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.

Anchorage: A Private Start

The trip opened with two nights in Anchorage, timed around a private, docent-led tour of the Anchorage Museum - a one-hour deep dive into the state's art, history, and Native cultures with a guide all to yourself, rather than joining a public group tour. From there, a full-day glacier cruise through Prince William Sound filled the second day: temperate rainforest scenery, tidewater glaciers, and a lunch included onboard. Layers were non-negotiable - waterproof outerwear and closed-toe shoes, since the same rain that soaks the deck is what feeds the glaciers.

North by Rail

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.

What a Trip Like This Actually Involves

Custom land packages like this one typically bundle tours, transfers, lodging, and most meals into one price, with personal expenses - meals out, souvenirs, gratuities - budgeted separately (a rough rule of thumb is $1,000-$1,200 per person for a trip of this length). What it doesn't include is the planning: sequencing nine days of tours, transfers, and lodging changes across three or four different properties so nothing overlaps or leaves a gap, while still leaving room to enjoy each stop instead of just checking it off.

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.