Wrangell-St. Elias

The gravel road to McCarthy took us nearly five hours from the Richardson Highway, rattling over the old railroad bed of the Copper River and Northwestern line, one hand on the wheel and one eye on the rearview mirror for the dust cloud trailing behind us. Lia counted exactly two other vehicles the entire way. Wrangell-St. Elias is bigger than Switzerland, encompassing four mountain ranges and nine of the sixteen tallest peaks in the United States, yet it receives a fraction of the visitors that Denali does. We came precisely because of that emptiness, and the park delivered it in full — hours of black spruce forest and braided glacial rivers with no other sign of human presence.

Kennecott’s copper ghosts

At the road’s end sits Kennecott, a cluster of blood-red mill buildings clinging to a mountainside, abandoned almost overnight in 1938 when the copper ore ran thin. We took the ranger-led tour through the fourteen-story concentration mill, climbing wooden stairs past rusted machinery still positioned exactly where workers left it eight decades ago. Lia, more taken with atmosphere than history, kept photographing the way afternoon light fell through broken windows onto the mill’s skeletal frame. It felt less like a museum and more like a town holding its breath.

Root Glacier on foot

From Kennecott, a flat trail leads out to the toe of Root Glacier, and we strapped on rented crampons to walk directly onto the ice — something neither of us had done before. The glacier’s surface was riddled with meltwater channels running electric blue, and moulins that vanished straight down into darkness. Our guide stopped us at a safe distance from one and dropped a stone in; we never heard it land. Behind the glacier, the jagged wall of the Stairway Icefall climbed toward Mount Blackburn, one of the park’s 16,000-foot giants, its summit wreathed in cloud the entire afternoon.

Getting There

There is no easy way into Wrangell-St. Elias, and that is part of its appeal. Most visitors drive the McCarthy Road, a rough 60-mile gravel route branching off the Richardson Highway near Chitina, about a five-hour drive from Anchorage. A footbridge at the road’s end leads into McCarthy proper, from which a shuttle covers the final five miles to Kennecott. For those short on time, small air taxis fly from Chitina or Gulkana directly into backcountry airstrips, trading the long drive for a spectacular aerial view of the ice fields below.