What to do at Wrangell-St. Elias

April 25th, 2026 by Carl D

What you do at Wrangell-St. Elias depends partly on which side of the park you visit. The McCarthy side has the historic Kennicott mining district, drive-up access to Root Glacier, scenic flights over the high peaks, and the small-town McCarthy experience. Most visitors go here. The Nabesna Road side, on the north end, has fewer headline attractions but a real network of maintained hiking trails, better wildlife viewing from the road, and far fewer people. For travelers who want to spend their days walking on actual trails rather than touring historic sites and a single glacier toe, the Nabesna side is often the better choice.

Backcountry options exist for visitors with serious wilderness skills or a guide service, but most road-based travelers don’t go that direction and the park is plenty rewarding without it.

Activities below are organized by where they happen.

Alaska hiking trips Wrangell Mountains McCarthy Alaska.
Fall in the McCarthy-Kennicott Valley, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.

In and around McCarthy and Kennecott

This is where most of the park’s road-based activity happens. Most of these can be done independently or with local guide services based in McCarthy.

Walk Kennicott historic district

Park Service ranger-led tours run daily during the summer season through the Kennicott mill complex, the company store, the hospital, and the bunkhouses. The mill itself is a fourteen-story wooden structure that processed copper ore from 1911 to 1938. Ranger tours typically run a few hours and cover the operational history, the engineering, and the social context of company-town life. You can also walk the district independently, but the interpretive value of a ranger tour is real.

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What’s special about Wrangell-St. Elias National Park?

April 23rd, 2026 by Carl D

Scale is what makes Wrangell-St. Elias National Park special. At 13.2 million acres, it’s the largest national park in the United States, bigger 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. They pile into each other and create a landscape with a depth you don’t find anywhere else in North America. Mt. St. Elias climbs to 18,008 feet out of the ocean. Mt. Blackburn sits at 16,390. 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 and stays buried under snow year round.

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Backpacking the Arrigetch Peaks

March 27th, 2026 by Carl D
Camping on our backpacking trip in Arrigetch Valley, Gates of the Arctic National Park.
Looking straight up Arrigetch Valley

North of Everything

The floatplane banks over Circle Lake and you see the Arrigetch Peaks for the first time from the air. Granite spires stacked against the sky, walled off behind miles of spruce forest and muskeg. From the lake, you can’t see them at all. You just know they’re up there.

The pilot cuts the engine, the floats touch the water, and within a few minutes you’re standing on the shore with your pack and your group, watching the plane shrink to a dot over the Alatna River valley. Then it’s quiet. Properly quiet. The kind of quiet where you hear your own breathing and the water lapping and absolutely nothing else.

That’s how every Arrigetch Peaks backpacking trip starts. A lake, a pile of gear, and a long walk ahead.

The Approach

The Arrigetch Peaks sit in the central Brooks Range, inside Gates of the Arctic National Park. The name is Inupiaq, meaning roughly “fingers of the hand extended”, which is about as accurate a description of a mountain range as you’ll ever hear. From a distance the peaks look like a granite hand reaching out of the tundra.

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Alaska Rafting Trips: Rafting the Canning River in ANWR

March 18th, 2026 by Carl D
Expeditions Alaska rafting trip guide, Rachel Taylor, guiding a rafting tour on the Canning River, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska.
Expeditions Alaska guide Rachel, RayTay, guiding our Rafting Trip on the Canning River.

Rafting Trip Report

By Rachel Taylor, Expeditions Alaska guide

Most Alaska rafting trips start with a long drive. Ours started with two of them, a night in Coldfoot, and a de Havilland Beaver bush plane flight over the Brooks Range before we ever touched the water. That’s part of it.

Getting to a river like the Canning takes some effort. There’s no trailhead, no boat ramp, and no road within a hundred miles of the put-in. The logistics are a real part of the experience, and honestly, they’re part of what makes an Alaska rafting trip in the Arctic feel so different from anything else.

Christie Conway and I guided this trip in late June 2024 with a group of five. We left Fairbanks on June 25th and drove north on the Dalton Highway to Coldfoot, about a five-hour drive on one of the most remote highways in North America.

The Dalton runs alongside the Trans-Alaska Pipeline for much of the way, through boreal forest and over the Yukon River, and it’s a trip in itself. We overnighted at Coldfoot, a small outpost just south of the Brooks Range, and prepped gear that evening. Weighed everything. Food boxes, stoves, bear spray, tents, personal gear.

Every pound matters when you’re loading a bush plane.

The next morning we flew into the Marsh Fork of the Canning River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. An hour and twenty minutes in the air, threading through the mountains of the Brooks Range. So many mountains. When you finally touch down on that gravel strip and the plane leaves, you feel it in your chest. You are out here.

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Cougar, Puma, Mountain Lion: It’s All the Same Cat

March 10th, 2026 by Carl D
A mother puma or mountain lion, also called cougar, in Patagonia Torres del Paine, Chile.
Puma? Cougar? Mountain Lion? Catamount?

What’s In A Name?

Cougar, puma, mountain lion, panther, catamount, painter, ghost cat, mountain screamer, red tiger, deer tiger, Mexican lion, American lion. That’s twelve names for the same animal. There are at least 40 more.

No other mammal on earth has this many common names. Not even close. And the reason is simple: Puma concolor has the largest range of any wild land mammal in the Western Hemisphere. From the Yukon to Patagonia, across forests, deserts, swamps, prairies, and mountains, this single species has been encountered and named by people speaking dozens of languages across two continents for thousands of years.

So when someone asks “what’s the difference between a cougar and a puma?” the answer is: nothing. Same animal. Same species. Same DNA. The only difference is who’s talking about it and where.

One Animal, Forty Names

The naming confusion isn’t laziness. It’s geography.

“Puma” comes from the Quechua language of the Inca, where it meant “powerful animal”. It’s still the standard term across Latin America and in scientific literature globally. The species name is Puma concolor, which translates roughly to “powerful animal of one color”.

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Why Do Humpback Whales Breach?

March 3rd, 2026 by Carl D
A humpback whale breaching out of the Pacific Ocean Alaska
A sight to behold – breaching humpback whale.

The honest answer is: we don’t know. Not for certain.

I realize that’s not the tidy explanation you came here looking for. But it’s the truth, and I’d rather start with that than dress it up. Researchers have been working on this question for decades and the best they’ve managed is a list of plausible hypotheses. None of them fully explains the behavior. Several of them contradict each other.

What I can tell you, after five seasons watching humpbacks in Southeast Alaska, is what breaching looks like when it happens 200 yards off your bow. And a few patterns I’ve noticed that may or may not amount to anything.

What It Actually Looks Like

Most photos of breaching whales show a single frozen moment. The animal airborne, water streaming off its body. What the photos completely miss is the speed, the concussion of sound, and the sheer absurdity of the scale.

A humpback whale weighs roughly 40 tons. To breach, it has to accelerate vertically from depth fast enough to launch two-thirds or more of its body clear of the water. The splash when it comes back down can be heard half a mile away. The first time you see it happen for real, in person, your brain genuinely needs a second to catch up with your eyes. Something that large is not supposed to do that.

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Humpback Whales in Alaska

February 26th, 2026 by Carl D

Where They Go, When They Come, and Why Spring Changes Everything

A humpback whale feast. Spawning herring make a calorie-filled feast for the local humpbacks.
Watching humpbacks bubble-net feed is a treat.

Every year, thousands of humpback whales make one of the longest migrations in the animal kingdom. They leave the warm breeding waters of Hawaii, Mexico, and the western Pacific and swim north. Some travel over 3,000 miles, one way. They don’t eat during the trip. They arrive hungry, and Alaska feeds them.

Understanding why they come here, when they show up, and where they concentrate is foundational to everything we do on our Hungry Whales Photo Tour each spring. It’s also the key to understanding why early spring in Southeast Alaska offers something the summer whale-watching season doesn’t.

Why Alaska

Humpbacks spend winter in tropical waters where they mate, give birth, and nurse calves. But tropical oceans are nutritional deserts for a baleen whale. There just isn’t enough prey down there to sustain a 40-ton animal that needs to eat a ton or more per day. So they fast. They live off stored fat for months, and by the time they point north they’re running on fumes.

Alaska’s cold, nutrient-dense waters are the payoff. The coastal waters of Southeast Alaska, the Gulf of Alaska, the Bering Sea, these areas produce massive concentrations of the small schooling fish and krill that humpbacks need. The whales feed hard during the Alaska months, building fat reserves for the next winter’s migration and breeding.

The whole cycle is driven by food. Alaska isn’t a destination for humpback whales. It’s a grocery store. The biggest one in the Pacific.

The Herring Connection

In Southeast Alaska specifically, one species holds the whole thing together: Pacific herring.

Herring aggregate in enormous schools in the protected waterways around Sitka, Chatham Strait, and the surrounding channels to spawn each spring. Timing shifts a bit year to year, but the peak generally falls late March through April. When the herring show up, the whales are right behind them.

This isn’t a casual relationship. Researcher Joseph Liddle tracked humpback whale abundance in Sitka Sound alongside Pacific herring spawning biomass from 1981 through 2011. The correlation between the two populations was 0.87. For context, that’s about as tight a link as you’ll find between a predator and its prey in the wild.

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Wildlife Photography Tips and Techniques

February 25th, 2026 by Carl D
Alaska bear photo tour; brown bear with red salmon.
My favorite bear.

Intro

I’ve been photographing wildlife for thirty years. Grizzlies on salmon streams or high in the mountains. Wolves in the Alaska Range. Pumas in Patagonia. Eagles in winter storms on the Chilkat River. I’ve also been roaming around Alaska’s backcountry since 1998, and guiding here since 2001, which means I’ve spent hundreds, if not thousands, of days in the field with wild animals, in every kind of weather (well, most kinds of weather), in some of the most remote country in North America.

Most wildlife photography content on the internet focuses on camera settings and gear. Those things matter. But they’re only a part of what determines whether you come home with strong images. The other ninety percent is fieldcraft: knowing where to be, when to be there, how to read an animal’s body language, and what it’s about to do next. That’s the stuff that’s hard to learn from a YouTube video.

This wildlife photography guide covers all of it. Gear, settings, fieldcraft, behavior, composition, ethics, and the mistakes that cost you and me the shot. It’s not theoretical. Everything here comes from decades of doing this for a living, in wild places where often times the animals don’t know you’re there and the weather doesn’t care about your plans.

Two Days for a Few Frames

I once spent two days in the Alaska Range following a band of Dall sheep rams. From watching the ewes’ behavior on day one, I guessed where the rams were headed, hiked to that spot the next morning, and approached slowly and quietly enough that one ram eventually grazed to within inches of where I lay on the tundra. Two days of fieldcraft for a few frames with a wide-angle lens. That’s wildlife photography.

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Packrafting the Arctic: Float Trips in Gates of the Arctic and the Brooks Range

February 24th, 2026 by Carl D
Packrafting trip on the Noatak river, Gates of the Arctic National Park, Alaska.
Packrafting trip on the Noatak river, Gates of the Arctic National Park, Alaska.

Why lightweight boats unlock Alaska’s most remote wilderness

Gates of the Arctic National Park has no roads, no trails, and no services. At 8.4 million acres, it’s one of the largest wilderness areas in the United States, and getting there requires either a very long walk or a small plane.

This is where packrafts shine.

A packraft is a lightweight inflatable boat, typically weighing 4-8 pounds, that can be rolled up and carried in a backpack. When you reach water, you inflate it and paddle. When you reach land, you deflate it and walk. The combination of backpacking and paddling opens terrain that neither activity alone can access.

In the Arctic, where floatplanes have strict weight limits and portages are unavoidable, packrafts make trips possible that would be impractical with traditional boats. You can fly into a remote lake, hike to a river, paddle for days, then hike out to a different pickup point. The boat goes where you go.

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Whale Photography in Alaska

February 19th, 2026 by Carl D

Tips From Five Seasons Shooting Humpback Whales

Humpback whale bubblenet feeding.
The feast for all!

Whale photography is humbling. You can have 30 years behind a lens, a camera body that costs more than your truck, and the fastest autofocus system money can buy, and a humpback whale will still make you look like an amateur.

They’re fast. They’re unpredictable. They surface where you’re not looking, breach when you’ve just put your camera down, and vanish when you’ve finally got your settings right. The ocean is moving, the boat is moving, you’re moving, and the whale is doing whatever it wants.

I’ve been running our Hungry Whales Photo Tour in Southeast Alaska for five seasons now. Here’s what I’ve figured out so far. Emphasis on “so far” because the whales keep teaching me things.

Why Southeast Alaska Is Different

A humpback whale fluke looks about the same whether you photograph it in Alaska, Cape Cod, or Antarctica. What sets Southeast Alaska apart is the context around the whale.

The backdrop matters. Moss-draped old-growth Sitka spruce, dark water, cloud layers sitting on the ridgelines. When a whale flukes against that shoreline, there’s no ambiguity about where the photo was made. Place changes everything in a wildlife photograph.

Then there’s the behavior. Spring here coincides with the Pacific herring spawn, which draws hundreds of humpbacks into concentrated feeding. The bubble-net feeding that results is among the most visually dramatic wildlife events on the planet. Groups of whales lunging through the surface together, mouths wide, herring flying. That’s a fundamentally different subject than a lone whale fluking on the horizon somewhere.

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