Wrangell-St Elias National Park

Wrangell-St Elias covers more than fifty thousand square kilometres, larger than Switzerland and about six times the size of Yellowstone, and it joins Canada's Kluane and Glacier Bay in one enormous transboundary World Heritage area. Four mountain ranges converge here, with nine of the sixteen highest peaks in the United States and Mount St Elias rising directly from tidewater to nearly five and a half thousand metres. At the end of a long gravel road sits Kennecott, a copper mill town abandoned in 1938 and left standing, its fourteen-storey red mill building still on the hillside, with the tiny community of McCarthy below it. From Kennecott a short trail leads onto the Root Glacier, where you can walk on ice with crampons.

History

Archaeological evidence shows people entering the Wrangell Mountains about 1000 AD: the Ahtna along the Copper River, Upper Tanana speakers on the Nabesna and Chisana, the Eyak at the river mouth and the Tlingit at Yakutat Bay. Vitus Bering landed in the area in 1741, Russian fur traders followed, with posts at Port Etches in 1793 and Yakutat Bay in 1796, and Russian parties searched the lower Copper River for the pure copper its peoples used, one of them killed in 1797, while Semyon Potochkin reached the Chitina and wintered with the Ahtna in 1798. The Klondike gold rush brought prospectors who found gold and then rich copper, and the park, the largest in the United States, now covers the Wrangell and much of the Saint Elias Mountains up to Mount Saint Elias at 5,489 metres (Wikipedia, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve).

Highlights

• Kennecott - the abandoned copper mill town and its red fourteen-storey mill.
• Root Glacier - a walkable glacier reached on foot from the mill town.
• The flightseeing - small planes over icefields and the St Elias peaks.
• The McCarthy Road - a hundred kilometres of gravel to the end of the line.

When to go

June to early September is the season; outside it, services close and the road becomes a serious undertaking. July has the longest days and the most reliable flying weather. Rain is frequent, and flightseeing is cancelled often, so leave spare days.

Before you go

Getting in is the hard part: the McCarthy Road is a hundred kilometres of rough gravel that hire companies often prohibit, it ends at a footbridge, and vehicles do not cross to McCarthy. Services in McCarthy are tiny and expensive. Almost all of this park is trackless wilderness with no facilities of any kind, and glacier walks need a guide and crampons.

Nearby

Chitina is at the start of the road; Valdez is about four hours from the junction.

Key facts