Hotel Captain Cook by Daniel Scott

Look beyond the three rather hideous fawn-coloured towers that make up the Hotel Captain Cook in Anchorage and you’ll find a veritable village within Alaska’s largest city. Secreted inside are 547 rooms, including 96 prairie-size suites; a couple of arcades with 15 shops in all, including a genuine old-fashioned men’s barber; an underground complex of both Men’s and Women’s Athletic clubs, with a large shared indoor swimming pool; enough meeting rooms to make the hotel an automatic choice for Alaskan conferences, and no less than 4 restaurants, ranging from top-floor fine dining at the Crow’s Nest through a pub-style bistro Fletcher’s (where you can swig your beer by the yard) to the run-of-the mill fare on offer at the Pantry in the lobby, where even the sacrosanct Alaskan salmon gets drowned in a sickly orange goo.

In the summer months the Captain Cook ‘village’ brims with international and American tour groups, many enjoying a short land component on an Alaskan cruise. It is also popular year-round with business people for its convenient downtown location, good facilities (including the 2 floors of Captain Club’s rooms with access to a dedicated lounge and a useful business centre) and the ease of having most things under the same rooves.

The hotel is more characterful than it might at first appear. While the exterior of the three square towers it occupies might be all 1970s, the interior owes more to the 1770s, and specifically to the Yorkshire sea-captain after whom the hotel was named. There is an ocean of dark wood throughout, especially teak, and ceilings, particularly that in the lobby, are designed to look like the interior of a ship. Most impressive is the collection of Cook memorabilia that adorns most walls and occupies many nooks. Original prints and maps that depict his voyages will make you marvel at the lengths to which the discoverer went. Intricate small scale models of ships in glass cases will show the vessels in which he sailed, and other collectables display the sort of things he found in many of the different “New world” locations he stopped at.

There are good views from the hotel towers of the Cook inlet, where the good captain anchored ‘The Resolution’ in 1778, of the Chugach mountains that surround Anchorage and down over the grid of the central city. On the clearest days you can also see as far north as Mt Mckinley, the tallest mountain in the US,and get some sense of the scale and emptiness of America’s largest state. Wild Alaska is closer than you think. Take a short bike ride along the Tony Knowles coastal trail, which runs close by the hotel, and you’ll be unlucky not to sight some very curious-looking moose, some of which are the size of racehorses. All manner of other wildlife and glacier viewing tours (to the Kenai Peninsula or Prince William Sound amongst other places) are also available from city centre tour offices.

The Captain Cook could do with some love and attention in places – its drab bathrooms could do with a refurb for instance –but all in all it does retain an individual Alaskan flavour, distinguishing it from other ‘chain’ hotels in town. And for the choice and range of facilities it remains the number one upper range choice of hotel in Anchorage.