Where to stay

Stillpoint Lodge A serene spot on sought-after Halibut Cove, where artists rub shoulders with authors, and Kachemak Bay provides your leisure facilities – from glacier walks to tide pool tours. Great cooking too, at $100 for a four-course dinner including wine. Minimum two-night stay, £493 per double cabin for two nights. Halibut Cove. 001 907 296 2283, stillpointlodge.com

Timber Bay Bed & Breakfast Retired New Yorkers’ Don and Sharron Cotogno run a pleasantly bonkers, themed B&B in their magnificent timberframed home 15 miles east of Homer. Stunning views across the bay. Breakfasts include French toast. Doubles from £56 including breakfast. 51310 Timber Bay Ct, Fritz Creek. 001 907 235 3785, timber-bay.com

Lands End Resort The smartest hotel in town perches precariously at the end of Homer Spit enjoying the full glory of the massive tidal fluctuations, and competing for space with dozens of fishermen. The respected, popular restaurant has nurtured a long line of local chefs. Doubles from £93. Homer Spit, 001 907 235 0400,lands-end-resort.com

Tutka Bay Lodge Carl and Kirsten Dixon’s luxury lodge in remote Tutka Bay delivers on all fronts, from hiking with their live-in expert guides to boat trips to nearby picturesque Seldovia, once the hub of the herring industry – for which Kirsten will provide a posh picnic. From £608pp, including all meals, activities, and transport to and from lodge. Tutka Bay, 001 907 274 2710, withinthewild.com

Travel Information

The currency in Alaska is the US dollar ($1=62p). British passport holders do not need a US visa for tourist trips of fewer than 90 days, providing they hold a ticket for return or onward travel. However, you need to complete an ESTA form online prior to travelling. It costs $14 and is valid for two years. Complete the form at https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov. Alaska is nine hours behind the UK. Summer tourist season in Anchorage lasts from May to September, with long hours of daylight (22 hours on 21 June, the summer solstice) and average daytime temperatures ranging from 13°C to 26°C. In winter, temperatures can fall to -15°C.

GETTING THERE
British Airways (ba.com) operates daily flights from London Heathrow to Anchorage, via Las Vegas.
KLM (klm.com) flies every day from London Heathrow to Anchorage via Minneapolis, Minnesota.
United Airlines (united.com) is launching seasonal flights to Anchorage,from London Heathrow (via New York), from July 2013.

RESOURCES
The Alaska Tourist Office (http://travelalaska.com) has extensive information about travel to Alaska, plus activities, accommodation, food and hiking.

FURTHER READING
The Winterlake Lodge Cookbook Culinary Adventures in the Wilderness by Kirsten Dixon (Alaska Northwest Books, £12.95). Part-Alaska cookery lesson and part-memoir, Dixon’s updated book revolves around life at her remote wilderness lodge, which serves elegant regional cuisine to visitors who arrive by bush plane, sled dog team or snowmobile.

Where to eat

Café Cups Drink Edna Valley chardonnay with clams and mussels in a Champagne sauce, and oysters baked with feta and chorizo. Then brace yourself for the fruit-with-everything main courses (an Alaskan thing) – king salmon with a raspberry and chipotle dipping sauce, yellowtail snapper with a cherry and mushroom sauce. From £34. Homer, 162 West Pioneer Avenue. 001 907 235 8330, cafecups.net

The Saltry Marian Beck’s enviably located eatery suspended high above remote Halibut Cove on a weathered, stilted boardwalk. Eclectic, in a word – from Korean shrimp poke to Scandinavian-style pickled salmon and Mexican-influenced halibut ceviche. From £25. Ismailof Island, Halibut Cove. 001 907 226 2424, halibut-cove-alaska.com/saltry.htm

Homer Brewing Company The microbrewery was opened in 1996 by a homebrew cooperative and has been oiling locals with its beers and seasonal brews ever since. Most stop by to pick up a few bottles, but you can linger and drink while taking brewer Stephen McCasland’s fermentation tour. Beers from £3. Homer, 1411 Lake Shore Drive. 001 907 235 3626, homerbrew.com

Two Sisters Bakery By day an ace bakery (the signature brown focaccia sandwiches are a must) and the place to go for Sunday brunch. By night it’s a clever restaurant where chef Carrie Thurman uses techniques such as ‘spherification’ – try the home-made ginger beer ‘spheres’ on raw oysters. ‘Dinners are small so we can experiment,’ says Thurman. From £28. Homer, 233 East Bunnell Avenue. 001 907 235 2280, twosistersbakery.net

The Homestead Restaurant Ask a local to name the best restaurant in Homer and invariably he or she will recommend this one. Sup on fresh local oysters, and choose steamed Alaska king salmon served in a butter sauce, or halibut from the bay topped with a green peppercorn beurre rouge. Old school. From £44. Homer, Mile 8.2 East End Road. 001 907 235 8723, homesteadrestaurant.net

Sunrise Inn Café Rub shoulders with logging truckers and white-water rafters at this satisfying slice of Americana en route from Anchorage to Homer. Choose a short stack of feather-light pancakes or have a blow out on the home-made meatballs. From £3 for pancakes. Mile 45 Sterling Highway. 001 907 595 1222, alaskasunriseinn.com

Captain Patties Fish House Eat Kachemak Bay oysters and deep-fried halibut at this unashamedly touristy spot on the beach on Homer Spit, where bald eagles brush right by the deck and fishing charters bounce through choppy waters. From £22. 4241 Homer Spit Road. 001 907 235 5135

Food Glossary

Food and Travel Review

It takes 15 minutes to drive the length of Homer Spit – the longest ocean-fringed road on earth. The surrounding mountains make it seem more vulnerable still; weather-boarded homes and businesses, many raised on stilts to accommodate the huge tidal fluctuations, cling to the narrow finger of land at the mercy of the elements.

At the most extreme, we’re talking earthquakes. The last big one, in 1964, shook the region so hard that half of the spit disappeared into the sea. Tsunami-warning devices, set out strategically, act as a constant reminder. If you like living on the edge, Homer Spit is the place to come.

Homer is a gentle five-hour drive south of Anchorage; you’re not long out of town before you reach the jagged mountains of the Kenai Peninsula, where forests give way to alpine tundra, and peaks are reflected in water lily-filled lakes. You’ll share the purple lupin-lined roads with logging trucks and lumbering trailers – and, if you’re lucky, the odd bear or moose. As you hug the final bend of the Sterling Highway on the final approach into Homer, the view of Kachemak Bay will stop you in your tracks.

Glaciers glint in the sunlight, volcanoes shimmer in the distance. Homer itself is a gentler place of white yarrow and goldenrod-filled meadows that tumble down to empty beaches, with cosy timberframed homes breaking up the landscape.

The road only reached the ‘Cosmic Hamlet by the Sea’ (Homer’s unofficial name – that or ‘The End of Road’, depending on who you talk to) in 1953. Since then, artists and fishermen, hippies and homesteaders, have all congregated in this idiosyncratic place. Summer is the best time to visit – unless snow and ice are your thing.

Ice is certainly Don McNamara’s thing. The Californian, pushing 60, flips through a photo album showing pictures of him surfing. Not for vanity’s sake, you understand, but to prove that he does actually surf out here in the middle of winter. Icicles hang off McNamara’s sideburns as he rides the crest of a wave, his battered black wet suit framed by the monster mountain range beyond, blanketed in snow. Locals call him the Iceman, though his behaviour is not unusual around these parts. Homer – and Alaska – is full of surprises.

McNamara runs a commercial kitchen garden in Homer with his wife Donna, supplying local restaurants and the weekly farmers’ market. You would think that not much grows here considering its northerly latitude and long, dark winters. Even during the short season, it struggles to top 18°C during July and August. But it’s amazing what you can do with a bit of plastic sheeting.

The McNamaras have three high tunnels – basically plastic greenhouses – squeezed onto their ocean-side plot. ‘My biggest passion is extending the season – and anyway, I’d rather look at potatoes than flowers,’ Don says with a grin, pointing out the various squashes and tomatoes, micro greens and soft fruits. Before we leave, McNamara presents us with a couple of frozen moose steaks. ‘We catch all of our own food – Dall sheep and mountain goat are the best,’ he says. Not that you’ll necessarily get to try any, sadly. Selling wild meat commercially is forbidden unless you are an Alaska Native – Inupiaq, Yupik, Aleut or Tlingit, to name a few.

It turns out that high tunnels are abundant in Homer, with sustainability the key to living here. There’s even an organised group, Sustainable Homer, run by a passionate local, Kyra Wagner. Like McNamara and his wife Donna (from California and Boston respectively), who came for a kayaking holiday and never went back, the Colorado-born Wagner met her Minnesota-born partner here while she was visiting a friend and decided to stay. It’s a common refrain you’ll hear from Homer folk.

It turns out that high tunnels are abundant in Homer, with sustainability the key to living here. There’s even an organised group, Sustainable Homer, run by a passionate local, Kyra Wagner. Like McNamara and his wife Donna (from California and Boston respectively), who came for a kayaking holiday and never went back, the Colorado-born Wagner met her Minnesota-born partner here while she was visiting a friend and decided to stay. It’s a common refrain you’ll hear from Homer folk.

‘Alaska does that to you, it seduces you,’ she says, gazing across the bay at the dramatic snow-capped mountains. Wagner shows us the root cellar underneath her wooden, shingle-clad home. It has shelves stacked with glass jars stuffed with pickled pumpkin, yellow beans, golden beetroot, plus various jams, jellies and chutneys. There’s even a canning machine, alongside a freezer that will be groaning with fish by the end of the summer, and which will see the Wagners through the long winter months. Every Alaskan has a freezer full of fish and game.

Homer is also known as the halibut-fishing capital of the world – it says so right there on the rickety wooden sign as you drive into town. Fishermen (and it is mostly men) gather with their bait and tackle at the end of Homer Spit in the hope of catching the prized white fish, though you need to venture into deeper water for the bigger specimens. The average size of the halibut catch here is 9kg, but many of them reach 180kg or more.

Apart from the jaw-droppingly lovely scenery, the seafood is another reason many come to Alaska. There was a short-lived herring boom that began in the early 1900s, but now it’s all about lingcod and yelloweye rockfish, black sea bass and pollock, greenling and Irish lords, with halibut and salmon fishing the biggest draw. Salmon farming is a dirty word in Alaska – a ban is even written into the constitution. They might encourage production by releasing eggs upstream, but that’s as far as it goes. Alaska salmon is a designated organic product that has made waves the world
over, and the distinctive, firm, dark-red flesh of sockeye salmon probably sits on a supermarket shelf near you. It’s quite something else, though, to eat it fresh out of the water.

Kirsten Dixon walks down towards the wooden dock to greet her local fish supplier. He’s managed to bag her a 15kg king salmon, the largest and scarcest of the five Alaskan salmon species. It’s by far the most coveted, with its distinctive black spots running along its back and tail fin. ‘They’re still not really running yet – this is the only one I’ve caught this month,’ he moans, handing over the precious booty destined for our dinner plates.

Kirsten is the charismatic chef-proprietor of Tutka Bay Lodge, about half an hour by boat across Kachemak Bay (or five minutes by floatplane) from Homer Spit – though you could just as well be thousands of miles from anywhere. The piercing high-pitched cries of a dozen bald eagles echo overhead; the surrounding towering spruce trees are crested by as many nests. And that’s it, pretty much, for noise. The peace is overwhelming. Well, almost… There’s the gentle clatter of pans coming from the main lodge where Kirsten’s team of chefs, including her daughter Mandy, are cooking up a storm.

Cordon Bleu-trained, author of several cookery books, and contributor to numerous publications, Kirsten is a well-known chef around these parts. She left Anchorage for the lodge life in the early 1980s after her husband founded a river and ski-touring company. They now run three remote lodges, with Tutka Bay the flagship property. Alaska has a history of remote lodging. During pre-aircraft days there were roadhouses dotted every 20 miles or so along the various trails used by dog teams which delivered the post. Some were little more than shacks, others more comfortable, but it doesn’t get much classier than Tutka Bay Lodge.

‘I think that the Alaskan personality is expressed through the cuisine,’ says Kirsten, neatly filleting a black cod, which we’ll have for lunch with a miso glaze, homage to one-time Anchorage resident, the legendary Nobu Matsuhisa, who created the dish. ‘There is a self-sufficiency to it that comes from our heritage. Alaskans are a hard-working, pioneering, independent bunch,’ she adds.

‘We were once owned by Russia and you can still see evidence of that in the cooking – in the beetroot and the cabbage, and root vegetables that we use. But a lot of Scandinavians settled here, too, and you can see their influence in the abundant use of sour cream, in our pickling heritage, and in our love of wild berries.

‘But we also share the Pacific Ocean. So that means there are strong links with Japan, who we have historically traded with, and there are influences from the Philippines, plus a lot of Koreans have settled over here. Not forgetting, of course, our Alaska Native culture – grilled salmon is our national dish.’

Sea kelp also makes a regular appearance on the menus at Tutka Bay Lodge. ‘We dry it on a rack in the garden and then crumble it into salads,’ says Kirsten, who turns bull kelp into a pickle and uses fiddlehead ferns as a garnish. Foraging is a way of life for the average Alaskan. Nature here is packed with unusual flavours.

‘Try putting bladderwrack [seaweed] into a dehydrator – it tastes exactly like Cheesos!’ laughs Lucas Thonig, Stillpoint Lodge’s wilderness guide (and yoga teacher), holding up a fistful of the kelp on the beach at the start of the Saddle Trail hike.

Stillpoint Lodge is owned by former airline pilot Jim Thurston and his artist wife Jan, who settled in Halibut Cove for a quiet life, creating a retreat that focuses on spirituality and creativity. This ethos extends to the food, thanks to the imagination of Lucas’s wife Beka, Stillpoint’s executive chef, who worked wonders with our gift of moose meat, creating a bourguignon. ‘It needs lots of slow cooking,’ comes the advice.

Lucas’s Saddle Trail winds up towards the Grewingk Glacier, across Kachemak Bay to the east of Homer. Clutching a can of bear spray (the information sheet in our room advises ‘if you are attacked – fight back’), with heads protected by mosquito nets, we tramp through damp, verdant spruce forests, dodging the coyote and bear scat, and marvelling at the size of the moose prints – though that’s as close as we get to anything on four legs.

We gather wild geraniums which we’ll later add to a salad, nibble highbush cranberries and columbine, with its nectar-rich flowers, and suck on orange, tulip-shaped, rusty menziesia oozing honeyed droplets – a bear’s favourite snack. Lucas then pumps up an inflatable canoe and we zip across the lake, skirting house-sized chunks of ice wobbling disconcertingly on their axis, to the towering glacier head that spills out of the 1,610sq km Harding Icefield.

The tide is high when we skit back in the boat across Halibut Cove to Stillpoint, passing a group of preening sea otters and rows of oyster beds (there are 14 oyster farms in the bay, the only fish farming allowed). We also roll past large wooden summer homes, many connected by the area’s trademark raised boardwalks.

It was Clem and Diana Tillion that put Halibut Cove on the map after they moved to the area in the 1940s. Logging threatened to decimate the area, and Clem, as State Senator, used his influence to turn the area into a National Park. And if you thought Homer was arty, then Halibut Cove is out there – sculptors, painters, printmakers and photographers regularly hang out here during the summer months, exhibiting in Ismailof Island’s smart little gallery, where the Tillion family has their home.

Today, Clem Tillion’s daughter, Marian Beck, oversees things here. An accomplished artist, she lives on the island full-time, one of the 20 or so people who brave it throughout the winter months. The ‘Danny J’ is her lifeline. This 70-year-old renovated wooden boat ferries visitors between Homer Spit and Ismailof Island, where Marian has The Saltry, her magical restaurant and bar. Perched high above the receding low tide on the boardwalk, Homer-brewed beer in one hand, a forkful of locally caught halibut ceviche in the other, watching bald eagles swoop into the quiet, mountain-fringed cove, this is one heck of a dining experience.

The name Alaska derives from the Aleut word Alaxsxaq, meaning ‘mainland’. The tribes migrated over the Bering Strait land bridge some 35,000 years ago, followed much later by waves of 18th-century European explorers – first the British, then the French, before the Russian whalers and fur-traders hit town and claimed it for themselves. With Russia’s finances in disarray after the Napoleonic Wars, the United States stepped in to help swell its coffers by purchasing the territory for a paltry $7.2m – less than two cents an acre. They were keen to get their hands on the whales… then the salmon, the gold and, finally, the oil.

Once the Alcan Highway was finished, connecting the territory with the rest of the USA, Alaska became, on 3 January 1959, America’s 49th state. It’s still rather surreal to see the constant reminders of the Russian heritage in the churches and villages – even in some elderly people’s dress. It’s not the only element of the state that appears untouched by time. Remote, unspoilt, Alaska is not easy (or, for that matter, cheap) to get to. But there are few places on earth that offer this level of grandeur and beauty.

DON’T MISS

Brown bear safari You can’t come to Alaska without flying in a floatplane, nor can you miss a look at brown bears – your main competition for king salmon – close up. With an estimated 4,000-strong population of bears in Katmai National Park alone, there is plentiful viewing. From £384pp. Bald Mountain Air Service, Homer. 001 907 235 7969, baldmountainair.com

Halibut and salmon fishing Daniel Donich is your man – he came to Alaska from Washington ‘because the fish-to-person ratio was right’. Daniel offers all kinds of fishing, including halibut, but salmon is his thing, and he’ll talk you through all five Alaska species. From £156pp. 001 907 235 3843, homerfishing.com

Glacier Lake Trail It’s five kilometres through verdant, wild flower-filled forest on the Saddle Trail to the Grewingk Glacier Lake in the Kachemak Bay State Wilderness Park, once inhabited by the indigenous Chugach Eskimo. Alaska’s first state park, designated in 1970, has almost 162,000 hectares to play in, with the glacier a highlight.

Bear Creek Winery Get a new respect for fruit wine at this slick 60,000- bottle operation run by Bill and Dorothy Fry. They started with raspberry wine and now produce 25 wines that make the best of Alaska’s renowned soft fruits. The gooseberry is an intriguing match for the local oysters. From £14. Homer, Bear Creek Drive. 001 907 235 8484, bearcreekwinery.com