Just east of Edmonton, Elk Island is a rare thing, a genuine wildlife sanctuary within an hour’s drive of a major city. Canada’s only fully fenced national park, it is a stronghold for plains and wood bison and a designated Dark Sky Preserve, making it equally good for a wildlife-rich day trip or a quiet…
Yosemite is the crown jewel of the Sierra Nevada, ancient granite monoliths rising from meadow floors, some of the tallest waterfalls in North America thundering off the cliffs, and groves of giant sequoias standing where they have stood for millennia. A UNESCO World Heritage Site and biosphere reserve, it is also one of America’s busiest…
Wrangell-St. Elias is the largest national park in the United States, more than 8.3 million acres (34,000 km²), twice the size of Switzerland, and one of its least visited. It stacks six of Alaska’s ten highest peaks against the world’s largest non-polar icefields, then folds in gold-rush history at the Kennecott Mines and the frontier…
Roughly 100 miles (160 km) southwest of Anchorage, Lake Clark packs coastal rainforest, jagged peaks, active volcanoes, turquoise glacial lakes and salmon-choked rivers into four million roadless acres, and almost nobody there to share it. Overshadowed by Alaska’s marquee parks, it is a hidden gem where brown bears graze the tide flats and the only…
Just north of the Arctic Circle, Kobuk Valley hides one of Alaska’s strangest sights: a 25-square-mile field of sand dunes rising up to 100 feet (30 m), where summer temperatures can hit 100°F (38°C). There are no roads, no trails, no facilities and no rangers on-site across its 1.7 million acres (7,000 km²), just the…
Kenai Fjords sits at the seaward edge of the Kenai Peninsula, where the ice age still spills into the sea. The 714-square-mile Harding Icefield crowns the park and feeds nearly 40 glaciers, several of which calve directly into the Gulf of Alaska. It is a landscape of hard contrasts, ancient ice above, whale-rich waters below,…
Katmai protects four million acres (16,000 km²) of Southwest Alaska and one of the greatest wildlife spectacles on Earth: brown bears lined up at Brooks Falls, snatching salmon out of mid-leap. More than 1,500 bears range across a landscape of volcanoes, salmon rivers and coastline, including the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, scoured by the…
Glacier Bay is 3.3 million acres (13,000 km²) of southeastern Alaska where the ice age is still visibly at work, a 65-mile (100 km) fjord lined with more than a thousand glaciers, tidewater faces calving icebergs into the sea, and temperate rainforest climbing the slopes above. A UNESCO World Heritage Site and biosphere reserve, it…
Gates of the Arctic is America’s last great wilderness in the most literal sense, the largest national park in the country, entirely above the Arctic Circle, and almost entirely without roads, trails, signs or visitor centers. Fewer than one park in a hundred sees this few people. You forge your own route across 8.4 million…
Denali is the crown of Alaska, more than six million acres (24,000 km²) of subarctic wilderness built around Denali itself, at 20,310 feet (6,190 m) the highest peak in North America. A single 92-mile (150 km) gravel road bisects the park, and beyond Mile 15 you travel it by shuttle bus, not private car. That…
