BEST OF ALAKSA: Alaksan locals (A) and visitors(V) select their favorite activities in each city.
(See Alaska Magazine Dec/Jan 2002) with Sherry's recommendations and tips.

Juneau
Restaurant: Fiddlehead Rest. & Bakery (907)586-3150
Candy: Alaska Wildberry Products

Sherry's recommendations:
- Mt. Roberts Tramway 5min $21 Views, views, views, with Alpine hike options
- Helipcopter over and walk on Mendenhall Glacier. $ Worth the price, it's the experience of a lifetime!

Sherry's recommendations:
- Drive scenic Turnagain Arm, looking for whale tails, Anchorage to Girdwood
- Kayak Resurrection Bay with the whales or College Fjord $cheap
- Drive to Portage Lake and hike Portage Glacier (free)
- Drive to Exit Glacier and hike the Harding Ice Field (free,) but tougher)
- Visit Seward Sea Life Center $12.50
- Raft Kenai Canyon (7 hr) $110
- Bear-viewing float-plane excursion from Homer $
- Cruise Kenai Fjords Nat. Park with a Park Ranger $105
- Ferry Seward to Kodiak (“Emerald Island”) $cheap
- Look for bear in Lake Clark or Katmai Nat. Parks $flight
- Attend a beachside Salmon Bake
- Drive to Hope and hike the Resurrection Trail (free)

In Girdwood:
- Stay at Winner Creek B&B (Kim and Vic)
- Eat at Double Muskee Restaurant (off Alyeska Hwy, Right on Crow Creek Rd. 1/2 mile on the left.)
- Take the 7-Glaciers Tram to the tp of Alyeska Mt.
- Visit the Big Game Wildlife Center $5 to get close to elk, bear, caribou, buffalo, deer, moose, musk ox and owl.
- Visit the Portage Glacier Lodge and Visitor Center in Chugach National Forest.
- Hike the path to Byron Glacier
- Eat at Coast Pizza. Talk with Brian (from Boston) and Sara Chaffe (from Alaska) for great pizza by the slice. (The locals love their subs.)

In Seward:
- Eat seafood at Ray's Waterfront
- Birdwatch at Potter's March bird sanctuary on Turnagain Arm
- Drink Chai or hot chocolate or espresso at Aurora Charters

Between Anchorage and Denali National Park:
- Enjoy the very special town of Talkeetna. Stay at the Talkeetna Alaskan Lodge, with a view of Denali Mt. (Mt. McKinley).

Accommodations:

If you are taking a cruise of the Inside Passage that departs or arrives in Seward, plan an extra week on the Kenai Penninsula. It was the best part of my Alaska experience! Don't book through the cruise lines. Stay at the Winner Creek B&B. The house, food, and hosts, Kim and Vic, are absolutely incredible and much more affordable! Rent a car and explore on your own.

Ketchikan:
Sherry's recommendations:
-Wander the shops and Dolly's on Creek Street
- Independently hike totem parks: Totem Bright St. Hist. Park or Saxman Indian Village
- Rent your own kayaks
- Walk the wooden walkway through the woods, along the Ketchikan Creek, just off of Ketchikan Bridge.
- College students can work at the Ketchikan Canning Co., paying only $20/day for room and board, which is refunded if they complete the season!

Sitka
B&B: Rockwell Lighthouse (907)747-3056
Whalefest www.sitkawhalefest.org
Cemetery: Sitka Nat. Cemetery

Sherry's recommendation:
- Take a long stroll through the spectacular totem forest!

Skagway
Railroad Excursion: White Pass and Yukon Route to Lake Bennett (800)343-7373 or (907)983-2217

Haines
Birds: eagles

Sherry's recommendations, at Denali State Park:
- drive 15 miles into park
- $24 shuttle 66 miles into park (on/off permitted - book in advance, for 5,6,or 7:30 AM tour)
- free dog-sled demonstration
- $115 narrated tour bus 95 miles into park to Kantishna Roadhouse for lunch and dogsleding or hiking in afternoon

Best Local Entertainment Group:
Pamyua A,V http://www.pamyua.com/
Northern Lights

Sherry's tip: Before you go, be sure to order Skin So Soft, from Avon. It's a great bug repellenent and the mosquitoes are killer!

“Grandma” lives south of Denali National Park and is about to turn her little bakery over to her grandson. She moves very slowly, preparing our cinnamon buns and coffee or hot chocolate. She is sweet and happy and relaxed and likely to live a long life, in this very basic lodge.

Enya, a dog musher and an only child from Germany, lives in a tent on a glacier in the summer, a cabin in the winter. I don’t know about her cabin, but her summer tent has only an entrance and an area in which to sleep. I has no running water and no heat. The entrance has a wood stove on which she melts ice for water for washing and for some of the 200 dogs at the site, 6 of which she personally owns. She lives there 4 months of the year, earning only enough money to survive. She is completely alone 8 months of the year. She prefers that life to any other.

The pilot of our helicopter is an attorney who left the “lower 48” to fly tours of glaciers out of Juneau, which - although it is the state capital - is a small city with no access other than plane and boat. He makes very little money flying tours, but he points out what his "office" looks like, as we fly above a landscape that seems other-worldly: ponds and rushing rivers and deep crevices, all of the most clear, deep blue water you can imagine.

Vic, the owner of the B&B in which we stayed near the Alyeska Ski Resort, began working at a salmon cannery as a child and grew up to own one in Valdez - until the oil spill. “If you’ve heard that Exxon has settled for damages they caused, know that that means they have settled with the state, so that business can resume. Those of us who lost everything when they stopped the industry there are still in court 14 years later.” Vic designed and built the large 4400-square-foot lodge-type home in which we stayed. , He is about to add a $30,000 heated driveway, as it is costing him $800 a winter to hire a man to clear it 3 times a day. It seems that he does not buy his own snowplow because, in this small town, they support each other’s means of making a living. It is filled with the trophies he has hunted: dall sheep, moose, sail fish, fox, grizzly and polar bear. (OK. The polar bear stumbled into his dad’s cabin and had to be shot.) He has heli-skied and paraglided in Alaska and has great stories to share.

Sara Chafee was raised in Alaska, as a child, attending a small school. When her mother moved her to a big school in the “lower 48,” she didn’t talk to anyone for years. She met a Boston Man at the Rhode Island cooking school they were attending, and moved him back to Alaska in ‘92, where they have owned and run a few different well-recognized restaurants; presently, a small gourmet pizza joint in Girdwood. On her walls hang the most beautiful quilts that I have seen since Kauai. She tells me that she treasures them, as her best friend from her Alaskan high school made them.

A dog musher we met begins training his dogs, in the dark of the long winter nights, in November, by camping out on 4- or 5-day trips. By February, they are ready to make the 15-day trips through the dark and snow, in temperatures as cold as 70 degrees below zero, to deliver supplies to those climbing Mt. Everest. He does this until spring. Until she had the twins, Stoney and Brooks, his wife was a better musher than he! She has written a children’s book about a sled dog growing up to “run with the big dogs” which I have bought a signed copy of. When I saw it, miles away, at Denali National Park’s bookstore, I mentioned to a ranger standing next to me that I had met her husband. “Oh yeah,” he replies. “I baby-sit for the twins.” Later, 70 miles into Denali, I mention again that I have bought the book. “I know Wendy (the illustrator),” replies the sales clerk. “She’s really wonderful!” What a small town this vast area is!

An artist I met in the small town of Talkeetna, between Anchorage and Denali National Park, told me that one tourist asked her why everyone at the shops and restaurants in town seemed so happy and peaceful. She said she thought about all the people she knew in that small town, since taking an early military retirement there and opening a gift shop with her husband some years ago, and she realized that there was no one in that town who had to live there because their job required it. They had all chosen to be there, so were doing exactly what they wanted to. Perhaps this is the key to a happy life, when life is so very short and fragile.

Some people in Skagway choose not to have phones. The mainly-volunteer radio station takes personal messages, reading them at 3 designated times a day, and those people just tune-in like it’s their answering machine.

I keep reading of those people who live with propane heaters in the outer areas, without electricity or running water, although I’m not meeting them in the city.

A small 1950’s ranch-style home sells for $250,000, here. One Alaskan family living in a very small cabin on land their family has owned for generations feels lucky to be living there. State law prohibits their sub-dividing their property or expanding the house for other members of their own family to share.

There is a frustration among the residents, here, in the lack of land available for housing. Yet, they are ALL here because it is one of last places on the planet where you will find so very much wilderness. We are right as a nation to preserve as much of this place as is possible.

If you have not yet visited Alaska, make it your next trip. Or - better yet - wait until 2004 or 2005, when I return to live here for the summer, and I’ll help show you around the Kenai Peninsula. This is a land more foreign than any I have ever visited.