Alaska: Glacier Bay, Wildlife, and North from Anchorage

In this post, we wrap up the tail end of our Alaska cruise from last summer. This includes the final part cruising by Glacier Bay, as well as the start of our self-drive land portion towards Denali National Park.

Glacier Bay National Park

After our Alaska cruise ship’s port stop in Skagway, we spent two more days on the ship. On the first day, we cruised by Glacier Bay National Park, seeing the area in the late morning.

Note that Glacier Bay is all seen by sea, though there were National Park rangers on board to describe things. When trip planning, also be aware that there are limits to the number of ships able to visit Glacier Bay. Since this was a must-see for us, it was one of the reasons why we chose our specific cruise.

Below are some pictures of Glacier Bay as we cruised by:

You can see from the pictures that the weather had gotten cooler and cloudier by this point. While we were in Ketchikan, Juneau, and Skagway, it was unusually warm and sunny, so this part of our cruise was probably more authentically Alaska summer in that respect. Make sure you bring appropriate clothing for this type of weather.

Last Day and Disembarking

On our final day on the ship, the ship turned and made its way towards Whittier, which is an hour’s drive from Anchorage. Enjoying the scenery, we did our last rounds around the ship, enjoyed high tea and the nice dining area, and rested a bit, as we realized things were coming to an end. In the evening, we got our rooms packed up, then docked in Whittier in the early morning. After the final breakfast in the morning, we followed the plans for disembarking the ship.

Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center

At the Whittier port, which mostly a big waiting room, there aren’t any rental cars. Rather, we opted to take the specific ACT bus that makes a stop in the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, though there are other buses that do go non-stop to Anchorage as well as land-and-sea excursions towards Denali.

The wildlife place was a fun visit along the way. I believe we had roughly an hour to see various large Alaskan animals:

Anchorage Rental Car Pickup, and Driving North

We continued on the ACT bus to the Anchorage airport. Many people end their Alaska trip in Anchorage. But we wanted to briefly see Denali National Park, as well as visit Fairbanks while we were in Alaska.

Hence, we picked up a rental car at the airport, which we’d booked one-way to Fairbanks. If you prefer not to drive, there are many bus tours and cruise-rail tours options to Denali and Fairbanks. And actually, the rental car rates were on the expensive side, so it’s possible that a tour could be favorable cost-wise. But in our case, we wanted a bit more flexibility and decided to drive the route.

With the car, we stopped briefly for lunch and went through a bit of downtown Anchorage. We quickly noted that Anchorage wasn’t particularly walkable and there weren’t a ton of super tourist-oriented activities. From our standpoint, Fairbanks seemed to be a better place to spend time as a tourist.

For orientation, the drive from Anchorage to Denali was roughly 4.5 hours, with Talkeetna at roughly the halfway point. Fairbanks, which we did on a later day, was roughly 2 more hours beyond that.

Talkeetna

We didn’t get great pictures of Talkeetna, but we spent roughly an hour there. It was a cute and fun town to stop at. There were people out, and it was a good place to go souvenir shopping and get an ice cream or coffee. We’d definitely stop there again. I’ll note that many of the tour buses seemed to stop there too, but that didn’t seem to detract.

Mostly though, the route itself was a paved and reasonably well-maintained 2-lane road, with lots of trees and greenery. It was nice to drive through this remote part of the US.