Northern Alaska Wilds

  • Finding Light in Kobuk Valley National Park

    Bymichael

    When planning a visit to America’s national parks, some destinations require a second look at the map to confirm what the photograph is showing. Kobuk Valley National Park contains active sand dunes above the Arctic Circle. Not near the Arctic Circle, not at its edge — 35 miles north of it, in the boreal forest and tundra of northwestern Alaska, where the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes rise to 100 feet above the Kobuk River valley floor with the Brooks Range as backdrop and the caribou migration passing through them twice a year.

  • Inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park

    Bymichael

    Every photographer eventually builds a list of places they cannot believe exist at the scale described. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve is at the top of that list. It covers 13.2 million acres of southeastern Alaska — larger than the entire country of Switzerland, larger than Yellowstone and Yosemite and the entire Swiss Alps combined. It contains nine of the sixteen highest peaks in the United States. It holds the largest collection of glaciers outside the polar ice caps. The Bagley Icefield alone, one of several major ice systems within the park, covers more area than the state of Rhode Island.

  • Inside Gates of the Arctic National Park

    Bymichael

    Some landscapes become part of our imagination through their absolute otherness. Gates of the Arctic National Park exists at the outer edge of what the national park system contains — not just geographically, though it sits entirely above the Arctic Circle in the Brooks Range of northern Alaska, but philosophically. This is the park that has no roads leading to it, no trails within it, no visitor facilities inside its boundaries, no entrance station, and no fee. It is 8.5 million acres of arctic wilderness — larger than Switzerland — where the only way to arrive is by small aircraft or by walking in from the Dalton Highway, and where everything that happens after arrival is entirely the visitor’s responsibility.