Seward Highway Drive

About this bundle

In the year 2000, the federal government sat down to name the handful of roads in America that aren't a way to get somewhere — they're the reason you came. The Seward Highway made the list. One hundred and twenty-seven miles from the edge of Anchorage to an ice-free harbor on the Gulf of Alaska, and it holds three separate scenic-byway titles at once, which is a bit like a horse winning the Triple Crown and then being told it also has a lovely singing voice. For the first fifty miles the road is pinned between a mountain wall and a long gray finger of the sea called Turnagain Arm — named, it turns out, by a very famous explorer having a very bad day. You'll hear what he was actually looking for, and who else was standing on that deck: a young sailing master whose name you absolutely know, for reasons that had nothing to do with Alaska and everything to do with a ship he lost twelve years later. Along that water you'll find out why it's the color of wet concrete and why walking out onto it is one of the worst ideas available to you in the state of Alaska. You'll learn how to spot the white whales that surface in it, and how to tell the sheep on the cliff above your car from the goats everyone insists they are. You'll meet a fish so oily you can light one end and read by it — and the people who did exactly that, for centuries, on this shoreline. And twice a day this water does something so unusual that people drive out from Anchorage, park, and just wait for it. We'll tell you exactly where to stand and roughly when. Then the road climbs into the Kenai Mountains, and the story turns. You'll pass a town that survived four minutes of the second-largest earthquake ever recorded and then, quietly, sank eight feet into the sea — and you'll see what's left of the one down the road that didn't survive at all. You'll hear how the sea caught fire in Seward's harbor that same night, which sounds like an exaggeration until you hear the part about the fuel tanks. You'll meet a woman who ran a roadhouse out here alone and hand-fed a bear on her porch, a thirteen-year-old orphan whose homework is currently flying over every school in Alaska, and a creek named for a bird that has never once been seen within four thousand miles of it. By the end you'll roll into a working fishing port that is the starting line of the most famous sled-dog race on earth, the finish line of a mountain footrace that locals will tell you, with total sincerity, is harder — and the front door of a national park you can only reach by boat, on foot, or by one single road that we'll point out on the way in. Two and a half hours of driving. About twice that if you do it right. The tour runs in both directions — and the return leg isn't the same tour backwards. It's a different set of stories, told to a driver who now knows what they're looking at. Bring snacks. Charge your phone. The pullouts on this road are not consolation prizes — some of them are the reason people fly here.