Ask anyone in Girdwood what's happening this month and you'll get the same answer: it's Blueberry Festival weekend. Ask about Winner Creek Trail and you'll get another answer that everyone repeats with the same confidence, that the hand tram is out, so don't bother hiking past the gorge. Both answers are half right. The missing half is worth knowing if you actually live here, because the food scene has changed more than the rumor mill admits, and the trail closure means less than most people think.
The weekend nobody mentions is happening at the same time as the one everybody does
The Alyeska Blueberry Festival runs August 15 and 16 this year, and it's grown into the town's marquee August event, regularly pulling in up to 4,000 people for berry picking, live music, a pie-eating contest, and a kids zone at Alyeska Resort. That part everyone knows. What fewer people mention is that the Girdwood Fungus Fair opened registration the same morning, August 15, at 8 a.m. It's a smaller, quieter event run by the Turnagain Arm Mycological Society, built around identification walks and specimen tables rather than crowds and vendor booths. Two organizations, same weekend, two completely different crowds.
That overlap matters more than it sounds like it should. Girdwood already has a reputation as a one-big-weekend-in-summer town, built around the Forest Fair every July. What the calendar actually shows is a second, quieter peak in mid-August that splits between berries and mushrooms depending on which trailhead you'd rather be near. If you've been treating this month as a lull between Forest Fair and ski season, it isn't one.
The food map moved while everyone kept repeating the same two names
Say "where should I eat in Girdwood" out loud and you'll hear Double Musky and Jack Sprat before the sentence finishes. Both earned that reputation honestly. Double Musky has been serving its Louisiana Creole menu since it started as an après-ski bar in the 1960s and 70s, and it still doesn't take reservations, which is part of the ritual at this point. Jack Sprat, at the base of Mt. Alyeska, runs a seasonally changing menu built around local and foraged ingredients, with dinner service Wednesday through Sunday.
Neither of those facts is new, and neither explains what's actually changed. Basecamp Eatery, on Hightower Road across from Crow Creek Mercantile, has been open since 2022 and has quietly become the answer for a lunch or dinner that doesn't require a wait or a special occasion, with what's become the most complete wine list in town alongside rotating local taps. And Alyeska Resort has added its own new answer more recently: Forte, a casual Italian restaurant overlooking the resort pond, described by the resort itself as its newest dining addition. It fills a gap that used to send people either to Seven Glaciers for a full mountaintop tasting menu or nowhere at all if that felt like too much for a Tuesday.
Then there's the piece of the food scene that doesn't show up on any list of restaurants because it isn't one. Girdwood Brewing Company doesn't serve its own food, but its taproom hosts a rotating cast of food trucks that has become a real third pillar of eating out in town. On any given week you might find:
- BruceSkis, serving Turkish street food like kababs, falafel, and hummus plates
- Blue Ristra, running New Mexican burgers, tacos, and burritos
- Crepes de Paris, doing traditional French crepes, sweet and savory
- The Hungry Deckhand, stacking massive sandwiches on sourdough
- Izakaya, with light Japanese-inspired plates
- Mochileros, serving Guatemalan-inspired street food
- Mammoth Cheesesteaks, El Señor Moose, and Mountain Pies rounding out the rotation
The schedule shifts week to week, so the brewery is worth checking before you go if you're chasing a specific truck. But the point stands: the two-restaurant version of Girdwood's food scene that most people describe to newcomers is out of date. There are now enough legitimate options that a slow week doesn't mean a drive into Anchorage.
The Winner Creek rumor that's only partly true
Here's where the town's folklore gets things backward. The hand tram over Glacier Creek, the one that lets hikers pull themselves across in a metal cage a hundred feet above the water, is genuinely closed. The U.S. Forest Service's Chugach National Forest page confirms it, and the closure has been in place long enough that locals have started treating the whole trail as compromised.
It isn't. The lower Winner Creek Trail, the roughly 3 to 4.3 mile stretch that starts behind the Alyeska Tram building and runs through boardwalks, cottonwood and alder forest, and past the gorge itself, doesn't touch the tram at all. That's the hike almost everybody actually takes. One regional guide put it plainly: this lower section is what 98 percent of visitors do, and the tram only comes into play if you're pushing further, either to link up with Crow Creek Road on the far side of Glacier Creek or to continue into the upper trail's alpine country.
The upper trail is a different animal regardless of tram status, an 8 to 9 mile push into subalpine and alpine terrain with avalanche chutes, creek crossings, and old snow that can linger into June. Late July and August are actually the reward months up there, when salmonberry and blueberry bushes along the route are producing enough that hikers treat the trail itself as a snack stop.
The trail everyone assumes is broken is fine. The connector everyone assumes is fine is the part that's actually out.
On the bridge replacement itself, sources don't fully agree. Some travel guides describe a bridge already spanning the creek in place of the tram. The Forest Service, in its most current posting, still lists the hand tram as closed with a suspension bridge planned but not yet built. If you're hiking to that specific crossing rather than just the lower gorge loop, it's worth checking current conditions before you count on a way across.
What this actually looks like on a calendar
If you're trying to fit all of this into an actual weekend instead of just filing it away, here's a version that uses both halves of the story:
- Friday evening: dinner at Basecamp or Forte, both easy enough for a weeknight that doesn't feel like an occasion
- Saturday morning: Blueberry Festival at Alyeska while the vendor lines are still short
- Saturday afternoon: swing by Girdwood Brewing to see which truck is running that week
- Sunday morning: the lower Winner Creek loop, still quiet before the festival crowds wake up, no tram required
- Sunday afternoon: check the Fungus Fair table if the mushroom crowd is more your speed than the berry one
None of this requires choosing between the two events people keep treating as competitors. They're not. They just happen to land on the same days.
Why the correction matters
The story Girdwood tells about itself, one big weekend in August built around berries, two restaurants worth mentioning, and a trail you should skip half of, undersells the town in one direction and oversells a problem in the other. The food scene has more range than the shorthand suggests. The trail has less of a problem than the rumor suggests. Both of those things are true at the same time, and neither shows up if you're only repeating what you heard when you first moved here.
That's usually how it goes with a small town. The version that gets repeated calcifies faster than the version that's actually current, and the gap between the two is exactly where the useful information lives.
If you're weighing a move within Girdwood, thinking about what a property near the trail network or the resort corridor is actually worth day to day, or just want a second opinion from someone who tracks this town closely, Sam Lightle is a good person to call.
