State Profile

Alaska, known as the Great Land, is a place of superlatives, and that goes as much for natural beauty and outdoor recreation opportunities as it does for many other aspects of the 49th state.

Alaska has more unspoiled places protected as national parks, national wildlife refuges, and designated wilderness areas than any other state. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park is America's largest national park. The Tongass National Forest is America's largest national forest. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is America's largest national wildlife refuge. Mountains, forests, wetlands, ice fields, seacoast ... Alaska's are bigger and wilder than anywhere else in America. Only in Alaska can Americans experience wilderness as our forebears experienced it, on an epic, breathtaking scale.

Same is true for wildlife. Alaska has fauna in abundance and range found nowhere else in America. Bears ... black bears, brown bears, and polar bears. Wolf. Moose. Dall sheep. Musk oxen. Caribou. Bison (yes, bison!). Sitka black-tailed deer. Roosevelt elk. Arctic and red fox. Six species of seal. Fourteen species of whale. All five runs of Pacific salmon. Four types of sea turtle. And birds ... in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge alone, more than 200 resident and migratory bird species have been seen. Migratory birds from the lower 48 states and five continents visit the Arctic refuge, including the grand champion of migrants, the Arctic tern, which flies some 20,000 miles per year migrating between the Arctic and Antarctic.

For outdoorsmen, Alaska offers the opportunities of a lifetime for the highest quality hunting, fishing, camping, boating, snowshoeing, wildlife photography, and other recreation pursuits.

Working together, we can conserve Alaska's immense, priceless natural heritage for the pleasure and benefit of future generations.