CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
From Anchorage it runs 290 km to the finish; allow about 3 h 48 of riding. The stops in between: Eklutna and Matanuska Glacier. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 1,700 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. A steady touring day rather than a sprint.
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.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Anchorage is where the day begins. Next is 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.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Eklutna comes up about 44 km into the recorded legs. Next is 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.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 156 km into the recorded legs you reach Matanuska Glacier. Next is Glennallen.
Alaska is big, and the Copper River Basin proves it. Glennallen sits in a broad, flat bowl of spruce forest and muskeg, ringed by some of the highest mountains in North America: the Wrangell Mountains stand to the east, with Mount Drum, Mount Sanford and the huge ice-clad bulk of Mount Wrangell, an active volcano that steams in cold weather. On a clear day the view from the highway is almost too large to take in, and a rider is aware of being a very small thing on a very long road.
Read the complete Glennallen write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Glennallen closes the day.
Anchorage → Eklutna is 44 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Eklutna → Matanuska Glacier is 112 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Matanuska Glacier → Glennallen is 133 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.