The 4 Best Swimming Holes in Alaska

Jewel Lake Park is south Anchorage's go-to lake swim, a 40-acre city park wrapped around a small urban lake at West 88th Avenue and West Dimond Boulevard. The city says the beach draws over 30,000 bathers each summer, which tells you two things: it works, and you will have company on warm days.

This is a maintained, lifeguard-staffed municipal beach rather than a wild swimming hole, with lifeguard stations in place during the summer season. Add the playground, picnic areas, and a soft-surface trail through the forested part of the park, and it is an easy family afternoon.

Tanana Lakes Recreation Area is Fairbanks' in-town swimming hole, a 750 acre borough park just a few minutes from downtown, built around two man made lakes near the Tanana River. The borough explicitly designates the park for swimming, and sandy beaches make it an easy lake to swim in during Interior Alaska's short summer.

The smart layout is what makes it work for swimmers: Cushman Lake is reserved for non motorized use, so it is the calmer, swim friendly water, while Tanana Lake handles the motorboats and connects to the river. With a playground and picnic area next to the swim beach, it suits families and casual summer swimmers, though no lifeguard presence is documented, so keep watch over the kids.

Goose Lake is one of just two official municipal swim beaches in Anchorage, a small glacial kettle lake sitting right next to the University of Alaska Anchorage campus. It is a developed city park with a designated swimming area and beach, connected to Anchorage's greenbelt trail network, so this is an urban swimming hole you can reach in a couple minutes from the parking lot, not a backcountry mission.

Locals use it all summer, but know two things going in. There are no lifeguards, so you swim at your own risk, and the Municipality warns that swimmer's itch, a mild skin irritation from parasites, gets more common in mid to late summer. A rinse after swimming is a smart habit here.

Chief Shakes Hot Springs is not a swimming hole in the usual sense, and that is exactly the appeal: it is a free Forest Service soaking site deep in the Stikine-LeConte Wilderness, about 28 miles up the Stikine River from Wrangell, reachable only by boat or floatplane. Two redwood tubs, one enclosed and one open to the rainforest, are fed by geothermal springs that arrive around 140 degrees at the source and get cooled with adjustable hot and cold pipes.

Getting there is the adventure. The Stikine is a tidal, glacially fed river with fast currents and braided channels, and once you land it is a short boardwalk stroll through old-growth Tongass forest to the tubs. This is a place to soak, not swim laps, and it is busiest on sunny summer weekends.