Scale is what makes Wrangell-St. Elias National Park special. It’s the largest national park in the United States at 13.2 million acres, larger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Switzerland combined, and it contains nine of the sixteen highest peaks in the country. It’s also one of the least-visited parks in the system, which is the other half of what makes it different.
Four mountain ranges meet inside the park boundary: the Wrangells, the St. Elias, the Chugach, and the eastern edge of the Alaska Range. Mt. St. Elias rises out of the Gulf of Alaska to 18,008 feet. Mt. Blackburn, the highest peak in the Wrangells, sits at 16,390. Mt. Sanford, a shield volcano, climbs to 16,237. Malaspina Glacier, spilling out onto the coast, is bigger than the state of Rhode Island. The Bagley Icefield runs over a hundred miles end to end.
Two of the park’s volcanoes are still active. Mt. Wrangell vents steam from fumaroles in its summit ice cap, hot enough to keep ice caves open year-round. Mt. Churchill, hidden in the St. Elias Range, produced two of the largest volcanic eruptions in North America in the past 2,000 years; the ash from those events is still visible as a distinctive layer in soil profiles across eastern Alaska and the Yukon.
The park is also part of one of the largest internationally protected areas on Earth: the Kluane / Wrangell-St. Elias / Glacier Bay / Tatshenshini-Alsek UNESCO World Heritage Site, a 24-million-acre system spanning the Alaska-Yukon border. Combined, those four parks make up an unbroken wilderness comparable in scale to small countries.
Then there’s Kennicott. Inside the park boundary, on the south side at the end of the McCarthy Road, sits one of the most intact copper mining ghost towns in North America. Kennecott operated from 1911 to 1938, working ore that ran 13% copper by weight, among the richest deposits ever mined. When the company pulled out, workers left mid-shift, and the structures were largely abandoned. The fourteen-story mill, the company store, the bunkhouses, and the power plant still stand, stabilized over the past thirty years by the Park Service. It’s a National Historic Landmark and one of the few places in the country where you can walk through a complete industrial operation from the early twentieth century.
The Ahtna people, who have lived in this country for hundreds of generations, named Mt. Wrangell K’elt’aeni: “the one that controls the weather.” They observed, across many lifetimes, how the mountain’s mass shaped storm patterns and cloud formation. That kind of long-form observation is part of what’s special too. The land has been continuously inhabited for at least 8,000 years, and likely longer.
For visitors today, what’s special depends on what you’re looking for. Historians come for Kennicott. Photographers come for the peaks and ice. Travelers looking for somewhere they haven’t been before come because almost everything about this park is on a different scale than anywhere else in the country.
