MCCARTHY, Alaska - If there is a prettier — and hipper — town in Alaska than McCarthy, I’d like to see it.

As you might have surmised, I just returned from a Labor Day road trip to McCarthy and I’m ready to pack up my bags and move to the tiny, old mining town nestled in the heart of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, 400 miles southeast of Fairbanks.

If only I had Jed Clampett’s cash.

This was the second year in a row we — me, my wife, Kristan, and 11-year-old son, Logan — made the trip to McCarthy to join musician friends who play each Labor Day weekend at McCarthy Lodge in what is the town’s last gasp of the summer.

After Labor Day, the town basically shuts down. All the National Park Service employees, guides and other seasonal residents that live in the town vanish. Basically, McCarthy turns into a ghost town with only a few year-round residents.

But in the summer, McCarthy is a bustling tourist town, offering world-class scenery of glaciers and snowcapped mountains. It’s a place where locals and tourists manage to co-exist in a sort of symbiotic relationship.

What’s so cool about McCarthy?

Well, pretty much everything. From the people to the history to the scenery to the atmosphere. Think Northern Exposure, only with real Alaskans instead of Hollywood lookalikes.

McCarthy is the kind of place where you can wear a tattered pair of cut-off blue jeans over long underwear all weekend long and feel right at home, which I did.

McCarthy is the kind of place where you can show up and join in the weekly Friday night softball game, which me and Kristan did.

McCarthy is the kind of place where you can let your 11-year-old son ride his bike around without worrying, which we did.

McCarthy is the kind of place where you can bring your dog and you don’t have to worry about putting it on a leash, assuming it doesn’t cause any problems with the local canines, which our two dogs didn’t.

McCarthy is the kind of place where Xtra Tuffs and sandals are the preferred choices of footware, depending on the weather.

McCarthy is the kind of place where you spend a weekend, leave and wonder why in the world you hadn’t lived your life differently so that you could have moved there when you were 22, which I found myself doing for the second year in a row.

McCarthy is the kind of place where you can walk around and actually get a feel for what Alaska really used to be like 100 years ago.

Maybe it’s driving the 60-mile McCarthy Road, an old, gravel railroad bed that is legendary for shredding tires and busting shocks on vehicles. (Fortunately, our Honda CRV made the trip without a problem and nothing fell off the sheet of plywood I had u-bolted to the roof rack with a pile of stuff ratchet-strapped down.) Driving across the Kuskulana Bridge, an old railroad bridge that sits 238 feet above the Kuskulana River, made my butt pucker again this summer.

Maybe it’s the incredible scenery once you arrive — jaw-dropping views of the massive, marshmellow-white Stairway Icefall, Kennicott Glacier and snowcapped 16,390-foot Mount Blackburn.

Maybe it’s the goose bumps you get walking around the old, abandoned mining buildings at the Kennecott Mine, thinking about the miners who used to work there.

Maybe it’s the airplanes buzzing around all day taking tourists out on flightseeing trips.

Maybe it’s the lack of vehicle traffic due to the fact you can’t actually drive to McCarthy and have to walk or ride a bike the last mile or so into town — unless you’re a local who has paid an annual user fee to drive across a bridge leading into the town.

Maybe it’s the laid-back attitude of the people who live there.

Maybe it’s the lack of anything that resembles life in mainstream Alaska, which is getting more mainstream every day.

Whatever it is, it works for McCarthy and I can’t wait to go back next year.

Contact staff writer Tim Mowry at 459-7587.