Alaska is bigger than the next three biggest states—Texas, California, and Montana—combined. From Alaska’s eastern border with Canada’s Yukon Territory it stretches 2,400 miles westward to Attu Island. From the southern tip of Alaska to Barrow, the northernmost city in the United States, is a distance of 1,420 miles. The highest point in North America is Denali, or Mt. McKinley, an icy giant that rises to 20,320 feet in south-central Alaska.
About 5,000 glaciers are in Alaska. The largest are in the moist highlands of south-central and Southeast Alaska. Not all of Alaska’s freshwater is frozen, however. Alaska boasts more than 3,000 rivers. The third largest river in the United States is the Yukon, which flows out of Canada across Alaska to the Bering Sea.
Alaska even boasts North America’s largest animals. Some of the biggest moose, brown bears, and polar bears live in Alaska, for example. Other majestic Alaskan wildlife include caribou, white dall sheep, shaggy muskoxen, and wolves.
Yet Alaska’s most spectacular mammals live in the sea. These include white beluga whales, tusked walruses, mysterious beaked whales, acrobatic humpback whales, lumbering bowhead whales that are still hunted by Eskimos, blue whales that are larger than any known dinosaur, and sea otters, among the most intelligent of mammals.
Many of Alaska’s mammals are hardy creatures that can survive in both forests and open tundra. Alaska’s most magnificent forests grow along the coasts of south-central and southeastern Alaska. These are the beginning—or end—of a rainforest that stretches southward into California. Some of Alaska’s highest mountains are found in this region.
Alaska’s interior is largely forested with smaller trees—notably spruce—that get smaller still towards the north. These forests are broken here and there by tundra, treeless expanses clothed in grasses, lichens, and other plants. Another great mountain range, the Alaska Range, arcs through Alaska’s interior. It is here that Denali towers over forests, mountains, and lowlands.
Western Alaska is a vast region of lowlands and small mountains and rolling hills. This is a land of tundra—dry upland tundra and wet lowland tundra that sometimes forms vast swamps. In contrast to the interior, western Alaska seldom gets warm, even in summer.
The lonely mountains of the Brooks Range separate the Interior from the Arctic, or North, Slope to the north. They also pretty much mark the limits of the taiga, as the northernmost forest is called. Beyond the Brooks Range, the land slopes gently northward to the Arctic Ocean. Like western Alaska, the Arctic Slope is a vast wilderness of tundra, with small willows growing along rivers and streams.
Southwestern Alaska is a mixture of forests, tundra, lowlands, and mountains. Of Alaska’s ten highest volcanoes—all of which have erupted within the last 10,000 years—six are on the slender Alaska Peninsula, and three more are nearby. In fact, about 80 Alaska volcanoes are considered potentially active. About half of these have erupted since 1760, when people began keeping records.
The Alaska Peninsula points westward towards the Aleutian Islands, which separate the North Pacific Ocean from the Bering Sea to the north. Often hidden in fog, these treeless islands stretch far to the west towards the eastern Asia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. Immigrants were entering North America through the gates of Kamchatka long before there was a Statue of Liberty.
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