You’d expect a destination that’s 2.5 times the size of Texas to have a few secrets. Here are 14 hidden Alaska gems worth visiting.
Cultural anthropologist and award-winning author Richard K. Nelson passed away in 2019 at the age of 77.
Though reaching the best spots for rockhounding Alaska may not be easy, the state’s geological riches rival its scenery in thrills and diversity.
Reflections of a carnivore
Capturing the spirit in the sky
A SHIMMER OF LIGHT FLICKERS OVER THE KOBUK RIVER AND THE CURVE OF THE BORNITE HILLS. Then another. As I gaze eastward, yellow-white tongues of fire rise from the horizon, accelerate in pulsing curtains that blaze overhead, shred and vanish, then form again.
Three parks, 17 million acres, as wild as it ever was.
Delivering plants and seeds and rototillers to Inupiaq Eskimo gardeners.
[by Seth Kantner]
We could have filled several issues of Alaska magazine with driving excursions in the Great Land. Instead, we decided to focus on a few tried-and-true road trips and will direct you to our sister publication The MILEPOST® as the definitive guide to making your way mile by mile throughout every region of the state, along with the places to stop for rest, food, lodging, and activities—as well as how to stay safe and be prepared in remote regions. On the following pages, you’ll find easily accessible journeys with manageable mileage and plenty to see and do enroute and upon arrival. Let’s hit the road!
Following the old timers’ trail I pulled alongside my traveling partner Clarence Wood. Following his lead, I tapped my snowmachine’s kill switch. Break time. As I unscrewed the cap of my thermos and poured steaming cups of coffee for us both, melting snow hissed on our mufflers. The upper Redstone valley stretched northward into a blue-white ache. Ahead lay Iviisaq Pass, known for its terrain-driven winds; and beyond, an expanse of treeless, unpeopled country, not so much as an inhabited cabin until the village of Anaktuvuk Pass, 200 more miles to the northeast. Our laden sleds, the sort once pulled by dogs, bore gas, food, and gear to sustain us for nearly double that distance. This was our first break since we’d set out from our village of Ambler, on the upper Kobuk, outward bound on a great loop that would carry us to Anaktuvuk, south to the Koyukuk, then…
High Tech I stood on a cut bank bright with autumn, the hoarse shouts of ravens echoing in the silence. Across the Kobuk’s clear, tannin-tinged flow rose a prominent, birch-spangled knoll; and beyond stretched an expanse of country, rising toward the looming, cloud-brushed pyramids of the Jade Mountains. This place, Onion Portage, known to the Inupiat as Paatitaaq (for the wild, onion-like chives that grow here), is marked by a great looping bend several miles long where the Kobuk reverses direction and almost circles back on itself before resuming its meandering westward flow. I lingered here as people have since time forgotten—not just centuries, but millennia according to the work of archeologist Louis Giddings. Roaming alone through the upper Kobuk in the early 1940s, Giddings, a researcher from Brown University, found his way to Onion Portage as so many had before him, following the river, drawn by the shape of…
