Road trip from Anchorage to Valdez (Eklutna Lake, Lion’s Head Hike, & GORGEOUS views!)

This drive is the best stretch of drive that we have done in Alaska. Just when you think it can't get any better, it gets better. We've been in Alaska for almost two months now and we've mostly been hanging around the Anchorage and Kenai Peninsula area but for our final couple weeks in Alaska we're gonna head east. Today we're going to be heading to the town of Valdez and there are a couple of different ways that you can get there. You can either drive, which is about five and a half hours from Anchorage, or you can take a ferry from Whittier along the Alaska Marine Highway, which is just under six hours. We're going to be driving there along the beautiful Glenn and Richardson highways and to break up the drive a little bit we're going to make a few stops along the way and first and quite possibly most importantly, coffee. While driving around Anchorage you'll notice many coffee stands which are also very popular in our former home state of Washington and this morning we stopped by Goldie's Coffee Roasters, which is owned by two local sisters who wanted to raise the bar on drive-thru espresso and what makes them pretty unique from the other stands is they actually roast their own coffee. We both got, as you can see, two 20 ounce Americanos. This has four shots of espresso in it because we've got a big day ahead of us. We have made it back to Chugach State Park, which if you missed one of our earlier Alaska videos we spent a few days hiking around the park and sharing a bit more about it, but today instead of hiking we're gonna hit the water in our kayak at Oklutna Lake. I'm always so scared I'm gonna flip it when I get in. Oklutna Lake is named after Oklutna, which is a nearby Alaskan native village and it's actually one of the oldest inhabited areas in the Anchorage area going back over 800 years with the Dena'ina Athabaskans calling this area home. The lake itself is fed by the Oklutna Glacier and is a major water source for the city of Anchorage and a source of power via a hydroelectric dam. This morning I don't know how it could get any better. It is so calm out here, the water is so blue, there is no wind, little bit of cloud cover but mostly sunny and we are just gliding on this lake. Besides kayaking you can also hike or bike around the lake and our original plan was to hike up to Pepper Peak which is one of these peaks up here. I'm not totally sure which one but it has an elevation gain of 4,500 feet which is pretty intense and we've already had a very intense last few weeks here in Alaska with hiking so we just decided to take it easy today especially with all the hours we have to drive ahead and I don't think it gets any more relaxing than this. This is just what we needed. We now have a two-hour drive to our next stop on the Glen Highway but we have a feeling it's going to take a little bit longer than that because the views on this next stretch of the drive are incredible. We drove this stretch of the road when we came out here to the Matanuska Glacier and we have been so excited to show you guys this area. You are just surrounded by mountains the entire time going by the Matanuska River. It is a stunning drive. Yeah, I think we're at hour three of our two-hour drive. It's impossible to not stop along the way. They have a bunch of different pull-outs along the road so they make it very easy to stop and soak up the views but we're getting very very close to our next stop. We made it to Glacier View, Alaska to hike the Lion's Head Trail. It's about 2.1 miles round trip with about a thousand feet of elevation gain. It's going to take us to the top of this peak right behind me. We read that it's supposed to look like a lion's head laying down but we're not 100% sure that we see it. Besides its shape, another unique thing about this hike is that it's actually on private property owned by AT&T and you have to call them and tell them that you're going to be doing the hike and get permission. There's a number on the sign right here but the only problem is we have Verizon and we have no cell service right now so I'm not sure if we can even call them. We do have an AT&T hotspot in the van but we tried calling each other. We were testing it out to see if we can call on the hotspot wi-fi and it wasn't working so I don't know. We'll give this a shot. I didn't read anything saying like you have to have AT&T for this to work. I read that there was cell service here. Should we go get our hotspot and try that again? Hotspot to the rescue? We'll see. It's dialing. Hi, we're trying to hike the Lion's Head hike in Glacier View, Alaska. Perfect. Awesome, thank you so much. That was easy. She just asked for a little bit of information, name, how many of us and then she told us where to park and that we need to call when we're done. So I guess you do need to have AT&T to do this hike or have an AT&T hotspot because we do not have Verizon cell service out here so that's something very good to know because we could have been in a bit of a pickle. An adventure. Wow. Yeah, this trail is really really steep. We're basically gaining a thousand feet in a mile but the first part was along a road and it was relatively flat. It had some incline so it gets extra steep at the end but the worst part is it's really really muddy and there's not much to group on to so we're having to hold on to trees and just anything we can. There's apparently also a bunch of different ways to get up. We saw a couple different routes that kind of all braid together so we just read that anyone will pretty much take you where you need to go so maybe we'll find a better one for the way down. That was the longest mile of my life but heck yes this view. This hike overlooks the Matanuska Glacier which we went ice climbing on about a month ago and if you missed that video definitely go back and check that one out because it's one of the craziest and most fun things we have ever done. The Matanuska Glacier is 27 miles long and it's the largest glacier in the U.S. that can be reached by vehicle. Being on the glacier is one of the coolest experiences ever but seeing it from this vantage point just really puts it into perspective just how big it is. The view from up here is wild. You have in every single direction and what makes it really interesting is all the mountains look totally different from each other. We have really really snowy ones over here by the glacier. We have ones back over here that kind of have orange streaks through them. These ones over here kind of have like a softer rock appearance and then the ones over here are super jagged. It's just such an interesting view. There's just so much to look at but we are kind of running a lot. Everything's taking us a lot longer than we thought it would today and we still have three hours of driving ahead so we're going to book it down and we're going to put the camera away because I have a feeling we're going to be using all of our limbs to get down. Hi, I just want to let you guys know we got down from the lion's head hike safely. Awesome, thank you so much. Right. As Catherine mentioned we have about three hours left until we get to Valdez but what's exciting is from here on it's going to be all new territory for us but in order to not get there by midnight we're going to start picking up the pace because we got to make some miles. We're now on the Richardson Highway which will take us all the way to Valdez and we pulled off at this overlook that overlooks Willow Lake and then the Wrangell Mountains off in the distance but they're covered in rain clouds right now but still beautiful but we figured this would be a perfect spot to make dinner, a fancy steak dinner because it's after seven and we are hungry. Just kidding, it turns out our steak went bad so we are going to have a fancy chicken dinner and I'm going to spice it up with this tomato garlic and basil McCormick spice pack. That's really good. This drive is insane just when you think it can't get any better it gets better our jaws have just been like on the floor the last hour holy cow you know what it worked out really well that we're getting here so late because we have the most gorgeous sunset lighting right now. I'm starting to think that this drive the stretch from where we made dinner to Valdez is the best stretch of drive that we have done in Alaska. This is for sure the best. We're getting much closer to Valdez but we're about to drive through an area that we plan to explore in our next video so we don't want to spoil the views quite yet so we're going to fast forward through this part of the drive but stay tuned for our next video where we'll hopefully show you all the views if it's not raining. I don't know how we managed to make a five and a half hour drive 15 and a half hours it is 10 40 p.m right now we did not think we'd be getting here this late it was such a long day but it was so beautiful and so much fun. We are so exhausted but we are so excited to explore this area in a couple days if we can see the views the forecast the weather forecast does not look very good so cross your fingers for us that we can enjoy all of this beauty around here without all the rain I will pump you up. I am Hans. I'm Franz and we want to pump you up!