Chapter 3: The 30% Club
Longtime readers know that any chance we get (i.e. the price is right), we will stay in an Embassy Suites hotel if it’s available during our travels. It’s always nice to have room for the 6 of us and not have to force anyone to sleep on the floor. And they have by far the best free hotel breakfast of anyone.
The Embassy Suites of Anchorage is a very nice one, located just south of downtown and not a terrible drive from the airport. I particularly liked the whale-themed fountain in the lobby.
They have a chef who cooks fresh, made-to-order omelettes on the spot while you wait. Mine was filled with ham, bacon, cheese and onions. Everything a growing boy needs. And they deep-fry the potatoes so they’re hard to beat as well. The chef here was a talkative Asian woman who was going on a mile-a-minute about how they had scheduled her for too many shifts…or something. I confess, I could only catch a few random sentences here or there. Mostly I was impressed at how she could keep up the running commentary with 5 dishes all cooking at once.
With that much fat and cholesterol, it’s really nothing a grown man needs, but this is my vacation, so shut up about my health choices.
Once breakfast was eaten, we started the next leg of our Alaska Road Trip Spectacular with perhaps the most important destination of the entire journey:
Walmart.
Gotta get those snacks and lunch supplies, you know.
The original plan for the day was to take it easy. We’d experienced 4 flights in 2 days and were trying to overcome our jet lag, so I figured it would make sense to have a relatively easy day hanging around Anchorage. We could visit a couple of small museums, or do a hike or two in the surrounding state parks. Nothing too earth-shattering, but a chance to rest for a bit after all the traveling.
But then we checked the weather.
It was Thursday, July 1, and the weather forecast for the day was outstanding. Clear skies, a high of 75F (24C), and a 2% chance of precipitation. It might actually be the best weather day of the entire trip.
We were hyper-focused on weather due to our desire to see Denali (formerly Mt. McKinley), the highest mountain in North America at 20,320 ft. (6193m). Naturally, we’d planned for an entire day touring Denali National Park later in the trip, but a look at the forecast for that date was decidedly iffy.
My father had told me about his trip to Alaska several years back, when he had toured Denali National Park and the entire mountain range had been socked in the whole time he was there. Later, on a clear day in Anchorage, he had decided to drive 135 miles up the road to a viewpoint just to be able to see the mountain, figuring it was the only chance he had. As it turned out, he was right.
We ended up deciding to try it as well. After all, it might have been our only shot to actually see the mountain. A quick check of the National Park Service webcam showed that it was indeed clear over the mountain that morning. We just had to hope that clouds didn’t move in later.
So, off we went. The
Denali South Viewpoint is at mile marker 135.7 on the Parks Highway, and that’s the exact distance from Anchorage. If all went right, we had scrapped our relaxing plans for the day so we could drive a total of 270 miles just to see a mountain.
Why was this so important? Well, there are many, many tourists who visit Alaska who never get the chance to see Denali. The local statistic that gets repeated over and over is that only 30% of visitors actually get to see it without cloud cover. I won’t take my shoes off to do the math again due to the complaints I received concerning the smell, but my 7-year-old assures me that this means 70% of visitors never get to see Denali. They even sell t-shirts in the gift shops for visitors to brag about being part of “The 30% Club”.
(One enterprising shop also offered shirts advertising membership in The 70% Club, for those who didn’t get to see a blessed thing.)
The drive up wasn’t terrible. There was a stretch of about 20 miles of road construction in the town of Wasilla that we had to navigate, but at least we still had plenty of mountain scenery to enjoy. At one point, we rounded a bend and found a female moose just standing in the middle of the road, like she was posing for a photo shoot. Thankfully, she thought better of trying to play chicken with the minivan, because I didn’t buy the extra insurance.
Navigating via Google Maps, it was nearing lunchtime as we finally made it to the viewpoint. We pulled into the parking lot, noting quite a few people had also stopped. We walked to the overlook to see if our bet had paid off.
Well, now. 135.7 miles suddenly doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.
We learned that this particular viewpoint is roughly 41 miles (66 km) from the mountain itself, but even at that distance it really dominated the landscape. Denali is the snow-covered peak dwarfing all of the other mountains nearby. As one would expect.
There’s a short hike from the overlook up the hill to the right, and it leads to another viewpoint that in my opinion provides a better view, as the Susitna River is now visible flowing beneath the mountain range.
I have to say, we were really getting spoiled with the scenery thus far. We were now officially part of The 30% Club. Time to buy some overpriced junky t-shirts! Woohoo!
The overlook seemed like as good a place as any to eat our PB&J sandwiches for lunch. We sat and enjoyed the warm, beautiful weather and the perfect scenic backdrop. I think scenery like this does make PB&J taste up to 5% better.
We had a nice hour or so at the viewpoint. And then we turned around and drove all the way back to Anchorage.
That pretty much took up the whole day. We got back to the city mid-afternoon, so we parked downtown and wandered a bit, but many of the visitor information areas were closed due to COVID. We ducked into a crappy gift shop or two, but there really wasn’t much to see in the city.
We tend to eat dinner early on our vacations because a) we like to beat the crowds, b) PB&J doesn’t typically fill us up for very long, and c) we have teenagers and a 7-year-old who are always hungry. We knew our dinner spot was popular and would be crowded, so we decided around 4:30 p.m. to make our way there and see if we could get a table. It turned out to be a wise decision because
Moose’s Tooth Pub & Pizzeria was packed, even that early on a Thursday afternoon. We ended up having to wait about 45 minutes for a table.
We were all pretty hungry by the time we were seated. The pizza menu was pretty extensive, and there were some funky combinations, so it was hard for everyone to come to agreement on what we wanted to try. Thankfully, they had some small 10” options so that you could order a “personal” pizza for roughly $10-15. We ended up choosing this option and having a bit of a pizza smorgasbord. Drew chose a plain cheese pizza, which is the only pizza any 7-year-old will ever choose. Julie went with a margherita pie and Dave went with his favorite, the Hawaiian.
Scott and Sarah like to split entrees so they can each try multiple options. In this case, they went with one safe option and one adventure: Scott ordered a pepperoni pie…
…while Sarah got a buffalo chicken pizza. It was a bit surprising to see shredded carrots on top.
But it actually really worked. That was their favorite pizza out of all of them.
Mine was the chicken parmesan pizza, and I was very satisfied with this one. It was basically as promised—like an open-faced chicken parm sub.
The pub also brewed their own beers, so I gave their Pipeline Stout a try, and that gets a thumbs-up as well. There are a LOT of brewpubs in Alaska. Between the scenery and the amount of brewpubs per capita, it’s fair to wonder if Alaska is actually heaven.
Spoiler alert: you’ll be seeing a lot of brewpubs in this TR.
Anyway, we greatly enjoyed our dinner here, and it was topped off when we decided to spoil ourselves by ordering a dessert called Death By Peanut Butter, which was their version of a chocolate/peanut butter pie.
You can almost taste it through the screen, can’t you? I want more. Now.
Having peeked ahead at the menus of the rest of the places we’d be eating on the trip, we decided there that we’d need to go on a Peanut Butter Pie Tour of Alaska. Again, you might be forgiven for thinking this place is heaven.
The pizza was very good, the beer and pie were wonderful, and we felt that Moose’s Tooth deserved a Drooling Homer Award for Excellence in Unpretentious Dining.
This Alaska trip was certainly off to a great start.
Coming Up Next: There are only about 7 major roads in Alaska, and we’re going to cover as many as we can.
And spends over $5 of gas in the process, right?
