Alaska is the wild edge of the United States — a state larger than Texas, California, and Montana combined, with a population smaller than most American cities. Scale is the first thing that surprises visitors. The road system barely touches the interior; more than 80% of Alaskan communities are not connected to anywhere by road at all. You reach them by bush plane, boat, or snowmobile.
Most visitors start in Anchorage, which sits between the Chugach Mountains and the tidal mudflats of Cook Inlet, and use it as a base for side trips — north to Denali National Park and its 6,190-metre peak, or south to the glaciers and fjords around Seward. The drive up to Talkeetna, the quirky bush-plane town at the foot of Denali, is one of the great short road trips in North America. Further north, Fairbanks is the best base for aurora viewing between September and April, when the northern lights are visible on roughly four nights out of five when skies are clear.
The southeast panhandle is a different Alaska — a rainforest archipelago of a thousand islands, reachable only by plane or the Alaska Marine Highway ferry. Juneau, the state capital, has no road connection to the rest of the state. Ketchikan, Petersburg, and Skagway each have their own character — Norwegian fishing town, Tlingit heartland, gold-rush theatre. The ferry from Bellingham to Skagway is a three-day trip through the Inside Passage and the best-value way to see this coast.
For the serious traveler, the Arctic beckons. Barrow (now Utqiagvik) is the northernmost town in the United States, where the sun does not set for 82 days in summer and does not rise for 65 in winter. The Dalton Highway — 666 miles of mostly gravel road from Fairbanks to the oil fields at Prudhoe Bay — is one of the most remote drives on earth. In the southwest, Homer sits at the end of a spit of land jutting into Kachemak Bay, with halibut fishing, sea otters, and a small arts scene.
Alaska is expensive and logistically demanding — a week here costs what two weeks in the Lower 48 might — but nothing else in America comes close to the sheer space of it.
