Glenn Highway: Anchorage to Matanuska Glacier

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Anchorage

   Anchorage lies where Cook Inlet meets the Chugach mountains, a city of about three hundred thousand people that holds nearly half of Alaska's population and yet ends abruptly at the edge of the forest. Moose wander through the suburbs, and on a clear day, the snowy peaks of the Alaska Range, including Denali far to the north, float on the horizon. The city grew from a railway construction camp in 1915, and was badly damaged by the Good Friday earthquake in 1964, among the most powerful ever recorded.

   Read the complete Anchorage write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Anchorage is where the day begins. Next is Eklutna.

2. 2. Eklutna

   Eklutna is a place where the old and the new Alaska sit side by side. A few miles north of Anchorage, where the Glenn Highway runs along the shore of Knik Arm with the Chugach Mountains rearing up on the east side, a small Dena'ina Athabascan village, the oldest continuously inhabited site in the Anchorage area, keeps its traditions in the shadow of a motorway. The village is home to a small Russian Orthodox church, a log building dedicated to Saint Nicholas, one of the oldest buildings in the region, and a graveyard with a unique feature: colourful little wooden spirit houses, painted and decorated, stand over the graves, a blend of Dena'ina and Orthodox traditions. The effect is quiet and moving.

   Read the complete Eklutna write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Eklutna comes up about 100 km into the recorded legs. Next is Matanuska Glacier.

3. 3. Matanuska Glacier

   The Matanuska Glacier is a river of ice twenty-seven miles long and about four miles wide at its end, one of the biggest glaciers you can drive to in the United States. It spills out of the Chugach Mountains in a great grey-white tongue, ribbed with crevasses and streaked with dirt, and its meltwater runs off in the Matanuska River, a braided stream of milky grey water that wanders across a wide gravel bed. You can see the glacier from the highway, at a state viewpoint near mile 101 of the Glenn Highway, where the whole ice mass lies spread out below like a frozen sea. If you want to walk on the ice, you must cross private land, and a fee is charged.

   Read the complete Matanuska Glacier write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   The route ends here after 335 km.