Inside a Custom 9-Day Alaska Winter Adventure

Every custom itinerary starts with the same question: what does your ideal Alaska trip actually look like? For one recent client, the answer was a 9-day winter adventure built entirely around chasing the Northern Lights - starting in Anchorage, cutting north to Chena Hot Springs, and finishing at a wilderness basecamp built specifically for aurora viewing. Here's a look inside that itinerary, and what goes into building one like it.

Rather than flying or driving to Fairbanks, this itinerary routed north on the Alaska Railroad's Aurora Winter Train - an 11.5-hour daytime journey through Alaska's backcountry in a panoramic railcar, with hot meals served onboard. It's a slower way to cover the distance, but for a trip built around scenery and pace rather than efficiency, the train was the point, not just the transportation.

Chena Hot Springs: Soaking, Snow, and the Aurora Ice Museum

Chena Hot Springs Resort anchored the middle of the trip - unlimited access to the outdoor hot springs and rock lake, a snowmobile tour, a tour through the Aurora Ice Museum (carved from over 1,000 tons of ice and snow harvested on-site, complete with an ice bar), a sled dog kennel visit, and an evening aurora viewing tour up to a ridge with heated yurts to wait out the sky in between light shows. This is also where trip planning gets genuinely logistical: winter activities here run on tight, guide-led schedules, so timing transfers, meals, and gear (snow pants, real winter boots, gloves you don't mind losing a fingertip's worth of dexterity in) around each tour matters more than it would on a summer cruise.

Borealis Basecamp: Sleeping Under the Aurora

The last stretch of the trip was built around a wilderness basecamp designed specifically for Northern Lights viewing - private heated "igloo" cabins with clear domed ceilings, so the aurora is visible from bed without stepping outside. The itinerary layered in a sunset snowcoach tour, a private aurora portrait session with a photographer, dogsledding, a snowmobile tour, and a private one-hour sauna session to close out the trip. An included wake-up call meant no one had to stay awake all night watching the sky themselves - the property does that part for you.

If a trip like this - or something built around your own version of "chasing the aurora" - sounds like what you're after, get in touch and we'll start sketching it out.