The Last Frontier, Where Humans Are the Guests

Stand at the foot of Denali and you understand Alaska in a single feeling. The mountain rises some 18,000 feet straight from the tundra, the greatest base to summit rise of any mountain on land, and you are very, very small. That smallness follows you everywhere in Alaska. This is a land too big for people. It was made for the wild.

The Animals

Almost everywhere else in America, wildlife lives around us. In Alaska it is the other way around. Grizzly bears roam freely through valleys and along coastlines, fishing for salmon as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. Wolf packs move through Denali. Moose, the largest on Earth, wade through rivers. Caribou migrate across the tundra in great herds. Dall sheep pick along cliffs, white against the rock. In fall, thousands of bald eagles gather along a single river. Offshore, humpback whales, orcas, and sea otters work the cold water.

You do not feel like you are sharing the place with them. You are the guest. They are home, living as they always have, and you are lucky enough to watch.

The Glaciers

Alaska holds an estimated 100,000 glaciers. Tidewater glaciers calve icebergs the size of buildings into the sea. Others sit at the end of a short trail from a parking lot. The ice is not decoration here. It built this coastline and it is still at work.

The Adventures

Winter is for the aurora, dog sledding, and ice fishing, the old ways of moving and surviving up here. Summer is for wildlife, when the bears are fishing, the whales are feeding, and the sun barely sets. Either way, the state is too big to wing it. Anchor in Anchorage, cruise the Inside Passage, or both, and take the small plane if you want the real bush.

Alaska holds eight national parks, and each one delivers the last frontier in its own way. Denali, Katmai, Glacier Bay, Wrangell St. Elias, Kenai Fjords, Gates of the Arctic, Lake Clark, Kobuk Valley. Eight different doors into the same wild.