Barrow -- officially renamed Utqiagvik in 2016, though most people still call it Barrow -- is the northernmost city in the United States, sitting 330 miles above the Arctic Circle where the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas meet. About half of its 5,000 residents are Inupiat, making it the largest Inupiat Eskimo community in the world.
The town serves as the seat of the North Slope Borough, an 89,000-square-mile municipality larger than Ohio and Pennsylvania combined. Getting here is an adventure in itself: there are no roads in, and everything arrives by air or barge. The Inupiat name Utqiagvik means "the place where we hunt snowy owls," and subsistence hunting -- particularly bowhead whaling -- remains central to daily life. The Iñupiat Heritage Center is the best place to understand it, and the whale bone arch on the seafront is the obligatory photograph.
Visitors come for the sheer otherworldliness of the place. In summer, the sun does not set for 82 consecutive days. In winter, it does not rise for 65. The tundra stretches flat in every direction, polar bears occasionally wander through town, and the frozen ocean extends to the horizon. Day-trip tours run to Point Barrow itself, the geographic top of the continent. It is one of the most remote and genuinely unusual places you can visit in North America.