The Talkeetna Roadhouse and a Sourdough Older Than Statehood
Near Talkeetna, Alaska
A roadhouse, in old Alaska, was a place where travelers could count on a hot meal and a bed on a long, cold journey. The Talkeetna Roadhouse has been doing exactly that on Main Street for generations. The log building dates to nineteen seventeen, though it began as a house and was expanded into a roadhouse in the nineteen forties.
Its most famous feature sits in a crock in the kitchen. The roadhouse makes its celebrated hotcakes and breads from a sourdough starter that the owners say dates back to nineteen oh two, kept alive and fed for well over a century. In gold rush Alaska, old timers were nicknamed sourdoughs precisely because they guarded starters like that, carrying the living dough from camp to camp so they would never be without bread.
Today the roadhouse still serves family style at long communal tables, where climbers fresh off the mountain sit elbow to elbow with tourists and locals. The building itself is part of the Talkeetna Historic District, a low log structure that has watched the town change from railroad camp to base camp. Order the hotcakes.
You will be tasting a piece of Alaska that, the owners say, is older than Alaskan statehood itself.
