Part of a 31, 250-sq-mile wilderness area, this park is a crossroad of mountain ranges: Wrangell, Chugach and St Elias. Extensive ice fields and 100 major glaciers spill from the peaks, including one bigger than the state of Rhode Island. This park is more difficult to visit than Denali National Park but, to those who make the effort, no less impressive due to its mountainous scenery and numerous opportunities for wilderness adventure whether on foot or in a raft.
Category: Alaska Toursim
At 2500 sq miles, Wood-Tikchik is the country’s largest state park. Thirty miles north of Dillingham, the park preserves two large systems of interconnecting lakes that are the important spawning grounds for Bristol Bay’s salmon. Wildlife in the park includes brown and black bears, beavers, moose, foxes and wolves. The fishing for arctic char, rainbow trout, dolly varden, grayling, salmon and northern pike is excellent. All five species of Pacific salmon spawn in the park.
You can see glaciers and brown bears, even mountains taller than Denali, without once visiting Alaska. But you will never, in a lifetime of searching, find another place like Whittier.
Just seven miles north of the Glenn Hwy/George Parks Hwy junction, Wasilla was a sleepy little town in the 1970s that served local farmers. Then urban sprawl reached it. From 1980 to 1983 the population of Wasilla doubled as Alaskans who wanted to work in Anchorage but live elsewhere began moving in. Today it’s a full-fledged bedroom community of the big city to the south. Shopping centers and businesses – including the ubiquitous Wal-Mart – have mushroomed along the highway, and this is one of the few places in Alaska where you’ll notice rush-hour traffic. If you need services – banks, auto mechanics etc – you’ll find them here and should take advantage of them, as things get sketchier and more expensive between here and Fairbanks.
Just 25 miles east of Columbia Glacier, the ice-free port of Valdez is the southern terminus of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Valdez first boomed when 4000 gold seekers passed through, heading for the Klondike. After the 1964 earthquake, the city was rebuilt 4 miles further east.
Unalaska, on Unalaska Island, and its sister town Dutch Harbor, on Amaknak Island, are at the confluence of the North Pacific and the Bering Sea, one of the world’s richest fisheries. Dutch Harbor is the only natural deepwater port in the Aleutians, and more than 400 vessels call here each year from as many as 14 countries. The two towns are connected by the 500ft Bridge to the Other Side.
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Tok Alaska USA travel video clips
Tok, 92 miles up the Alcan from the Canadian border, is the first Alaskan town motorists on multiweek pilgrimages from the Lower 48 will encounter. Thus, this hodgepodge of gas stations, motels and RV parks is viewed with a strange, out-of-proportion reverence, like a sort of pearly gates opening onto heavenly Alaska. The town was born in 1942 as a construction camp for the highway, and was originally called Tokyo Camp until anti-Japanese sentiment caused locals to shorten it to Tok. From here, the rest of the state beckons: the Alcan heads 206 miles northwest to Fairbanks, Tok Cutoff and Glenn Hwy reaches 328 miles southwest to Anchorage, and the Taylor Hwy curls back 161 miles to Eagle.
A grand expanse of forest and alps sweeping from Anchorage to Fairbanks and Canada, the Interior has been immortalized by poets, picked over by miners and popularized in the quirky 1990s TV series Northern Exposure. Here is Alaska’s heartland: dogsleds and gold pans, roadhouses and fish wheels, moose on the side of the road and a seemingly endless stretch of pavement disappearing into the mountains.
Since its period in the late 1800s as a winter retreat for fishers and prospectors, Tenakee Springs has evolved into a rustic village known for its slow and relaxed pace of life. On the east side of Tenakee Inlet, the settlement is little more than a ferry dock, a row of houses on pilings and the hot springs – the town’s main attraction – which bubble out of the ground at 108°F.
Taylor Hwy runs 161 miles north from Tetlin Junction, 13 miles east of Tok on the Alcan, through the lovable tourist trap of Chicken and on to the sleepy, historic community of Eagle on the Yukon River. Save for recent wildfire scarring it’s a scenic drive, ascending Mt Fairplay, Polly Summit and American Summit, all over 3500ft. Until recent years the route was infamously rough, though these days the only white-knuckle stretch is the last 65 miles from Jack Wade Junction to Eagle.