Some driving problems/AFD

But tops for retirees

With the winter of 2025-2026 delivering every kind of seasonal bad to Alaska’s urban core, older Alaskans might have trouble accepting this news, but the data-crunching website WalletHub has declared the 49th state the sixth best place in America to retire.

OK, given the Anchorage metro area’s problem with the homeless and theft, retirees do – like everyone else – have to keep their belongings locked down. Still, this isn’t warm, sunny New Mexico, which came in 41st on the best-places-to-retire list thanks in significant part to the highest property crime rate in the country.

See, things can be worse elsewhere.

Consider Hawaii, which would seem like a great place in which to spend those later years. It, however, fell to 46 on the WalletHub list, just in front of West Virginia, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Kentucky, about which little more need be said.

Hawaii suffered from the highest “adjusted cost of living” in the nation. Oklahoma had the lowest, but that couldn’t lift it from a 49th-place ranking because of high taxes and the costs of services needed by the elderly, which left it with an “affordability” score of 31 among the 50 states.

Then, too, there was the Sooner  State’s “quality of life” score of 48 out of 50 when factoring in such things as the percentage of elderly residents, crime rates, weather, scenic byways,  food security, public transportation,  “shoreline mileage”, theaters per capita, and “neighborhood friendliness.”

By and large, none of the country’s warm, Southern states scored all that well in the analysis with the somewhat predictable exception of Florida, which came in number two overall, thanks to a best in the nation score for “quality of life” and a number two ranking for affordability.

One might have been tempted to conclude Wallet Hub’s gang of analysts comprised largely of big city university and college professors had a bias against the conservative South and the wide-open spaces of the warm Southwest, but along with Alaska coming in sixth, conservative South Dakota – which is technically in the Midwest but seems in some ways more Western – came in third, and Wyoming, the least populous state in the nation, came in number one.

Wide-open spaces

Alaskans like to think of Alaska as the last great wilderness, and it is. But when it comes to accessible wild lands, sparsely populated Wyoming arguably has more going for it.

Alaska’s population passed that of Wyoming in 1990, and Wyoming has remained the least populated state ever since. Alaska even surpassed Vermont at the start of the new millennium and has remained the third least populated state despite a major exodus of residents from 2016 to 2020 and little growth since.

The big thing about Alaska, though, is that the statewide population isn’t really reflective of the state as a whole, given that of the 49th state’s 740,133 residents more than 407,000 live in the 26,400-square-mile Anchorage Metropolitan Area at the head of Cook Inlet with most of the rest of the clustered around Fairbanks and Juneau or hunkered down in the Kenai Peninsula Borough.

Alaskans appear to like their urban amenities as much, or more, than the residents of other states, and thus their world sort of revolves around the very urban Anchorage metro area with its big box stores, coffee shops and Pacific Northwest-esque traffic complete with the chaos that ensues when the snow falls.

Wyoming, on the other hand, lacks a major metropolitan area. Its biggest, the Cheyenne metro area, is home to fewer people than the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, the bedroom community on the one road north from Anchorage that contributes about a third of the population to the state’s largest metro area.

Wyoming, unlike Alaska, has a significant road system connecting its small towns, and that road system includes some truck-busy interstate highways tying the four largest Wyoming cities to the rest of the country.

This truck traffic rolling through or past Cheyenne, Casper, Gillette and Laramie ensures quick, easy and cheap online shopping. Wyoming retirees, unlike those in Alaska, don’t have to deal with online retailers who want exorbitant fees to ship to Alaska or won’t ship there at all in the mistaken belief that Alaska is not part of the “continental United States.”

Blame U.S. maps that still show Alaska as an island, along with Hawaii, somewhere to the southwest of the rest of the country in the Pacific Ocean. The official map published by the U.S. Geological Survey still has Alaska and Hawaii down in the lower, left-hand corner, but it at least now show Alaska connected to Canada, which is part of continental North America.

Anyone with a basic understanding of geography recognizes that this makes Alaska part of the continental United States. Geography, let alone map-reading skills, are not, however, well taught in American schools these days.

All of which is meant to say that retiring to Alaska is not like retreating to some remote island in the Pacific, but needless to say, there are some issues to be considered when retiring to the farnorth.

Weather, whether not

Alaska, in general, is not a good place for those with mobility issues. Sidewalks are often missing in the newer parts of Anchorage and in many of the bedroom communities surrounding it.

Where there are sidewalks, they are often buried under snow and only irregularly cleared, if cleared at all, in the winter months that can stretch from mid-October to mid-April, depending on the year.

Anchorage had a string of Seattle-esque winters at the start of this decade that made the city pretty easy to get around in if you had spikes on your walker, but since then it’s been hit and miss.  Last year was snow short, the year before a snow bonanza.

This year has shaped up more like 2024 than 2025. The National Weather Service just reported an Anchorage record snowfall for January of more than three feet. Blame global warming. January in Anchorage has historically been a cold, dry month, though it was a warm, rainy month in those Seattle-esque winters.

The global-warming issue plaguing the state’s largest city at the moment is that the break point between snowy and rainy is only a couple of degrees in temperature. So you can get either a lot of rain or a lot of snow in winter.

That said, Anchorage remains a global-warming refugia. There’s no reason to believe you’re going to see a heat-killing summer anytime soon. The highest temperature ever recorded was 90 degrees in 2019. The second highest remains 85 degrees.

The 2019 heat wave was big news at the time.

“Experiencing a summer heat wave with temperatures in the nineties is probably pretty normal for most people. But now imagine you live in Alaska.  Not so normal anymore, is it?” Climate.gov reported at the time.  “Alaska has just come to the end of a period of warmth that re-wrote the record books for multiple cities and communities across the state. And crazy enough, it was one of several jaw-dropping climate events taking place across our largest state.

“Of course, this heatwave is also occurring against the backdrop of human-caused climate change. And Alaska has often been on the forefront of impacts from climate change. In fact, since the 1950s, Alaska has been warming twice as fast as the global average, according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment. Since the late 1970s, the statewide annual average temperature has being increasing a rate of 0.7°F per decade. And starting in the 1990s, record-high temperature have occurred three times as often as record lows. Simply put, record-breaking high temperatures across Alaska are not uncommon nowadays.”

That was then; this is now:

“Anchorage braces for frigid temperatures, as National Weather Service issues cold weather advisory,” Alaska Public Media headlined to start the year. 

It would appear someone at Climate.gov got “climate” and “weather” confused in 2019. Alaska is warming. No doubt about that. Ask the every north moving beavers if you have any doubts. 

But the state remains a place where hypothermia is a greater risk than heat stroke. The exemption, of course, is the central part of the state, which is in some ways more moon-like than earth like.

The record high for Fairbanks is 99 degrees, set back in 1919. The record low is 66 degrees below zero, recorded in 1934. But as late as 1971, Fairbanks was a very, very frigid place. Five of the city’s top-20 low temperatures date to that year. 

It has warmed up since, but it’s not exactly warm.

Fairbanks’s “December 2025 was the eighth coldest December on record since 1904, with an average temperature of −22.8°F,” according to the Weather Service. “This marks the coldest December since 1980 and the coldest month overall since January 2012.

“This extended cold stretch has also been notable, with Fairbanks seeing 29 days and counting of temperatures at or below −15°F, the longest stretch since 1979. Today also marks the seventh consecutive day with temperatures reaching −40°F or colder.”

So if you’re thinking about retiring to Alaska, or retiring in Alaska if you’re already an Alaska  “sourdough,” you might want to think about where in Alaska you want to retire. Coastal Alaska and Interior Alaska are basically different worlds.

And if you’re someone unfamiliar with the far north, you might want to note that Alaska has a different definition for “sourdough” than the “veteran inhabitant and especially an old-time prospector of Alaska or northwestern Canada” found in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

The old Alaska definition of sourdough is this: “Sour on Alaska without the dough to get out.”

This once gave Alaska a reputation as a bad place to retire, but the times, it would appear, they are a changin’….