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To the Aleut peoples, Alaska was “Alyeshka,” meaning the great land. Visitors today are likely to agree: Alaska is truly one of the world’s special places. Those who visit can’t help marveling at the exotic wildlife, magnificent mountains, glacier-carved valleys and steep, rocky coastline. And after they spend several days encountering one wonder after another, they marvel at just how much of this special place there is to see.
The sheer size of Alaska is hard to imagine: The town of Barrow is more than 1,600 mi/2,575 km north of Ketchikan, while Attu (at the end of the Aleutian chain) lies almost 2,000 mi/3,220 km west of Anchorage.
Need more information about
Alaska Cruises visit this site. Acreage aside, Alaska is large in lots of other ways: It has the tallest mountains, biggest glaciers, best fishing and wildest wilderness on the continent.
With such abundance, it’s no wonder that more and more travelers visit Alaska each year, particularly aboa rd cruise ships. Because of this heavy traffic, some towns in southeastern Alaska and such attractions as Denali National Park and Portage Glacier can seem a bit overrun at times. It must also be noted that Alaska isn’t cheap: Per-day expenses in remote parts of the state are comparable with those in New York City or London. Nonetheless, we think the cost is well worth it—a bargain, in fact—given all that you’re going to see.
The first settlers in Alaska arrived at least 20,000 years ago, when hunters from Asia followed large game over the Bering Strait land bridge into North America. By the time the first Europeans arrived, in the mid 1700s, they found several diverse cultures living in Alaska: Whalers inhabited the treeless tundra along the coast, and nomadic caribou hunters roamed the forested interior along the Yukon River. Alaska’s panhandle was home to members of the Tlingit and Haida groups, who lived in a lush coastal environment.
Alaska was made a territory of the United States in 1912, but statehood wasn’t granted until 1959. Then, in 1968, the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay sparked a new rush to Alaska. The construction of the Alaska Pipeline from the Beaufort Sea to the Gulf of Alaska in the 1970s brought new wealth, new jobs and new environmental concerns. Even now, the debate continues as to how much of Alaska’s pristine wilderness should be developed. The latest focus of the debate has been oil extraction in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and logging in the Tongass National Forest.
Alaska borders the northwest edge of Canada and is closer to Russia (just a short hop across the Bering Strait) than to the rest of the U.S. The landscape is dramatic and, because it covers such a huge territory, quite varied. In the south is rain forest (Tongass), and in the north is Arctic desert. The state is traversed by several mountain ranges and encompasses North America’s highest mountain (Mt. McKinley) and 16 of the highest peaks in the U.S., as well as most of the active volcanoes in the country. It has more coastline than all of the other U.S. states combined. The geography ranges from tundra to sheer mountain wall, from the densely forested, relatively temperate coasts of the Inside Passage to the permafrost of Barrow.
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