The vibe in Girdwood, a woodsy little hamlet, is much like that on the mountain: unfussy, ripe with tumbledown charm, checking all the essential après-ski boxes without the manufactured authenticity of so many ski towns. One evening I kicked back with a pint at Girdwood Brewing Company, with its airy taproom, outdoor firepits, and rotating food trucks. Another, I ate an exquisite meal of bibimbap at Jack Sprat, an eclectic, buttery-lit mainstay run by Frans and Jen Weits, a couple originally from Michigan. Chair 5, a low-key restaurant-bar, cooked up exactly the kind of burger one craves after a day in the snow. It was refreshing not to encounter anyone from outside of Alaska. Where the barstool chatter at Vail can turn quickly stock portfolios, at Chair 5 I chatted with a rowdy group of local skiers about the incoming “bore tide,” a phenomenon in the Turnagain Arm that creates a single wave that breaks for miles on end. They talked about plans to surf it the next morning with the nonchalance of New York cyclists discussing a loop through Central Park. “Wanna join?” one asked.
It all adds up to a world-class ski destination that, improbably, is still primarily the realm of the locals. But this may be changing. In 2018, Alyeska was purchased by Pomeroy Lodging, a Canadian company that is pushing to spread word of the property to residents of the Lower 48. The current ski season marks Alyeska’s first as part of the Ikon Pass. The hotel has been making various upgrades, most notably a new 50,000-square-foot Nordic spa that debuted in 2022. Set in the forest adjacent to the main gondola, with a slick restaurant of floor-to-ceiling windows and blond wood tables, the facility is a transporting oasis with outdoor hot tubs and cold plunges, steam rooms, an exfoliation cabin, and a semicircle of barrel saunas built from cedar and tucked into a glade. This is not, needless to say, the Alaska of frostbite and frontier lore, though the no-phone policy happily prevents it from being pure influencer catnip. During my three days of downhill hijinks, it proved a welcome respite that left me primed for more adventure.
Leaving Alyeska, I drove through light flurries back toward Anchorage, then hooked northeast along the foothills of the Chugach Mountains and headed deeper into the state’s interior. After about three hours, I found myself far removed from anything resembling civilization, even though I’d barely penetrated a state that is nearly three times the size of France. My destination was Sheep Mountain Lodge, one of Alaska’s many off-the-grid hideaways. Consisting of cozy single-occupancy log cabins fanned out along the foot of a mountain, Sheep Mountain Lodge has the advantage of being reachable by car and close to the Matanuska Glacier, a 27-mile-long cathedral of ancient ice.
Pulling in, I was met by Mark Fleenor, who runs the property with his wife, Ruthann. He grew up in Tennessee and spent years flying planes for NGOs in Afghanistan before settling in Alaska because few other places could sate his appetite for adventure. Inside the lodge’s main building, I saw a photo of him ice climbing the glacier and another of him scuba diving inside of it. “People think we’re bundled up in this barren, inhospitable land half the year, when really we’re just having an insane amount of fun,” he told me. Then, with earnest bluster: “You ready to get intimate with the glacier yourself?”
