Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center

One of the top 5 attractions in Anchorage, the Alaska Aviation Museum is special. Each aircraft and artefact holds a fascinating, relevant, meaningful Alaska history back story. As a state with few transportation options over a vast territory, aviation developed a rich and textured legacy. The Alaska Aviation Museum is located on the world’s busiest seaplane base, Lake Hood, at Anchorage International Airport. Open daily 9 am-5 pm during the summer, it’s a substantial museum boasting 4 hangars of exhibits and vintage aircraft (over 25 vintage aircraft in flying condition on display). (Follow website or Facebook for winter hours.) Outdoor exhibits; Restoration hangar (watch volunteers at work restoring vintage aircraft); Control tower (watch seaplanes land and take off, including live real-time radio tower feed); Flight simulators, including full-immersion virtual reality; World-class gift store. Allow 1½ to 2 hours for a visit. https://www.anchorage.net/listings/alaska-aviation-museum/35730/

This Anchorage museum offers an in-depth look at Alaskan Native life—with a big focus on Alaska Natives. Watch dancing, listen to stories, meet carvers and explore recreated winter dwellings. The setting is so small and intimate that visitors are sometimes even invited to join the dancers on stage. You'll see how Alaska Native history is not a collection of artefacts behind glass: this is a living, dynamic culture that you can experience firsthand. Of course, you can also see plenty of crafts and handiwork: beautifully adorned moose hide boots, birch bark baskets, and tunics made from seal hide. Outside, you can check out the life-sized traditional native dwellings—like a Supiaq, a semi-subterranean home built by the Alutiiqs to shelter themselves from the harsh Alaskan climate. Or, enter a Southeast Alaska Longhouse—large wooden constructions with no windows and only a smoke hole at the top—that generally housed several families. Inside you will find four beautifully carved posts that each represent a different culture. Each post is carved and painted with a different theme of respect; respect for family, environment, culture, and self. Aside from the beauty of the ornate posts, it is very unique to be able to experience four cultures in one house. https://www.alaska.org/detail/alaska-native-heritage-center

Alaska's largest museum, the Anchorage Museum tells the real story of the North. The twisting story, the unsuspected story, the many-faceted story- a story that weaves together social, political, cultural, scientific, historic and artistic threads. Explore the full diversity of Alaska Native cultures, including masterworks of Alaska Native art and design from the collections of the Smithsonian Institution. The Art of the North galleries in the museum’s new wing present the museum’s art collection from the perspectives of American art and an international North. Paintings, sculpture, photography, video and other media offer varied perceptions of the Northern landscape and wilderness through historical and contemporary depictions of both land and people. The new Alaska Exhibition tells the story of Alaska through multiple voices and perspectives reflecting the ingenuity, technology, ways of knowing and intimate understanding of the landscape that have allowed people to survive and thrive across the North. The exhibition is organized by 13 themes reflecting essential aspects of life in Alaska, both today and throughout the state’s rich history. These themes reveal the identity of Alaska and its people. Discover Alaska and the Arctic through science. In the 11,000-square-foot Discovery Center, visitors of all ages are introduced to Alaska and the Arctic through technology, interactive installations, artwork, marine-life tanks and more. Space is divided into several distinct areas, each providing an opportunity to learn about our Northern environment. https://www.anchorage.net/listings/anchorage-museum/36698/

The Chugach Mountains create more than a dramatic skyline for Anchorage. They are a playground for outdoor enthusiasts. Combined, Chugach State Park and Chugach National Forest are home to some of the most accessible outdoor adventures in the state. Best of all, some of the top trailheads and access points are just 20 minutes from downtown. Chugach State Park is one of the largest state parks in the nation. To the east of that, Chugach National Forest is the second-largest national forest in the U.S. Together they comprise more than 9,000 square miles of hiking, rafting, biking, ATVing, kayaking and fishing. The most frequently climbed mountain in Alaska, most popular trailheads and more than 60 of the state’s most accessible glaciers are all found in the Chugach. With such a massive range, there are plenty of access points. And ways to enjoy it are as varied as the Chugach landscape. Head north for kayaking on a glacial lake or alpine berry picking. A trip south reveals countless hiking trails tucked into the mountains and amazing glaciers. https://www.anchorage.net/discover/the-chugach/

Sure, you can pan for gold at hundreds of places in Alaska, but very few of these spots let you really work a claim. But at Crow Creek Mine, less than an hour from Anchorage, you’ll learn how to work a pan, and then how to run a creek-side sluice box. That’s because Crow Creek is an operational mine run by a mining family. Search for gold all day, or tour the historic grounds, once one of Alaska’s largest mines. Set in a picturesque valley high in the Chugach Mountains, the site is like a beautiful outdoor museum, with original buildings—the oldest in the Anchorage municipality—and turn-of-the-century mining equipment. Crow Creek Mine has been in operation since 1896 and the start of the Alaska Gold Rush, at one time mining an astounding 700 ounces a month. World War II brought an end to the large-scale mining, but even today, some say that half of the original deposit is still buried in the ground. The very ground you’ll be mining! https://www.alaska.org/detail/crow-creek-mine#map

The Alaska Zoo started in 1969 with one baby elephant named Annabelle that was won in a contest. Since then, it has expanded to include 100 animals across 25 acres of the Anchorage hillside. The zoo has the widest variety of animals native to the state of Alaska as well as a handful of exotics that are part of a great center for education and research that focuses on wildlife conservation and animal rehabilitation. For 50 years, the zoo has been a nonprofit organization serving the wildlife and people of Alaska, as well as visitors to our state. We rely on admissions, donations, gift shop sales, coffee shop purchases and memberships to operate and care for the animals as we receive no city or state funding. The wooded hillside setting allows visitors to get close-up views of the many animals of the north along the naturally wooded boreal forest with gravel pathways. The staff takes pride in maintaining a natural setting for both zoo animals and visitors. https://www.alaska.org/detail/alaska-zoo

A trip to the Alaska Botanical Garden will dispel any thoughts you might have that Alaska’s harsh climate allows only a few hardy species of plants and trees to grow. Step into this wonderland and you’ll be amazed to see the lushness and variety of species that thrive here. Explore the hardy perennials that flourish in Southeast Alaska, like poppies, iris, Asiatic lilies, and roses. Walk through the rock garden, with its 350-plus species of alpine plants. Check out the herb garden, where you can ask volunteers questions when they’re around, and get a sense of Alaskan history in the Anchorage Heritage Garden, a recreation of an old-style local garden where you can see vegetables, annuals, and perennials that were typically grown here in the first half of the 20th century. The produce grown is donated to local food banks. http://www.alaska.org/detail/alaska-botanical-garden

Homesteaders. Entrepreneurs. Photographers. This petite, but very well-done museum in midtown Anchorage offers engaging proof of how the state of Alaska has been shaped - and is still being shaped - by a diverse community. It's open 1 pm - 6 pm Sunday through Thursday year-round (closed Friday and Saturday for the Jewish Sabbath). It takes only 15 minutes to see the exhibits, but you can also watch a 90-minute video about Warren Metzker, a legend of Alaska aviation who captained the Jewish airlift of Yemenite Jews to the newly-created state of Israel. Launched in the summer of 2013, the Alaska Jewish Museum was the brainchild of a group of Alaskans, led by Rabbi Joseph Greenberg of Anchorage’s Alaska Jewish Campus, who wanted to explore the Jewish history and culture that had made an impact on the state of Alaska - as well as the Alaskans who have made an impact on the larger Jewish community. They began by creating and partnering with various exhibits—for example, a 2013 exhibit hosted by the Anchorage Museum of Art about the work of Ruth Gruber. Though not an Alaska native herself, Gruber is a respected Jewish photojournalist who documented the early days of modern Israel and also spent time in Alaska decades ago, capturing valuable images of features and terrain that simply don’t exist anymore. https://www.alaska.org/detail/alaska-jewish-museum

What was it like for a family living in Anchorage in 1915? The Oscar Anderson House Museum, located in Elderberry Park at 5th Avenue and M Street, is the perfect way to find out. Oscar Anderson played a large role in the development of early Anchorage, and his house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. The restoration took place between 1978-1982 with help from the Anderson Family, and particularly their daughter Ruth. The interior was intricately restored to represent its earliest décor. The Museum was opened to the public in the early 1980s and has provided Alaskans and visitors with a chance to experience life in early Anchorage for over 30 years. Tours are available by appointment and regularly from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend. Or come visit during Swedish Christmas, the first two weekends each December, when the house is elaborately decorated and special Swedish treats are available. https://www.alaska.org/detail/oscar-anderson-house

This museum in downtown Anchorage may house artefacts that are hundreds of years old, but its high-calibre collection—and its solid connection to the community—makes it feel like a living museum. Even though the art-gallery-sized space feels intimate, this is the largest private collection of its kind in Alaska. The museum was started by the First National Bank of Alaska in 1976, as a way for the bank’s owners, the Rasmussen family, to create a space for high-quality art and artefacts largely from Alaska's native tribes, such as the Northwest Coast Indian, Athabascan, Aleut, Yupik and Inupiaq tribes. Wells Fargo bought the museum in 2000 and has its own piece of Alaska history to share: the bank and delivery service used to ship gold out from the Klondike during the gold-rush days of the late 1800s and early 1900s, while also bringing in both miners and materials. To date, the museum’s collection now has about 6,000 artefacts and works of art, as well as 4,000 books, in museum branches around the state; this Anchorage flagship, though, has 900 pieces on display, including traditional clothing, a collection of historic Alaskan business tokens, a Bering Sea kayak covered in traditional seal skin, and paintings by such famed Alaskan artists as Sydney Laurence, Fred Machetanz and Eustace Ziegler. https://www.alaska.org/detail/alaska-heritage-museum-at-wells-fargo

Located in the historic 4th Avenue Market Place in downtown Anchorage, the Alaska Experience Theatre’s Earthquake Exhibit and Safe-Quake Theatre experience take you back in time to 1964 on the fateful Good Friday when North America recorded it largest earthquake ever at a magnitude of 9.2. https://www.anchorage.net/listings/alaska-experience-theatre/39062/