Alaska

I landed in Anchorage in late May, which meant the light was already doing strange things — golden at ten in the evening, never quite dark, the sky cycling through shades of copper and rose while people walked their dogs like it was four in the afternoon. That first disorientation is Alaska’s opening move. Nothing about it operates on the schedule you arrived with.

The Mountain

The scale is the thing nobody warns you about properly. I’d seen photographs of Denali from the park road, that great white mass dominating the horizon, and I thought I understood what I was looking at. I didn’t. At 6,190 meters it is the highest mountain in North America, and it rises from lowlands so flat that the whole height of it is on view, which is rarer than it sounds: in summer the peak is hidden by cloud more often than not. The mountain is so large that your brain refuses to process it as a single object — it reads as sky, as background, as something that can’t possibly be as close as it is. I stood at the Eielson Visitor Center with my jaw actually open, which has never happened to me before and felt embarrassing until I noticed everyone else doing the same thing.

Denali National Park is organized around a single road. Past the first fifteen miles you cannot drive it yourself, so you ride a bus for hours into the park and get off wherever the wildlife or the light tempts you. Moose, caribou, Dall sheep and grizzly bears all turn up in the valleys, and the bus drivers are unusually good at spotting them.

Talkeetna and the Interior

We drove to Talkeetna for a rest stop and ate reindeer sausage from a stand near the railway depot — dense, smoky, slightly gamey — while floatplanes buzzed overhead on their way to drop climbers at base camp. That combination of the mundane and the extraordinary is pure Alaska.

Further into the interior the roads get long. Fairbanks is the northern hub, and the place to go for the aurora in winter; Chena Hot Springs is a short drive out, with hot pools in a cold forest. On the way back south the Matanuska Glacier is one of the few big glaciers you can reach by road and walk onto. The biggest wilderness of all is Wrangell-St. Elias, the largest national park in the United States, and a place where the infrastructure is a gravel road and a few lodges.

The Coast

The coastline is a different story altogether. I took the ferry through the Inside Passage from Bellingham to Juneau, three days of watching glaciers calve into grey-green water, bald eagles perched on every dead spruce, orca fins cutting through the channel without ceremony. Juneau itself is a small city reachable only by sea or air — no road connects it to the rest of Alaska — and there’s something philosophically freeing about that. The town has good coffee, a surprisingly decent dining scene, and the Mendenhall Glacier sitting at its edge like an uninvited guest who’s been there long enough to feel permanent.

Kayaking in Tracy Arm Fjord among floating ice, the silence broken only by the groaning of the glacier and the occasional thunderclap of a calving, is one of those experiences I’m still processing.

The Inside Passage towns each have a different personality. Sitka was the capital of Russian America until 1867, and the onion-domed church in the middle of town still says so. Skagway is a Klondike Gold Rush town with a narrow-gauge railway and a main street of preserved wooden fronts, and Haines is the quieter neighbor across the water. Ketchikan and Wrangell are fishing towns where it rains most of the year and the totem poles are the reason to visit. West of the Panhandle the coast turns wilder still: Seward and Kenai Fjords for glaciers you reach by boat, Homer for halibut and the long spit, Valdez and Cordova for the Prince William Sound, and Kodiak Island for the big bears.

The Far North

At the top of the map, Utqiagvik is the northernmost town in the country, where the sun does not set for about eighty days in summer and does not rise for about two months in winter. Nome is the end of the Iditarod and a gold town on the Bering Sea. Both are reachable only by air.

When to go: Late May through early September for the interior — Denali is best in June and early July when the mountain is most likely to be visible. June offers the midnight sun in full force. Southeast Alaska (Juneau, Sitka, Ketchikan) is accessible and green all summer but prepare for rain regardless of month. September brings the first autumn colors and fewer crowds. Avoid winter unless you’re specifically chasing the northern lights — February and March offer good aurora viewing around Fairbanks, but the cold is genuinely extreme.

What most guides get wrong: They push the cruise ship experience as the default Alaska, which gives you a version of the state seen from a floating hotel — beautiful but controlled. The real Alaska requires either your own vehicle, a floatplane, or the ferry system. The distances between things are enormous, and the places that stay with you are almost always the ones you had to work slightly harder to reach. Also: Fairbanks is criminally underrated. It’s ugly in the way frontier towns are ugly, completely practical, and it sits at the edge of genuinely wild country that most visitors never see.

Photography: Pexels contributors.