Anchorage, Alaska City Guide
For over 20 years, Pamela Lanier's Anchorage, Alaska Travel Guide has been your connection to Anchorage's tourism community with invaluable details on local attractions, restaurants, shopping, museums, history, outdoor recreation and more.
Anchorage Events
 Anchorage’s unique Fur Rendezvous festival, locally known as the Fur Rondy, celebrates the beginning of the end of winter each year. Featuring activities including the Fur Rondy Grand Parade, Snowshoe Softball, Ice Bowling, Fur Rondy Melodrama, and snow sculptures, fireworks, and dogsled races, it was first held in the 1930s with the aim of bringing people together and showing community support. Now running for 18 days from late February to early March, the festival expanded in 2004 to lead in to the ceremonial start of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog race. Less well known though equally exciting is the World Championship Sled Dog Race, a three-day dog sprint event during Fur Rondy featuring mushers covering a 25-mile round-trip that begins and ends at 4th and D streets downtown.
Each March, the world-famous Iditarod dogsled race covers more than 1,150 miles from Anchorage to Nome. Run since 1973, it usually takes 9 to 12 days from start to finish. Mushers and 1,000 dogs dash toward the Bering Sea coast through rugged remote mountain ranges, snow-capped forests, and frozen lakes, dodging bear, and moose while braving the elements.
Anchorage's nights offer one of the world’s best chances to view the Northern Lights, also known as Aurora Borealis: glowing, dancing curtains of light that ripple and sway, fold and unfold, disappear and reappear. Fall, winter and spring are the prime seasons for viewing. The best displays tend to coincide with sub-zero temperatures and moonless skies, often near midnight, and are variable. Patience is recommended if you’re intent on seeing this phenomenon during your Alaska trip. Local Aurora Forecasts are available online or in the weather section of the Anchorage Daily News. Many of the area hotels have a “northern lights wake up call” for guests who indicate that they want to be awakened if the lights are dancing in the night sky.
|
