Talkeetna, Alaska - August 13th to 14th, 2022

Talkeetna is a small, touristy town, but it has a lot of character. It was a nice change of pace after spending over a week in Denali National Park. It was a chance to get reacquainted with civilization again, with shops and restaurants.

On Saturday, the rain started about half way on our drive to Talkeetna. Mount Denali stayed hidden behind the clouds. Our campsite for the next two nights was in Talkeetna Camper Park. It is right next to the train depot. Luckily, the scenic passenger trains don’t run at night. More importantly, the campground is a quarter mile from K2 Aviation where our Denali Grand Tour flight departs from the next morning.

The campground is also only a half mile from the center of town. At 4 pm, the rain let up, so we walked into town for dinner. Most of the restaurants are along Main Street, which is only a few blocks long.

It was Saturday night, so there was a live band playing at Mountain High Pizza Pie. Keith was in the mood for trying some beer, so we went to the Denali Brewpub. We both had the pulled pork sandwich. Ann had hers with sweet potato wedges and Keith had slaw. The food was decent and filled us up. Keith thought his beer was good as well. There was no room for dessert or fireweed ice cream. That will have to wait until the next day.

It was not raining by the time we finished dinner, so we walked down to the river at the end of Main Street. On a clear day, you can see Mount Denali from there, but it was not a clear day. It started to drizzle on our walk back to the campground. That’s what rain jackets are for.

Our Grand Denali Tour with K2 Aviation was scheduled for 11 am. Check in time was 10:30 am. It was not raining when we walked over at 10:15 am; however, it was a little foggy. When we walked inside to check in, they informed us that they had just cancelled our flight. Our options were to reschedule or get a refund. There was a flight available at 6:30 pm that same day, so we rescheduled.

We walked back to the campground and hung out a little while, then walked into town to have lunch at Mountain High Pizza Pie. By this time the sun had come out, but the area was still surrounded by clouds. The pizza place was counter service. We each ordered a small pizza and salad and sat down at the covered tables outside. The salads were pre-made. We would have preferred to have received the salads before the pizza, but they came out at the same time. So we ate our salads while our pizza cooled down. The pizza was tasty, but it definitely was not as good as Moose’s Tooth in Anchorage, but that’s setting the bar high (Anchorage, Alaska - June 28th to July 4th, 2022).

After lunch, we walked the couple of blocks down to the river again. The visibility was worse than the night before. Not only could we not see Mount Denali, we could see no mountains at all. On the way back down Main Street, we stopped at Shirley’s to try the fireweed ice cream. It had a lovely pink color, but, to us, it just tasted like vanilla ice cream. We could detect no other flavor. We wanted to see what fireweed tasted like. We’re not sure how much fireweed is actually in the ice cream or how much of the color is from food coloring.

We hung out at the van until it was time to check in for our flight again. From our camp site, we could watch all the scenic passenger trains come and go. The nicest ones that we saw looked like the ones owned by Princess and Holland America. They both had double decker cars with domed windows on top. We took advantage of the time we had to make reservations for a couple of excursions in Fairbanks.

At 5:30, we walked over to K2 Aviation again. It was not raining on the way, but dark clouds were rolling in. They checked us in, but they said they were still waiting to see if they will fly. They already warned us that if they do fly, it will probably only be the one hour flight without the glacier landing. OK, we’ll wait. Then about 15 minutes later, they called it. The weather forecast for the next morning, our only other option at this point, did not look any better. Besides, we had a long drive on Monday to Fairbanks. So we asked for a refund instead of rescheduling again. Bummer!

There are a couple of other companies that fly out of Healy and Anchorage. Perhaps we can schedule a flight with one of those as we are passing through again from Fairbanks to Denali State Park or when we are in Palmer. We’ll have to wait and see what the weather is like. Of course, by the time we left K2 Aviation to walk back to the campground, it started pouring down rain. Our feet were drenched by the time we reached our Red Tail Lodge (our camper van). That’s Alaska for you.

Well, the weather didn’t cooperate with us during our stay in Talkeetna, but we still had an enjoyable, relaxing time. It was nice to stroll a town again and eat at restaurants instead of cooking our own food..

Check out our related video: Talkeetna, Alaska

(Ann)