage it still felt very much like winter. Snow was everywhere: piled high on rooftops and cars, lining the sidewalks in colossal embankments, floating in clumps in the Cook Inlet, and shellacking the nearby Chugach Mountains, which form a fierce and jagged amphitheater on the city's eastern edge.

I'd come to Alaska in part to ski those mountains, thanks to a chance encounter I'd had the previous year. While visiting the state for the first time in the way that many do—on a midsummer cruise—I met a guy from Anchorage at a bar. After recounting how I'd fallen for the state after a day spent hiking imagination-defying landscapes, I made a predictably naive remark about how the winters must be brutal.

Signage at Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard home store in the resort town of Girdwood

Breakfast at Fire Island Rustic Bakeshop in Anchorage

“Oh no,” he said. “Winter here is the absolute best.”

He described jaunts to a ski resort with surreal terrain and no crowds, weekends spent holed up in cabins reachable only by bush planes that land on frozen lakes, and weather that (at least around Anchorage) was less punishing than you might think. Go after February, he advised, when the sunlight is back but the snow is still deep.

I began my first day by exploring Anchorage, mainly because I've long been intrigued by cities that seem overlooked—or, in the case of Anchorage, cast more as an entry point than an ultimate destination. Alaska's largest city, home to nearly half the state's 730,000 inhabitants, has a fascinating history and heritage. Indigenous cultures here date back to long before it became a tent encampment of frontiersmen. An earthquake leveled the place in 1964, four years before oil was discovered and opened a spigot of money that shaped the mini metropolis one encounters today. Anchorage feels somehow both brand new and dated, consisting primarily of a downtown of utilitarian towers and a sprawl of strip malls that resemble those towers tipped on their sides. Everyone in the state knows the quip about Anchorage's best feature: “You can see Alaska from there.”

Mark Fleenor, owner of Sheep Mountain Lodge, landing on Matanuska Glacier

Club Paris, a mainstay of Anchorage nightlife since the 1950s, serving steaks and Alaskan halibut

“We are definitely due for a revamp,” joked Rachel Pennington, part of the family that owns Fire Island Rustic Bakeshop, a local staple where I stopped in for breakfast on my first morning. “But that's part of the fun. So much here is hidden that you have to be willing to look for it.”

Her bakery, a past James Beard Award nominee, is a prime example. Occupying a former medical clinic,