Insight Guides: Alaska

Alaska: the Great Land, the Last Frontier – more than 580,000 sq miles (1½ 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.

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. 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.