Thoughts on an Alaska Family Vacation

In June 2026, we did a 2-week family trip to Alaska, in celebration of Kristen's 40th birthday. Many friends have asked us for our thoughts, and tips regarding the trip:

• Cruise vs. Overland: after having been there and seeing the cruise passengers at some of the places we visited, I think this is a false choice. These are completely different vacations. If you think you’d enjoy a fully curated, week-long guided tour with a resort experience, do a cruise. If you want more freedom and spontaneity for exploration, do an overland tour. There is some overlap, but they’re fundamentally different vacations. We would actually consider doing a short cruise even after having done this trip.

• Light and Sleep: this was a far bigger factor than expected. We were so unprepared for what this would be like, we brought headlamps like idiots. The sun literally does not set. It does not get dark. Your body has no sense of what time it is, ever. You could be doing a mid-day hike, then look at your watch and it’s 9pm. You can book long tours that start in the afternoon and it doesn’t matter. The practical effect here is that you have no cues as to when it’s time to go to sleep. We ended up having to liberally use melatonin, and we all slept with masks. Many of the hotels we stayed in didn’t even have blackout curtains.

• Mosquitoes: we were terrified about this, but mosquitoes turned out to be a non-factor. We seemed to be in Alaska at the start of the hatch, so they weren’t that bad as they could be. But also, it’s cold there, so you’re wearing pants and a long-sleeve shirt all the time. So if you treat your clothes with permethrin, there is very little for a mosquito to bite. We supplemented with picaridin lotion when necessary.

• Car rental: this is insanely expensive. Also, you DO NOT NEED AN SUV. Yes, there are many OHV and rough dirt roads you can potentially drive on. But most car rental company insurance will not cover you if you drive on these roads. They have big signs saying this. You can rent a car that is covered on these roads from a specialty company, but who cares. A sedan or minivan would be fine if it saves money.

• Wildness: many parts of Alaska are the only place in the world we have been, besides Patagonia, that feels like it’s not for humans. Humans are temporary visitors in these places. Most of the national parks in the state don’t even have roads leading to them. Even in Denali, there’s one road that feels like it was grudgingly built so a few people could see a few miles of the park. The term here is “wild.” Everything is huge in scale. It’s like if you took the wildness and desolation of Patagonia, dropped it into the Pacific Northwest, and then multiplied by 10.

• Bear spray: you obviously need it, but it costs $50 for a new can at any store ($70 if you buy it at the park), and you can’t take it home. I wish we’d looked into a way to get spray from an outgoing vacationer beforehand, like on the facebook page Anchorage Bear Spray Exchange. We just left ours in the hotel room at the end of the trip. At one point, some other people offered us theirs for free.

• Hiking gear: you are going to encounter highly variable conditions. It'll be at times wet, muddy, you will walk across snow fields, or need to get across a river. We'd strongly suggest wearing waterproof boots/shoes, hiking poles (especially for snow and river crossing), and using gaiters. The gaiters were amazing for keeping snow and rocks out of our boots. Kristen and I had never used gaiters before, but now I'm not sure we'd ever hike without them. We'd also suggest bringing rain pants in addition to normal rain jackets (ponchos are not sufficient). The weather changes on a minute-to-minute basis, and you could be doing a hike in driving rain.

• Strongly suggest reading Michener’s Alaska before going, to get a sense of history and place. Many of the places we visited were in the book, and it helped contextualize what we were seeing. It’s also just a really good book.

• Every single day of this trip, we saw something amazing. There was not a down day, or a meh day.

We have had many questions about our itinerary and how we planned the trip. In general, trough all of our travels we learned that the best bet is: choose a few locations that seem good, book lodging, and then only book those things that require advance planning (e.g. tours that sell out). Here was our general trip layout:

You can see we booked areas generally, but only had 3x pre-planned events (Matanuska glacier tour, Denali NP bus tour, and Kenai Fjords cruise tour). Everything else we did was vaguely roughed out based on what seemed interesting in each area, but ultimately decided on a day-to-day basis.

We would not change the layout. It was correct for our experience.