Alaska travel guide
Bears, birds, totems, train travel, skiing down glaciers, camping in the wilderness… Alaska can still astonish the most jaded of travelers.
Alaska: the Great Land, the Last Frontier – more than 580,000 sq miles (1.5 million sq km) that taunted early explorers and still challenges modern-day researchers. It also provokes a fascination that attracts more and more travelers looking for something that a conventional vacation cannot give them. The hint of urban sophistication in Anchorage and Juneau rapidly gives way to the frontier, where outdoor survival skills are among the most useful attributes a resident can possess.
Wild Alaska
America’s 49th state is so broad, so unpeopled, and so roadless that small airplanes are more common than cabs in other states. There are more private pilots than truck drivers and cabbies combined. Men outnumber women (though women have coined the phrase “The odds are good, but the goods are odd”). The population numbers nearly 700,000, almost half of whom live in one city, Anchorage. Nearly the entire state is raw, wondrous wilderness.
Alaska has lush rain-drenched forests and fragile windswept tundras. There are lofty mountains, spectacular glaciers, and still-active volcanoes, as well as 3 million lakes and endless swamps. Along with a handful of modern high-rise buildings, there are countless one-room log cabins.
Travelling in Alaska
This varied land is best viewed from a small plane or surveyed from a canoe or kayak – or by foot; it cannot be seen properly from a car (though increasing numbers of people are exploring parts of the state by traveling the highways). And, although it would take forever to cover on foot, hiking is often the best way to touch the landscape, to appreciate its vastness. Alaska is an outdoor world, a wilderness, a land of many faces.
The Alaskan experience includes the sheer wonder of finding what hides beyond the horizon or over the next ridge. No one person has ever seen it all; no one person ever will. Therein lies the essence of Alaska. Its huge, untamed spaces, it has been said, are the great gift Alaska can give to a harrassed world.
What to do in Alaska
Explore Anchorage, Alaska's biggest metropolis
Anchorage is a good jumping-off point for many parts of the state, but it has a lot more to offer, from interesting museums to lively nightlife, and ski slopes right on the doorstep. Read more about Anchorage...
Have the ultimate Alaskan adventure at Denali National Park and Preserve
Dominated by the magnificent Mount McKinley, Denali, one of the world’s greatest wildlife sanctuaries, is the most visited of all Alaska’s national parks. Read more about Denali National Park and Preserve...
Witness Alaska's wildlife at Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve
Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve encompasses 3.3 million acres (1.3 million hectares). Located at the northern end of Alaska’s Panhandle, the park’s center lies approximately 90 miles (145km) northwest of Juneau and 600 miles (965km) southeast of Anchorage. In a land comprising three climatic zones – marine to Arctic – seven different ecosystems support a wide variety of plant and animal life. From the endangered humpback whale and Arctic peregrine falcon to the common harbor seal, black and brown bears, marmots and eagles, Glacier Bay provides a rich overview of Alaska’s wildlife.
Glacier Bay’s physical environment is as diverse as any found in Alaska. Sixteen massive tidewater glaciers flowing from the snow-capped mountain peaks of the Fairweather Range (reaching 15,300ft/4,663 meters) plunge into the icy waters of the fjords. Besides the jagged icebergs, the ice-scoured walls of rock lining the waterways, the salt-water beaches, and protected coves, numerous fresh-water lakes and thick forests of western hemlock and Sitka spruce are also found in the area.
Discover Alaska's flora and fauna in Prince William Sound
Prince William Sound’s wonderful natural displays of flora and fauna, ice, forests, and mountains draw visitors to this wild country southeast of Anchorage. There are dozens of glaciers in the Sound. Columbia Glacier is the largest among the many that drop down from the Chugach Mountains into the northerly fjords of Prince William Sound. Fed each year by enough snow to bury a five-story building, Columbia Glacier covers an area the size of Los Angeles. It flows more than 40 miles (64km) from the mountains to Columbia Bay, where its 4-mile (7km) wide face daily drops hundreds of thousands of tons of pristine ice into the sound.
See the incomparable Northern Lights
Alaska is the best place in the USA to view the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights. Literally meaning “dawn of the north,” this is a solar-powered light show that occurs in the earth’s upper atmosphere when charged particles from the sun collide with gas molecules.
The Northern Lights occur most intensely in an oval band that stretches across Alaska (as well as Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway and Siberia). All the state, except parts of the southwest and the Aleutian Chain, are within the “auroral zone,” with the best light shows visible north of the Alaska Range. One of the best views to be had is in Fairbanks, which calls itself an “auroral destination,” in an attempt to lure winter visitors.
The aurora occurs throughout the year, but can be seen only on clear nights when the sky has darkened. In Alaska that means from fall through spring, with peak viewing in winter. Colors vary from pale yellowish green – the most common shade – to red, blue and purplish-red. Northern Lights often begin as long, uniform bands, stretching along the horizon, but may develop vertical bars or rays, that give the appearance of waving curtains.
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