Can you drive through Wrangell-St. Elias?

No. No road crosses Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. Two gravel spur roads enter the park from the Alaska highway system, and both dead-end inside it. The McCarthy Road runs 60 miles from Chitina to the Kennicott River footbridge on the south side. The Nabesna Road runs 42 miles from Slana to a small camp on the north side. The two don’t connect.

If you came to this question after looking at a map and wondering whether you can drive through the park to somewhere else, the answer is that the park’s interior is roadless and no through route exists.

The road network in detail

McCarthy Road (south side)

• Length: 60 miles of gravel
• Starts at: Chitina, off the Edgerton Highway spur from the Richardson Highway
• Distance from Anchorage to Chitina: about 190 miles, paved, 4.5 hours
• Drive time on the gravel: 2.5 to 3 hours
• Endpoint: Kennicott River footbridge (cross on foot to McCarthy)
• Access reaches: McCarthy, Kennecott National Historic Landmark, Root Glacier, scenic views of Mt. Blackburn and the Kennicott and Chitina river valleys

Nabesna Road (north side)

• Length: 42 miles of gravel
• Starts at: Slana, on the Tok Cutoff (Alaska Route 1)
• Distance from Anchorage to Slana: about 260 miles, mostly paved, 5.5 hours
• Drive time on the gravel: 1.5 to 2.5 hours
• Endpoint: a small camp past which the road becomes impassable to most vehicles
• Access reaches: Skookum Volcano Trail, Trail Creek and Lost Creek trails, Caribou Creek Trail, Rambler Mine, the Nabesna community, access to the Mentasta and eastern Wrangell ranges

Wrangell-St. Elias Maps & Current Road Conditions

• NPS official park maps: the NPS Map here
• Alaska 511 (state DOT road condition reports): 511.alaska.gov
• McCarthy Road conditions are maintained on the Alaska DOT page for the McCarthy Road

What you can see from each road

Each road accesses different country and different highlights.

The McCarthy Road (south-side access)

The McCarthy Road, from Chitina to (just shy of) McCarthy, where you can access the historic Kennicott district, the front of Root Glacier, and walking-distance views of Mt. Blackburn and the upper Kennicott Glacier. About 70% of the park’s annual visitors come in this way. The historic and glacier-access value is concentrated here.

The Nabesna Road

The road from Slana to Nabesna, called the Nabesna Road, ends at a small lodge 42 miles off the Tok Cutoff on the north side. This one gets you to upland tundra, big river valleys, the eastern Wrangell volcanic peaks, and reliable wildlife sightings (caribou, moose, sometimes Dall sheep on the visible ridges). Roughly 30% of park visitation. Quieter, with fewer services. Closer to a backcountry feel even from inside a vehicle.

The two don’t connect, there’s no cross-park route, and none has ever existed.

If you want to “see” the park as a whole

You can’t, by car. The park covers 13.2 million acres. The two roads combined cover about 102 miles, all on the park’s edges. Everything beyond them is wilderness reached on foot, by bush plane, by raft, or by sea kayak along the Gulf of Alaska coast.

The most efficient way to take in the park’s scale without leaving the developed area is a scenic flight from McCarthy. Air taxi services run flights over the Bagley Icefield, Mt. Blackburn, the upper Wrangell volcanoes, and back. An hour in the air covers terrain a road network couldn’t approximate.

The interior of the park is roadless on purpose. When Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980 and designated Wrangell-St. Elias as a national park, the law included language preserving the park’s wilderness character. That means no new roads, no new trail systems, no backcountry shelters, no visitor centers in the interior. What was roadless in 1980 stays roadless.

That policy is the reason the park feels the way it does. Most national parks you can think of are built around a loop road. You drive in, you pull over at viewpoints, you see the headliners from the pavement, and you leave. Wrangell-St. Elias wasn’t built that way and never will be. The two roads that exist are old mining and homesteading access, pre-dating the park. Everything beyond them is wilderness you reach on foot, by bush plane, by packraft down a river, or by sea kayak along the Gulf of Alaska coast.

If you want to see both ends of the park

You drive in one side, come back out, and either drive around (roughly a full day of pavement and gravel connecting the two road heads) or fly between them on a small charter. A few visitors do both ends in a single trip. Most pick one and commit.

What the roadlessness actually protects

Real solitude. We’ve led week-long trips here where the group never saw another party. Real wildlife undisturbed by predictable human pressure. Grizzlies that have never learned to associate people with food. Wolf packs that roam far and wide in search of sheep and caribou. Those things are rare in the Lower 48 partly because the road networks there don’t allow for them.

The park also has active volcanoes, tens of thousands of square miles of glacial ice, fault zones that earthquake regularly, and rivers that change course from season to season. Building and maintaining interior roads in that kind of terrain would be expensive, disruptive, and at odds with why the park was set aside.

What you can do instead of driving across it

Cross it on foot. Our multi-week traverse trips fly into one side of the park, walk out across the country, and fly from the other side. This is the closest thing to “going through” Wrangell-St. Elias that exists.

Float it. Point-to-point packraft trips on the Chitina, Nizina, and other drainages move you across big sections of country without a trail.

See it from above. Air taxi flightseeing flights over the Wrangells give you the sense of scale that no road-based experience ever could.

Road access gets you to the park’s threshold. Everything past that is up to you.

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