Alaska.com: Alaska's Travel Website

In addition to the four major national parks, Alaska boasts four other national parks, two national historical parks and four national monuments.

National historical parks

The historical parks are along the Inside Passage, recalling history reaching back to the 1700s.

• Sitka National Historical Park covers the site where Russian merchants and religious leaders ran their empire.

• Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park honors practically the whole town of Skagway and the route prospectors took during the stampede that began in 1898.

National parks

Aside from Alaska's four most popular national parks, four are both off the road and cruise routes.

• Katmai National Park sits on the western shore of Cook Inlet, southwest of Anchorage. It is set apart by two features: a volcanic blast zone and bears that catch salmon.

• Lake Clark National Park, just north of Katmai, is a land of lakes and rugged valleys.

• Gates of the Arctic, above the Arctic Circle northwest of Fairbanks, has migrating caribou and the raspy Arrigetch peaks.

• Kobuk Valley, also in the Arctic and west of Gates of the Arctic, has a desert and has produced some of the continent's oldest human artifacts.

National monuments

Two of Alaska's four national monuments are along the Inside Passage.

• Admiralty Island, near Juneau, has the world's greatest concentration of brown bears.

• Misty Fjords, near Ketchikan, features dramatic waterways in a rain forest.

• Cape Krusenstern, north of Kotzebue, has high archaeological value.

• Aniakchak, on the lower Alaska Peninsula in the southwestern part of the state, features a lake in a volcanic caldera with some of the world's worst weather.