Spenard Landmarks #12: La Mex & Ray's Place
You can see the complete Spenard Landmarks Series here.
Welcome to the second stop on the Spenard Landmarks tour! After leaving Bosco's, you'll head south and cross the street to the first set of coordinates. This is a semi-easy multi cache that has you visit two famous Spenard eateries to unlock the coordinates to a micro bison hidden nearby. You can solve this in one of two ways: look at the proximity map and see where you'd be able to hide a cache nearby based on what is 528 feet from two other caches, or complete this quick tour!
Start at the posted coordinates. This is the long-time location of Ray's Place, a Vietnamese eatery known for its positive signs plastered outside of it. This location is right across the street from Chilkoot Charlie's and kitty corner from Bosco's, another famous Spenard location!
Once here at the coordinates, look up to the sign on the door and, enter into certitude the name of who gets to park at this location, as one word.
So if the sign says "ray's staff parking only," you'd type "raysstaff.'
Great! You should now have coordinates for the next stop on the tour. Head back to Spenard Road and walk down the sidewalk to the next location. As you walk, you will pass the former La Mex building. Here is some history on La Mexicana!
La Mexicana served Spenard in this location for 42 years, until 2013. It had previously founded in Mountain View in 1969, in a log cabin. People often wrote checks to pay and would shorten the payee to "La Mex," and the name stuck, becoming the official name sometime in the 1990's.
As Spenard and Anchorage grew, competition arrived, and in 2013, the owners of La Mex, who had since opened a second location in Dimond, decided to close this location. It closed in December 2013, and has remained so since. The building is growing pretty blank, but the infamous cactus, which once was as well known and as well loved as the Palm Tree at Paradise Inn, now stands alone in the long winters with no moniker on the sign.
What comes next for La Mex? Nearby Spenardians The Bear Tooth purchased the property in 2014, and had big plans, but has since found other great distractions, such as the opening of Alaska Rock Gym, next to Moose's Tooth in 2016, and the opening of their thier eatery location, Eye Tooth, in 2025. And there was that whole COVID thing that almost ended the whole restaurant industry, too. Anyway, they still own it, and in 2018 they did have a plan for an indoor food truck hall approved by the Spenard Community Council, but it hasn't happened yet. Just two days after the Adults Only/Writer's block cache was published, the restaurant/bookstore announced they were closing up shop, so maybe the publishing of this cache may spark a sudden announcement.
When you get to the coordinates provided from the first stop, you will have passed the cactus and will be facing a mural. Type the phrase written on the bottom left corner of the mural into certitude in one word, no spaces. So if the phrase is "Love everyone all the time" you would like loveeveryoneallthetime into certitude. This will provide you with the final coordinates to the micro cache that is very nearby.
It is currently hidden in a winter-friendly way, but will be a slightly harder find once the snow bank in front of it melts, and I move it to be more ADA accessible. Enjoy!
Congrats to AKKalina for the FTF!