Two PERFECT days in Hatcher Pass (Alaska) | Reed Lakes, Independence Mine, April Bowl, & MORE!

If you missed our last video, we're spending a few days hiking and exploring Hatcher Pass, which is a gorgeous area in the Talkeetna Mountains just north of Anchorage. We just spent the last two days backpacking the Gold Mint Trail to the Mint Hut, plus some additional lakes which had its difficult moments with tons of mud, water to walk through, and aggressive wasps, but the insanely epic and jaw-dropping views were more than enough to make up for it. And for our final two days in the Hatcher Pass area, we're going to try to experience even more of this gorgeous area, including conquering some day hikes and exploring an old mine, and we're starting with the hike to Reed Lakes. Reed Lakes is one of the most popular hikes here in Hatcher Pass, and it's about 10 miles round trip and has about 2,300 feet of elevation gain, so it's definitely not as long as the hike we did in our last video, but it still should be pretty challenging. We're about a mile and a half into the trail, and we've just come up this little valley here, and from the second we started this hike, we have had sweeping views of all these mountains around us. This trail has been a much different experience than the one we did, the Goldman Trail. I haven't had to touch a single bush. My feet are dry. Also down in the valley here along the trail is there's some beaver dams, and I'm pretty sure we can spot a beaver swimming across the top of the water. While the hike is pretty easy at the beginning and pretty well maintained, about two and a half miles in or so, you'll come across all these boulders. So we have to climb up these boulders, and I believe there are more boulders later on too, so it definitely gets a bit more rugged. This boulder area has been a little confusing and a little hard to follow. We've kind of been crossing back and forth across this stream, not totally sure where to go. There are some big rocks you have to climb over out here. Oh yeah. Wow. Yeah, look at that. Wow. This first lake is beautiful, gorgeous, stunning, all of the amazing adjectives. It's kind of hard to come up with words to describe how beautiful Hatcher Pass is, how beautiful Alaska is. We're running out of adjectives, so sorry we say the same things over and over, but man is it breathtaking out here. But there's another lake up a bit behind this really cool looking waterfall. Since we got here pretty early, we're going to try to book it up there to continue escaping the crowds and then enjoy this lake a bit more on the way down. We made it, look at this. Both of these lakes are just so incredibly blue and we got such a nice sunny day. Most of July has been really, really rainy here in Alaska, so we got the perfect weather the last few days out here. It's just making that lake pop with that blue color. We're going to start making our way back because we still have another hike that we want to do today. And before coming to Hatcher Pass, we were kind of torn if we should just do Reed Lakes or the hike to the Mint Hut, or if we should do both. And we ultimately decided to do both and we're so happy with that decision. But if you're curious how we'd compare the two, we would say the hike to Reed Lakes from start to finish was just much more enjoyable. Much more of an actual trail. Even the boulder part was super, super fun. A little challenging, but really fun. Whereas the Mint Hut trail was just kind of annoying and difficult the whole way. Lots of mud and water. And the views here at Reed Lakes are 10 out of 10. So spectacular. But we will say the views from the Mint Hut and those other lakes we hiked to were probably an 11 out of 10. They just completely blew us away. So in the end, we're so happy we did both. But if you can only do one, I think Reed Lakes is probably the right decision because it's just more enjoyable and the views are still spectacular. We originally planned to only do a couple things while we were here in the Hatcher Pass area, but the more we researched, the more we found that we just couldn't pass up. And so it might sound a little crazy to go on another hike today, but we just want to see and experience as much as we can while we're here. So right now we're going to head over to the Summit Lake area and hike the April Bowl trail. So this hike is pretty short. It's only 2.2 miles round trip, but it gains over 800 feet of elevation. So it's going to be real steep. This short little hike is packing quite the punch. There's a couple lakes down here that we didn't even know about until we stumbled upon them. There were some paragliders gliding through the air, hopping these mountains behind us, and then look at this scene behind me. Just this huge semicircle of mountains back here. Wow. Oh yeah, this is a leg burner. We could be a hundred percent wrong, but we're going to pretend that we're right. We think that is Denali over there. Do not let the length of this hike fool you. Despite being short, it does not skimp on the mountain views. We have 360 degree mountain views right now. It is a pretty hard hike. It is extremely steep, but you don't have to go all the way to the top to have amazing views. I'd say about a quarter of the way up, halfway up, you can still see a good amount of the views, not all of them. So there are definitely options if you're not up for this full challenge, because that kind of kicked our butts a bit. But for the rest of the day, I'm actually going to go fish at Summit Lake, which is back down the hill, back where we started. It stopped with grayling, so that should be a lot of fun. And then we're going to pop into Wasilla for a much needed shower. Yeah, much needed. At the Planet Fitness before we come back out to this area tomorrow morning to explore more. My first real fish. I caught one. I finally caught one. I finally caught like a real good size fish. Shout out to Walmart coming in clutch, even here in Alaska. This morning, we're giving our bodies a little bit of a break from hiking and we're going to check out the Independence Mine State Historical Park in Hatcher Pass, which has a bunch of really cool old mining buildings to explore. Mining in this area began when Robert Lee Hatcher discovered and staked the first load gold claim mine in 1906 and many others soon followed. However, load mining was very expensive, so operators merged to reduce expenses and pool resources. What is now known as the Independence Mine actually started out as two different mining companies, which combined in 1938, making it the second most productive hard rock gold mine in Alaska. At its peak in 1941, it had about 200 employees, blasted almost 12 miles of tunnels, and recovered enough gold that in today's money would be worth about $18 million. The gold mine closed for good in 1951 and it became Independence Mine State Historical Park in 1980. And since then, the state has been working to restore the buildings for visitors to check out. Y'all know we love mines, so we are very excited to check out this park. We have visited a handful of mines in our travels. Last summer in the San Juan Mountains, we actually got to ride in a cart into a mine, and then we also explored a ghost town by jeep, and then we also went inside of a mine by foot on the Keweenaw Peninsula. But this is probably the coolest and most impressive mining facility we've ever visited. You have all of these really well-restored buildings behind me that are this really cool gray color with red trim, but then you have this contrast of this mill building just completely in shambles. And then don't even get me started on the scenery around this mine. This would not have been a bad place to work. We were hoping to be able to go into the buildings, but minus the mine manager's house, which is actually the visitor center now, you have to pay $15 to go on a tour and they'll take you inside all the buildings. So we're just enjoying walking around, checking them out from the outside, and creeping in the windows, seeing what we can see. You know, as one does, creeping in windows. As I said earlier, this would not be a bad place to work despite how hard mining actually is. And then I read what they got to eat here, and I'm sold. I'm coming to live and work here. They had a typical dinner included of steaks, pork chops, roast potatoes, and several kinds of vegetables. And they had pies, cakes, cookies. That's dessert. They had three meals a day, and it sounds like they were eating like kings here. I'm in. Sign me up. Besides the mining buildings in the park, there are some trails to check out. And for the rest of the day, we're going to hike to Gold Cord Lake, which is about a mile and a half round trip with about 500 feet of elevation gain. As we mentioned yesterday, even these short hikes provide amazing scenery. This is in the shortest one and the easiest one we've done here in Hatcher Pass. And just look at this. This is amazing. In a lot of places, you got to hike a lot of miles to get to something like this. We think we made it pretty clear in our Hatcher Pass videos how much we loved it out here. But in case we didn't, we loved it out here. This area had come highly recommended to us, and we've been looking forward to it for over a year. And all these jagged, rocky mountains and gorgeous blue lakes totally exceeded our expectations. It is just so magical out here, even on a rainy day like today. But we have hiked over 30 miles over the last four days. And to be honest, we are pretty exhausted. So we're going to head down to the Anchorage area to treat ourselves to a little spot called Taco King that we loved. And also, head back to Wild Scoops, which we shared quite a few videos ago, and we loved it. So excited for that. Then we're going to knock out some chores, rest up a little bit before we hit the road, and start heading east. Come on. You got a bit. Chicken dance.