What do you want on your trip to Alaska?
Do you want mountains and glaciers? How about animals and interesting history? Maybe you want wild rivers and great hikes?
What about wide-open spaces and plenty of wilderness?
While Alaska specializes in all those things, there is no place better to find all of them than Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve.
At 13.2 million acres, Wrangell-St. Elias is the nation's largest national park, twice as big as Denali National Park and Preserve.
"From Kennicott you look around, your 180-degree view is probably about 50 miles of country," said Mike Murphy, co-owner of Kennicott Wilderness Guides (www.kennicottguides.com, 1-800-664-4537). "That's one of those things people don't understand until you get there. It has the feel of being 'out' there.
"On a landscape perspective, I like to say it's like driving right into the middle of Denali, or driving into the middle of the Alaska Range. Of course, you can't drive into the middle of Denali. Here, there is a 7,000-foot icefall, that's pretty much the first thing you see when you park your car at the end of the road."
Murphy's company offers guided hiking, ice climbing, trekking on glaciers, rafting, backpacking and other trips. He said they specialize in low client-to-guide ratios, offering unique trips.
Wrangell-St. Elias is home to the nation's second-tallest mountain, 18,008-foot Mount St. Elias. It's just one of many impressive peaks in the park. Four mountain ranges -- the Alaska, the Chugach, the Wrangell and the St. Elias -- converge at the park, which is home to nine of the nation's 16 tallest mountains.
Flowing out of those mountains are dozens of glaciers. The massive Malaspina Glacier is larger than Rhode Island, while at 80 miles long, the Nebesna Glacier is North America's longest. The Hubbard Glacier is one of the most active tidewater glaciers in Alaska. It stretches 76 miles from the Yukon territory to the sea at Yakutat. The calving face of the glacier is six miles wide.
Air-taxi companies will deliver visitors into the park and also offer flightseeing trips. Some trips can be booked from Anchorage to McCarthy. Those who want to drive into the park can use one of two gravel roads. The 59-mile McCarthy Road is from Chitina to McCarthy. Visitors can expect the trip to be slow and bumpy, although Murphy said the condition of the road has improved considerably the past couple years.
Once in the park, many visitors head straight for the abandoned Kennecott Copper Corp.'s mine, especially the 14-story mill in Kennicott. (The names of the town and the mine are spelled differently.)
"It really offers a peek into the copper mine that mined the richest copper ore ever found on earth," said Smitty Parratt, chief interpreter for Wrangell-St. Elias National Park (www.nps.gov/wrst). "It was so rich, it was worth building a railway all the way from Cordova up to McCarthy to extract that copper. It shows human perseverance in the face of great difficulties.
"Tours through the mill really see the whole production -- raw chunks of boulders came in the top and at the other end, 'digested' copper came out in small sizes."
Tours inside the mill are offered by St. Elias Alpine Guides (www.steliasguides.com, 1-888-933-5427). In addition to the 2 1/2-hour guided tour inside the mill ($25), the company offers ice trekking and a variety of other outdoor activities. The National Park Service offers tours around Kennicott but not into the mill.
Before heading into the Wrangell-St. Elias, spend some time at the park headquarters at Mile 106 Richardson Highway. A park movie is shown in the theater, there are exhibits and a large interactive map of the park.
Special sections editor Steve Edwards can be reached at sedwards@adn.com. Visit his Alaska travel blog at www.alaska.com/alaskology.
