Ever since our kids started getting into rock climbing, these gyms have supplanted the traditional…read morechildren's museum as the place we look forward when we travel, and the kids need to burn off some energy. The spot was one that we found online, and we're very impressed with the place. The climbing gym has two levels, a bouldering area upstairs, and large climbing walls, with ropes and belays downstairs. The main climate walls were really impressive. The largest ones we estimated to be 40 or 50 feet high. Bigger than we are used to, but not so big that the kids couldn't conquer them! Pricing seemed very reasonable, and really when it comes down to it, there aren't many prices that we wouldn't pay to get the kids to runoff some energy and have a good time doing it. Well, worth your time garrulous of if you're stopping in for a quick climbing session or looking to do more training long-term.

Great way to start the day, especially since they open at 6AM most of the week…read more + They offer in-person demonstrations. Tess showed us the ropes, literally and figuratively, before we got started. While we are new to Alaska Rock Gym, we've been to others and this is the first time we've received a personal orientation. + ARG has thought through the grossness of wearing climbing shoes and gear into the restrooms, and encourages you to go before gearing up. + There are gym machines, a yoga studio, elevators, and multiple water fountains, in addition to auto belay, partner, and free climbing options. The things that could be better: - $22/adult just to get in, then more fees to rent shoes and/or harness. I wish we could've stayed longer than 1.5hr or come back again later in the day. - Long, tedious waiver with the "option" to add a minor that does NOT work. So you have to go back to the main menu to fill out an even longer waiver for children because they require the adult info (again) in addition to the child's. Please get this bug fixed on your iPads or offer paper waivers. It's worth the trouble though to watch your child [and let your child watch you] try and fall, try a little harder each time, and make it to the top!

It has a nice overhanging splatter wall, vertical splatter wall, and a crimpy stemmy wall. Plus the…read moreclimbers there are REALLY GOOD, but the pictures were only of them just warming up on the jugs I'm sure.

Take the helicopter glacier hike tour! You will not regret it!! My husband and I were second…read moreguessing such a big ticket item for our Alaska trip but we agree it was worth it! Our trip would not have been the same had we skipped this standout experience! Our guides Andy and Matt were amazing! We had a lot of fun with them and learned a lot too. Thank you guys for the memories! Until you see and walk on a glacier, you cannot understand the scale and size of one! There are hidden worlds when you get on the ice! Waterfalls into the abyss, hidden ice caves, lakes of deep aqua blue... and it goes on and on in every direction. Completely insane! Do yourself a favor and book this trip. The views from the helicopter alone are worth it, but exploring a glacier is priceless!

Did the spencer glacier kayak and hike, starting from the Alyeska Resort. $379pp (occasional…read morecoupons on their Facebook). This took about 9 hours, with about 5 hours being kayak + hike. The rest was transportation/waiting for train/etc. Prices are high, but the experience is pretty amazing. It's hard to do activities or get up close to glaciers without assistance/guides. The group to guide ratio is low so you're definitely safe. I love the energy from the guides. They know what they're doing and they are so enthusiastic about it. They definitely take care of you if you're a newb to all this. Amazing views. Amazing pictures. Would recommend!

We took the trail in rain. Trail is muddy but walkable. The view is BEAUTIFUL! We would have…read morefinished the trail if we had more time before sunset or if it's a sunny day.

This is a beautiful, scenic 10+ mile round trip hike that ends at two lakes side by side (Eagle…read moreLake and Symphony Lake). The trail is pretty flat, only an 850 ft. gradual elevation gain. If the parking lot gets full, you can park on the road without worry, even though it says not to. Little to no cell service out here so prepare accordingly. Bring bear spray and big spray.

So, it's kind of hard to find information on this trail, so I'll help ya'll out…read more GETTING HERE: From the Seward Highway, go north (a right if you're heading towards Anchorage, a left if you're heading away from Anchorage) on Boretide Rd (right next to the new Turnagain Arm Pit BBQ location). Where the marker is for this Yelp listing, is where the paved road ends. Just keep going straight! The road can be a little bumpy but nothing that would require high-clearance or 4WD/AWD. Eventually, after what seems like a long time (but isn't), you'll end up at the trailhead. Officially, this trailhead is called "Indian Valley Trailhead". Chugach State Park's website is horrible (they have some great .pdf's for some of their trails, but good luck finding them anywhere on their website...), so I was only able to find most of this information from: googling, using summitpost (a climbing website), and browsing blogs. Hopefully, this consolidated source of information will be helpful to some! From this trailhead, you can access two trails: Powerline Pass: which has its other end at the Glen Alps area (Flattop) Indian Valley Trail: a trail of controversial quality (I have never done it) that goes NE from this trailhead and eventually meets the Ship Creek Trail. (About 1/4 of a mile up the trail you'll come to a junction: if you go straight you'll be on Indian Valley Trail, if you take a left, and go over a footbridge, you'll be on Powerline Pass trail) I'll be mainly speaking of Powerline Pass. Most folks start Powerline Pass up near Glen Alps. Most folks mountain bike* it, rather than hike it. Most folks would need a bike with a good suspension to do this. I do not have such a faithful, two-wheeled steed, so I hike. Why hike it from this side? A couple reasons: 1) This is the approach hike to climb Homicide Peak: this is how I originally found the trail. Homicide Peak is a fun scramble with awesome views of the Suicide Peaks. More info on climbing Homicide can be found here: http://www.summitpost.org/homicide-peak/815642 2) Crowds: there aren't many. This trail isn't as well-known or popular as many others in the area. 3) Feasting options: Froth and Forage (https://www.yelp.com/biz/froth-and-forage-coffeehouse-and-eatery-anchorage) is open till 10 pm, and located very close to this trailhead. Hiking early in the morning? Stop in for a coffee. Hiking late in the evening? Stop in for a burger! 4) Get out of your usual rut: expand your mind, hike some new stuff! Reasons you might want to be a bit leery of this trail: 1) I've heard the Indian Valley Trail can be miserable and overgrown in spots. I hope you like bushwhacking. Or 'schwacking, for short. 2) There can be lots of bear activity in this area. Carry your spray, take your dog, hike in a group. 3) If there's been recent rain, it can get pretty muddy. Definitely, give this trail a shot! *for info on mountain biking Powerline Pass, check out this slick website: https://www.mtbproject.com/trail/6452974/powerline-pass

The crux for me on these Eklutna Glacier summits is that I don't have a mountain bike, but Abbey…read morehelped me out by renting one for me downtown ahead of time, so we could go right to the trailhead after work on Friday. We cycled in and setup our tent. There was a man and his dog plane-camping there, something I've heard happens at the Bold airstrip, but that I've never witnessed. We decided to get an early start and wakeup around 4:30am. At around 5:30 we were crossing the braids of the Eklutna river. I learned my mountaineering skills in the Pacific NW where you walk across bridges, so every time I cross these in Alaska... it kind of feels like the first time. It was extremely cold and unpleasant. Lucky for us, we had some uphill bushwhacking just ahead to clear our minds and warm us up. I've heard there might be some sort of "trail" up to the ridge of The Watchman, but we didn't find one. I was in front, following weaknesses in the trees. Initially it wasn't that bad, but, before I knew it we were hopping over rubbery tree branches stabbing at us from the slopes. In maybe 3-4 hours (it felt much longer) we were gaining the summit ridge. (Beta note: while I can't vouch for our bushwhacking route-finding, I can vouch for our ridge top-out. Once you can start to see up towards the ridge again, aim for ~61.3160, -149.0299. There is a big grass bench there, great for napping. The slope leading to it is quite moderate.) Once on the ridge, it's straight forward class 2 hiking. At about 61.3126, -149.0290 we left the ridge and started side-hilling to the climber's right (West). The side-hilling eventually turns to a wide grass bench with very comfortable hiking. This would be an amazing spot to make a high camp. (if you enjoy crossing rivers and bushwhacking with overnight gear, that is. There were ample streams for water here, but they seemed like they might be seasonal only.) Eventually the grassy bench ended (~61.3002, -149.0275) and we had to start picking our way up a series of choss gullies and rotting snow tongues. From here, the summit of The Watchman looks close (spoiler: it ain't) and there are great views of Peak 6530 (which I stupidly thought was Benign when I first saw it). The creatively-named peak (there's another peak with the same name, less than a dozen miles from this one) looks like it has some great couloir routes on its north-aspect. After ~1,000 feet of gain we were on the ridge proper. From here, it's mainly 3rd class ridge scrambling. You just have to be mindful of the runouts and not climb up anything that feels harder than that. (unless you want to) After a few false-summit top-outs, we eventually reached the summit proper. The summit area is how we all imagined the tops of mountains were before we actually started climbing them: it's the narrowest, steepest part of the climb with the scariest runout. We stayed on a ridge of increasing narrowness. Finally, we were looking at the last ~80ft. It was a slabby-looking slope off to our right with a thin (maybe 3-5 inches) layer of snow. In front of us, there was gravelly rock spine snaking up to the summit. Abbey mentioned that she didn't feel like going all the way to the summit, and, even though I'm the one with the higher risk tolerance...I definitely agreed with her on this one. It seemed like there wasn't a non-slippery way to the top. Either you go on ball-bearing gravel on top of rock or you go on a thin layer of snow of dubious quality. Abbey mentioned she read some people had gone "around" at this point. I started looking for another way. I found a sensible, short down-climb off of the ridge (climber's left/North). And then we side-hilled around looking for a less-terrible way up. I spotted some tat (the "summit anchor") around a horn and thought that was probably the summit. In front of us was something halfway between a shallow chimney and a narrow gully. After testing holds repeatedly, and breaking many, we were back on the summit ridge about 10ft from the summit. From there it was an easy crawl-scramble to the summit. Apart from an ominous storm cloud forming near Thunderbird Peak, the views were sunny and incredible! Abbey signed us into the summit register, and then we started picking our way down. In a surprise twist that rarely happens in the hills, down-climbing from the summit area was actually easier than going up! However, the dread of the bushwhack and the river re-crossing hung over our descent the entire time. We weren't precious about the creek crossing on the way out, we just marched straight through with our boots on this time. The rigidity of the mountaineering boots made It much easier, despite the flow coming up maybe a foot higher (mid-thigh now, instead of knee-high earlier). We got back to the Bold Airstrip and hydrated meals at Eklutna Lake. In our tent, we watched TV on a phone, and Abbey fell asleep with a nine-tenths of a beer in her hand.

This peak is accessed from the penguin creek trail:…read morehttps://www.yelp.com/biz/penguin-creek-trail-anchorage Depending on who you ask, it may be considered the most difficult hike in Chugach State Park. It definitely requires lots of off-trail travel and navigation, that's for sure! Here's my trip report from when I summitted it: We left the penguin creek trail shortly after and began our traverse into the hanging valley. We ended up maintaining an elevation of roughly 1400 ft before steadily ascending to 2600 ft to drop down into the hanging valley. This decision was...OK. It wasn't a sufferfest, but it wasn't exactly great. There was definitely some bad snow and some alder-wrangling. The lake of any chlorophyll in any of the foilage made route-finding through it much easier...but there was still ample grunting and rubber-banding-gunning of branches. Rather than take the full ridge up Bird, we decided to go up-valley and then gain the ridge near "Point 4800"/"Point 4840" (I've heard it called both things, and on my map it isn't either of these elevations, anyone know where this name is documented?) Anyway, we started ascending form the valley floor at roughly 60.9989, -149.3137. It was mostly snow climbing on snow of marginal quality. Lower down it was very bad wallowing, so we climbed the rock bands. Eventually the rock bands ended and we were climbing a spine of snow (reminded my of the "hogsback" from my Mt Hood climbing days!). It was straightforward ascending, but extremely bad visibility was a little anxiety-inducing. We were in and out of rolling whiteouts and there was so little contrast my camera couldn't auto-focus, ha! We kept taking the obvious gully up, and eventually were dumped out onto a flattish rock band. From there steep, firm snow climbing to gained the ridge proper. (we didn't put our crampons on for this, but we probably should have) We aggressively side-hilled to avoid going up and over Point 48XX, a decision that didn't end up saving any time. Knife-hard Icy snow slopes peppered sloppy scree fields making travel annoying, unless you're really good at crampon-changing! Eventually we were at a low-point in the ridge, where I found a sneaky route down. I was a line I had heard described in some trip reports at the end of the valley that could take you directly to the summit ridge and probably save a lot of time, if it had snow on it. There was a ton of good-looking snow on it, so I noted it in caltopo (60.9981, -149.2958) for a possible, hot-pizza-at-Moose's Tooth-preserving descent short-cut. What we did next is hard to describe, but sticking to the ridge became difficult so we started side-willing east towards the true summit. Eventually we were on and off of really bad choss that was either dusted with half-melted powder or hardened by rime ice (similar to what Kevin Downie experienced last fall: https://www.peakbagger.com/climber/ascent.aspx?aid=1524570) . I can see how this would be a fun scramble in the summer, but dodging icy gullies and scraping choss with crampons was not! Abbey found an "easy" icy ramp to the summit area (I thought it was kinda scary), and after front-pointing on some rime, we reached the snow-and-rime dome that is the Bird Peak summit...to absolutely zero views. Vis was probably at 20-30 ft? There was enough visibility for us to scout an easy snow ramp that would take us down from the summit. (Anything to avoid down-climbing the Abbey M0 variation!) Long story short, the snow ramp was also extremely hard snow. It would've protected beautifully with even vertical pickets. We just kept our heads down and slowly front-pointed down it for what seemed like forever. Eventually we got back down to the scree slopes, took the crampons off, and started side-hilling back to the ridge (west). We went right to the descent line I had marked and...it still looked pretty good. I got out and tested it a little and it was just too hard to tell what the quality of the snow would be once we got out on it. I still had some mild anxiety from the summit downclimb and wasn't interested it going down a long slope with that level of firmness (especially with my crappy ultra light crampons, but that's for another time) We talked about it and, with some hesitancy, decided to go down the way we came up. We didn't side-hill Peak 48XX this time, we stayed pretty high, and travel was much faster! We found where we were topped out on the ridge, put our crampons on, and started down-climbing. The first small section was really steep, but eventually we were quickly plunge stepping down the slopes. I decided to go left (south) down a different way than what we came up to make it a pure snow down-climb. Heavy, wet snow in this area made for perfect wet-cement, slow-and-steady glissade conditions. We then trudged through chunky-water-style snow back to our tent, and we quickly saturated our gaitered mountaineering boots. Good day in the hills? Um, kinda?

In the summer, this is a fun (kind of long) summit scramble…read more In the winter: use EXTREME CAUTION and bring crampons/ice axe. I took a nasty fall here, after deciding to turn around when my microspikes weren't getting much purchase on the ridge (I climbed it in early fall, I'd been up a neighboring peak "The Ramp" a week earlier and the snow as not at all icy...which is why I didn't bring "real" crampons for this. Big mistake.). 5 minutes later one of my feet started to slip, and next thing I know I was summersaulting down the slope, unable to stop. I dug my ice axe (more precisely, my whippet) into the slope and it couldn't stop me. I eventually lost it. I can to a stop some 500 ft down the south side of the mountain. I had one microspike. I tried to self-rescue, but my injuries and only one spike, and no axe meant I was moving at about 100 ft/hr. With 5% battery left, I called 9-1-1. My phone died talking to the sheriff. 2 hours later, I heard a helicopter overhead and was pulled of the mountain. I was sure I had cracked multiple ribs, but after I was examined and scanned: I did not sustain any major injuries. Physically, I\'m better now. Mentally, snowy slopes kind of freak me out...in a way they never did before. Anyway, do it in the summer, when it's dry and it's warm and the days are long. You start at the Powerline Pass trail: https://www.yelp.com/biz/powerline-pass-trail-anchorage It's about 6 miles to the base of the mountain. You can make it much more fun (and quick) if you bring a mountain or fat bike.

Everything about this mountain was easier than I thought it would be: the approach (Joe Chmielowski…read moreis an excellent navigator, no matter what he might say), working the majority of the North Ridge, and finding and rigging the rap off the chockstone. Climbing up-and-out from the rappel and gaining the summit...was pretty GD harrowing. The gully (which is not really visible until you're right up in it) was meringued in a crust of rotten snow that was barely clinging on for life. It would've been easier to work up it cramponless but...many sections had a slick ice layer underneath. So, crampons were necessary for safety the entire time. However, many sections had loose chossy and/or smooth slab underneath, causing the front points to alternate between snagging and scraping. Kudos to Joe for blazing the boot pack in the trashy beer cooler snow. On the summit, I drank a pint of my latest homebrew ('Scend, a hoppy, 7% abv, lager) to calm the nerves. The entire time up I as filled with dread for the way down. Thankfully, the downclimb wasn't as bad as we were expecting, the double-boot pack on they way up paid dividends. Our day stretched out a bit longer than we were expecting and rather than hike all the way out (our informal, original plan), we opted to stay another night in Pichler's, which we again had all to ourselves. A great 103rd summit in the park! The next day we had a mellow hike out down the Eklutna, and parted ways at the East Fork Eklutna Trail where I began working my way towards Kelly Peak. (TR later)

Man, how am I just now getting around to hiking this?!…read more Falls Creek is located at ~Mile Post 105.6 on the Seward Highway. In relation to other trails: To the West: Rainbow Trailhead (https://www.yelp.com/biz/rainbow-trailhead-anchorage) To the East: Indian Valley Trailhead (https://www.yelp.com/biz/indian-valley-trail-anchorage) Stats: Mileage: 2.7 (one-way) Gain: 2,900 ft About a 1,000 ft/mile, steep but not *too* steep. The trail starts out...next to a falls! It closely follows Falls Creek for the first half of its length. As the water is loud and the brush is thick, I'd highly recommend doing some trail karaoke with your friends to make sure you alert any bears in the area that you're coming. Eventually, you get out of the brush and the valley expands. It's gorgeous. It's wide and it's bright-freakin'-green (my favorite shade of that color), or at least it was in mid-June. This is going to sound odd but, it actually reminded me of some of the valleys I hiked in Hawaii! It made me a little butthurt that I am only just-now getting around to hiking the trail. The trail ends at a lake. I'm not sure what the name of it is, so I'll just call it "Falls Lake". The lake frequently has snow on/in/around it, up until July. But, there is an ample amount of vegetated, snow-free flat area around the lake, this would be a perfect "Baby's First Backpacking" trip. (no permits required, just load yourself down and hike up) You can continue up past the lake, onto the ridge between South Suicide Peak and Indianhouse Mountain. The path will quickly change from "hiking" to "scrambling" though. I'd only recommend going up South Suicide if you are confident on your feet, and I'd only recommend going up Indianhouse if you have a rope and a partner! If you're quick enough, this can be done as an after-work hike. If you're slow or looking for a casual stroll, you can easily make a day of this hike.

I'm still sore. Dragged my spouse and our neurodivergent son with me to do this hike on a sunny…read moreSeptember Saturday. We parked at 1pm (parking lot was packed). Got back to the parking lot after 5pm. You'll need most of your day to do this hike if you're not a professional. This hike is beautiful but it is challenging for sure. You are going uphill the entire time. On the way down it's so steep you're jamming your toes trying not to fall. We did the bulk of this hike with nothing but backpacks full of snacks hahaha. Everyone that passed us up or down had poles, guns, bear spray, bells, dogs, the whole enchilada. I don't recommend hiking this area the way we did, we just got lucky :) It was a beautiful day and we were never alone for longer than 15-20min at a time. Weather was perfect, it was sunny and warm but the breeze was breezin'. The falls are a sight to see and made this strenuous hike completely worth it for my water-loving son. I can't wait to return soon and make it further.