No other region in North America fires the imagination like
ALASKA – derivation of Alayeska, an Athabascan word meaning
“great land of the west”. Few who see this land of gargantuan
ice fields, sweeping tundra, lush rainforests, deep fjords and
occasionally smoking volcanoes leave unimpressed. Wildlife may
be under threat elsewhere, but here it is abundant, with bears
standing twelve feet tall, moose stopping traffic in downtown
Anchorage, wolves prowling national parks, bald eagles circling
over the trees and rivers solid with fifty-plus-pound salmon.
Alaska’s sheer size is hard to grasp. Superimposed onto the
Lower 48 states, it would stretch from the Atlantic to the
Pacific, while its coastline is longer than that of the rest of
the US combined. All but three of the nation’s twenty highest
peaks are found here and one glacier alone is twice the size of
Wales. In addition, not only does it contain America’s
northernmost and westernmost points, but because the Aleutian
Islands stretch across the 180th meridi