Alaska Excursions

Alaska Excursions

Wide range of glorious day trips throughout Southcentral Alaska.

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Flightseeing in Alaska

With so few roads and so much country, taking to the air is a favorite way of residents and visitors alike to see some of the state's most spectacular scenery.

Anchorage Daily News

With so few roads and so much country, taking to the air is a favorite way of residents and visitors alike to see some of the state's most spectacular scenery.

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More on Flightseeing

Flightseeing

With so few roads and so much country, taking to the air is a favorite way of residents and visitors alike to see some of the state's most spectacular scenery.

Flightseeing offers extraordinary views of breathtaking landscapes. Find out how to book your flightseeing tour.

Flightseeing at Denali

The lure of seeing a really big mountain -- at 20,320 feet, Denali is the tallest on the continent -- up close draws tourists to flightseeing businesses in the Denali National Park area.

Flightseeing over Alaska's bush

The engine roars, the bush plane shudders; it's take-off time. The world outside begins to crawl by, then it goes faster, faster, before dissolving into a blur of hurtling colors. Then you're up, up, leaving the ground in a dizzying pitch and, within moments, you're sailing toward a range of distant mountains.

Planes and helicopters go up where the view is grand

By Teeka Ballas / Special to the Anchorage Daily News

One summer, I had the opportunity to take a flightseeing tour over the Cathedral Peaks of the Chilkat Mountain Range in Southeast Alaska. In the course of that hour-long flight I became an addict. In three months I took 10 flights over Cathedral Peaks, and I have since taken many  more all over the state.

Flight seeing operators
Click on a link to receive a directory of flight seeing operators in various locations around the state.

I just plug in my iPod and allow the soundtrack of my bird’s-eye view to take over.

To see Alaska from the window of a Cessna or Twin Otter is not just a rush to the senses; it’s also a great way to lay your eyes upon the vast amount of unscathed land that no train or automobile can reach. The sky-stroking peaks, the miles of ice, the flats of tundra riddled with herds of caribou and musk ox - it’s  all breathtaking and potentially life-changing.

Every town or village that has an airstrip also offers air-taxi and sightseeing services.

Southcentral
The peak of Denali is the most popular sight in this region, but the nearby Alaska Range, the Great Gorge and Ruth Glacier are almost as stunning. Also noteworthy are the notorious Mount Redoubt volcano and Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. A real treat is to take a floatplane from Anchorage, fly around for a couple of hours and land on a remote lake. It’s a good time to get out and stretch the legs and get a better  view of all that you’ve witnessed from the air.

Southeast
The top sights in Southeast are Glacier Bay, the 1,500 square miles of the Malaspina Glacier (it’s so large it can only be seen in its entirety from space), the ice fields of the Tongass National Forest, and the 75-mile-wide Hubbard Glacier

The Bush
Equally enchanting, but in an entirely different way, is an air retreat over the tundra of northern Alaska and the Arctic Circle. Long ago the great sheets of ice that stretched from Siberia to the interior of Alaska melted, and what’s left is a haunting and flat, treeless, cold desert, chiefly inhabited by bear, caribou and musk ox. In the fall, the long, green tundra grass atop the layer of permafrost turns an array of colors.