Exploring Talkeetna, Alaska (a CHARMING, quirky town!) | FOOD, fishing, & trying birch syrup!

After spending four amazing days in Denali National Park, we have headed about two and a half hours south to Talkeetna, Alaska. Talkeetna is an artistic outdoorsy and creative town that is known as the gateway to Denali because it's a popular launching off point for most climbing expeditions of Denali as well as other fun excursions. We'll tell you more about the history in a bit but first we're gonna go get some coffee from a local spot called Conscious Coffee. Just like the rest of this town, which we'll show you more of in a bit, this place has so much character. It just has this wooden artsy vibe, tons of outdoor seating and we're keeping it simple this morning. We just got two Americanos, 16 ounces because we need caffeine. The coffee was delicious but what made the experience even better is that we chatted with the local for basically the entire time we were there. We were chatting with him about travel and where he's been and where we've been and then earlier today we chatted with someone who's here working for the summer and got to learn all about the seasonal work that happens here and while this town is so charming and it's so much fun to walk around, just getting to make those connections with people has just made our time here so much more meaningful. Talkeetna's history goes back thousands of years with the Denaina living and hunting in the area calling it food is stored river or the river of plenty in their native language. However over the years the area now known as Talkeetna began to catch the interest of others. In 1905 gold was discovered in the Cache Creek region west of Talkeetna which brought prospectors to the area and in 1915 it was selected as a district headquarters for the Alaska Engineering Commission as they built the Alaska Railroad which caused the area to boom with the population growing to 1,000. However over time the population declined but as tourism grew in Alaska so did Talkeetna and it has become a popular tourist destination especially because of its proximity to Denali. But despite its popularity Talkeetna has retained much of its early Alaska historic charm. It has log cabins, a roadhouse, and clapboard storefronts is what many people think of when they picture a small town Alaskan community. In fact it was even the inspiration for the 90s tv show Northern Exposure. Good kisser Mr. Moose, don't tell my husband. We normally try to keep politics out of our videos but we can't ignore the leader of the political party here in Talkeetna. Their mayor is a cat, not a person named cat, an actual cat. It first started back in 1997 with Mayor Stubbs who reigned over the town from 1997 to 2017 and then when he passed away he passed the torch to Mayor Denali. We may be team dog but we can't deny that a cat as a mayor is very unique and very cute. We heard that he hangs out at Nagley's store so we're gonna go try to find him. Here kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty where are you? We haven't found the mayor but we found the mayor's sister. Her name is Aurora. She's very very beautiful too but we're gonna keep looking for the mayor. Looking for you, where's the mayor? We were given a lead from the people working at Nagley's that when he's not there and not right in town he might be at this place called Mahay's. He's a very very busy man to track down. We're giving up on finding Denali for now but maybe we'll have some better luck later. What do you think of the mayor being a cat? We came over to the Talkeetna Riverfront Park which is just off the main street just outside of town and right here behind me is where three glacial rivers all converge. You got the Talkeetna, the Susitna, and the Chalitna rivers. Another cool thing about this park is on a clear sunny day you can even see Denali way in the distance there. We've got the sunny day and we kind of have a clear day. It got a little hazy recently but we can see the tippy top of Denali over there. Flight scene tours of Denali are a really popular thing to do from here in Talkeetna but one they're kind of expensive, two I'm pretty terrified of small planes, and three we feel kind of weird leaving Kona while we go up in a small plane so we're skipping it this time but it's definitely something to look into if you're visiting. Despite being a small town Talkeetna has tons of amazing places to eat and while we wish we could try them all we came to a spot we've been eyeing for a very long time Talkeetna spinach bread. It's a food truck known for its spinach bread which is spinach, a blend of cheeses, whole chunks of garlic on there you can see on wood-fired bread. Oh wow so much garlic oh yeah man could eat that every day. There is so much cheese on there it's salty got the spinach in there that gives it makes you feel like you're eating a salad and then the bottom so crispy man nice crisp on there but also you know what I'm gonna say already pillowy in there look at that oh man again I could eat this every day I would never get tired of this and then the garlic of course the roasted garlic on top garlic is my favorite flavor of all time if something calls for like three cloves I put in 12 so garlic bread's one of the best inventions ever the bread is like almost like airy it's so crispy but airy but also pillowy as Adam said melted cheese look at this melted cheese on bread with garlic how do you go wrong this is like an elevated just like garlic bread I could eat this every day too we also got their Brazilian limeade which has condensed milk in it which is why it looks so creamy and we had hoped to get their blueberry rhubarb crisp which comes with homemade whipped cream but unfortunately they're all sold out and they won't have more till later and we won't be here later I think we need to get a second because I want to drink all of this it has such a like fresh lime flavor but it's not overpowering but it's that condensed milk that makes it just creamy it's kind of a warmer day at least for Alaska at least from what we think of when we think of Alaska so this is so refreshing oh yeah dang that's again like light and refreshing a little bit of citrus in there it goes well with this the salty savoriness of the bread they're smart and salty they're smart here they have a good combo going tonight we are staying by Montana Creek which I guess you could say we are achieving peak van life because we are living in a van down by a river and I live in a van down by the river I guess it's technically a creek but I'm going to take advantage of it because I'm going to fly fish for the first time here in Alaska I bought a fly rod a couple months ago in Bend Oregon at Bend Fly Shop and I bought the Reddington Path 2 rod and reel combo it's nine feet long and it's a five weight I've only fly fished one time and that was when we met up with our friends Dan and Aaron in Montana we didn't catch anything that day and I've actually never caught a fish in my entire life to fish in Alaska you have to buy a license and the sport fishing license for someone who's a non-resident is a hundred dollars per year but to fish for salmon here in Alaska you have to purchase a 75 stamp but I'm not going for salmon I read that an easier species to catch here in Alaska is the arctic grayling so that's what I'm going for let's catch some fish it hasn't gone so hot so far I don't even think I've seen a fish so move down to a more calm area of the river and I'll try my luck down here I think I found the one clear water stream in Alaska with no fish in it while Adam's been fishing I've just been sitting here enjoying the sunshine enjoying the sound of the river just enjoying being out in nature it is so relaxing out here and just very very peaceful it's rare that we ever get a chance to just sit and do nothing so I really like this fishing thing having fun it's trial and error learning learning as I go all right gonna call it quits today it's getting late although you wouldn't be able to tell because it stays light here I don't think it ever gets dark at this time of year usually have beginner's luck with stuff but not today got to keep trying if anybody has any tips out there if you're nice about it I'm open to them but definitely not giving up I am catching myself a fish here in Alaska so maybe next time well that wasn't as exciting as we hoped it would be I was so excited for Adam to catch his first fish I could just envision him catching it and just the joy on his face I think he's gonna giggle and he's gonna be so excited the day it finally happens but today was just not the day but we're gonna enjoy this campsite for the rest of the night and we have one more stop in Talkeetna tomorrow and it should be pretty sweet literally last fall we visited Vermont and went on a tour of a maple farm called Baird Farm and it was one of our favorite things we did in all of New England and here in Alaska they also make syrup but instead of from maple trees they make it from birch trees birch syrup is much more rare than maple syrup and can only really be found in Alaska Canada Russia and parts of Europe it's also a lot more difficult to produce and the worldwide production is only about 5,000 gallons per year and Alaska birch syrup right here in Talkeetna is the world's largest producer of birch syrup with over 1,000 gallons produced every single year and to learn more about it we're going to go on a free short tour that they offer and try some of it for the first time ever first thing to know about birch syrup is a little bit about maple maple's 40 gallons of sap to one gallon of syrup birch is over a hundred to one we were about 110 to one this year maple tree gives you more sap daily it's got a longer season six weeks we get three we just get a lot less sap with birch that's why it's so rare and you don't see it there's 20 million gallons of maple syrup made between Canada and the U.S. and my guess best guess research is 5,000 gallons of birch syrup in the whole world and I've doubled that number just to cover myself so it's just hard to make the biggest focus for birch birch sap is a beverage like our birch water there that's what they do in eastern Europe Finland Norway Russia it's been around forever and that's crazy we do about 10,000 trees here a thousand gallons of syrup a year and that makes us the world's largest birch syrup producer and we're not large in any comparison to the big maple guys who literally have hundreds of thousands of taps out there but we're the largest we've been doing that ever since we started we've been the world's largest even when we had 200 taps out there so we now have 8,000 taps on a vacuum tubing system now the tubing system big advantage the tubing system is it's low maintenance during the season we tap up all those trees we turn on vat pumps that are designed to run 24 7 and basically it brings all that sap to one location the workhorse of our system here is the reverse osmosis machine it's going to get rid of 90 percent of the water before we have to add heat and the heat's the most expensive especially nowadays with fuel costs we'll take 9,000 gallons of water in that big day just gets dumped back out the woods we'll end up with about a thousand gallons of concentrated sap that's now around 10 percent sugar the sap coming out of the tree averages about one percent so we just always have a lot of water to get rid of so now we're down to a thousand gallons we can add the heat it's going to caramelize the sugars give some color flavor get rid of the last the water and we'll be down to zero this evaporator is expensive to run it's burning 16 gallons an hour of fuel oil but it's super efficient it evaporates 250 gallons of concentrated sap an hour that syrup comes out we filter it a hot packet bucket send it down to our commercial kitchen and bomber where they're going to work their magic on it down there so our grading system is early run mid run and late run so the first sample is going to be the early run thank you uh these are samples from every day of the season this year that's tangy a little tangier than maple syrup yeah well that's a strong flavor you taste the cherry yeah kind of i can definitely taste like the cherry and chocolate he mentioned the tour was super informative we learned that the process to make birch syrup is basically the same as making maple syrup but the one big difference is it takes a ton more sap to make birch syrup versus maple syrup which makes it a lot more rare to find we got to try four different runs of birch syrup so we got to try early mid late and reserve i believe and we had gone into it hearing that we shouldn't think it's going to taste like maple syrup because it does not but that's all we could think of in our heads when we think of what syrup tastes like and it does not taste the same as maple syrup it's more i would say like tart it has cherry and kind of like chocolate undertones you can kind of taste that like tartness from the cherry but it's still really really sweet it was super good it's just unlike anything we've had i don't know how to describe it it was just very different than maple syrup but still a delectable sweet delicious sticky treat they also have a gift shop inside with a bunch of local products as well as birch products like birch caramels and birch brittle which we tried samples of both of those and they were so good and they have ice cream and more importantly birch ice cream it's made from motley moo creamery in anchorage and i got the birch ice cream with birch brittle crumble on top oh yeah that tastes just like vanilla ice cream with the birch syrup in there you can definitely tell the birchy flavor brittle on top this is a perfect crunch so i also got the birch flavor of ice cream and i topped it with birch syrup this is kind of like the alaska version of maple creamy a birch creamy that ice cream is super good yeah like catherine said a little bit of vanilla flavor but then tons of birch flavor it is a birch explosion we also got a bottle of their birch water and we learned in the tour that most producers of birch products use the sap to make birch water as opposed to syrup and the sap is mostly water anyways and so they have three different flavors and we got the wild chaga lemon mostly tastes like lemon but then you have a tiny tiny uh little tinge of the birch but it is very refreshing smells very interesting kind of smell the lemon that is not at all what i thought it was going to taste like i thought it was going to be just like sweet and sugary but it tastes just like lightly flavored water you taste a little bit of lemon get a little bit of that birch flavor it doesn't taste like sweet it just tastes like like adam said and like he was telling us in there so just a really refreshing drink huh i was expecting it to be this like thick sugar thing before we got to alaska we had heard so many good things about talkeetna and it totally lived up to all of its high praises it just has so much character and so many cool local businesses and great views of denali and quite possibly the world's coolest mayor even if we didn't have the chance to meet him but we did meet tons of amazing people while we were there that just made our time there even more special well we're back on the road and look who's driving oh that was a bump that wasn't my driving that was a bump on the road unavoidable we're headed southeast towards anchorage which is where we'll be hanging out for the next few weeks as we explore both the city and some cool nature spots nearby and in our next video we're going to be doing something we've never done before and it's one of the experiences we've been most excited for in alaska it should be pretty ice i mean nice me yeah i know i'm like i'm glistening you might be wondering why is she glowing so much oh my gosh her skin is radiant let me tell you my secret it is off deep woods bug spray you just lather it on and then you just shine bright like a diamond it's getting nothing there it's an angel it was angel am i doing it the wrong way i need to go like a little lower