Alaska fits its name very well. It comes from the word alyeska, meaning “Great Land” in the language of its native Aleut people. Alaska covers 591,004 square miles. Rhode Island would fit into Alaska 480 times! The highest point in Alaska is 20,320-foot Mount McKinley. The 16 highest mountains in the United States are all in Alaska. There are also about 100,000 glaciers. The largest, Malaspina Glacier, covers 850 square miles. Alaska also has more than three million lakes and 3,000 rivers, much more than any other state.
Everything about Alaska seems to be big. The largest salmon on record was caught in 1985 in Alaska’s Kenia River. It weighed 97 pounds, 4 ounces. It brown bears, called Kodiak bears, are the world’s largest bears. Even the vegetables grown there are big. Cabbages have been known to weigh 95 pounds and carrots to be 3 feet long! If you took a trip through Alaska, it would take quite a long while to cover its vast territory. You’d have to take an airplane from place to place because much of Alaska doesn’t have roads.
Along the coast you will see thousands of islands, rocks, and reefs. You’d see glaciers and icebergs, which are huge pieces of glaciers that fall into the water. Glaciers cover nearly 29,000 square miles of Alaska. Most are in the south and southeast.
In south-central Alaska, you’d fly over the Alaska mountain Range and Mount McKinley. Thousands of visitors have climbed up Mount McKinley. Others have died trying. The youngest person to climb Mount McKinley was Taras Genet of Talkeetna, Alaska, who climbed it in 1991 when he was 12 years old.
No doubt you would visit several of Alaska’s national parks. In these protected lands there are glaciers, mountains, active volcanoes, lakes, rivers, forests, and wildlife of many kinds. Besides Kodiak bears, there are grizzly bears, polar bears, moose, caribou, wolves, porcupines, beavers, mountain goats, foxes, and squirrels. Alaska has 450 kinds of birds. In its waters, whales and dolphins swim along the coast. Seals, walruses, and see otters are also found there.
Part of Alaska lies within the Arctic Circle. The land there is called tundra. There are no trees because the soil is permanently frozen. This frozen soil, called permafrost, thaws on the surface during the summer, when it is covered with a thick layer of mosses, wildflowers, and grasses. People who live there have a special problem because of the permafrost. A house built on it sometimes causes it to thaw beneath the house. The thawed soil begins to sink down, and the house goes with it! Many arctic inhabitants build their houses on platforms so they can be moved from time to time.
If you lived in the arctic, you would why Alaska is also called the “Land of the Midnight Sun.” At Barrow, the northernmost point, the sun does not set from May 10 to August 2. There is daylight all that time. But from November 18 to January 24, Barrow has no sunlight. Then the average temperature is minus 11 degrees Fahrenheit. If you went to the arctic in the spring and autumn you’d see the northern lights. This is a natural phenomenon in which the night skies are filled with spectacular colors, also called the aurora borealis.
Alaska is a very different and special place, and so are its people. Alaska has a very small population for such a big place. Many Alaskan towns have fewer than 100 residents. One such town is Chicken, which has a population of 37. Many towns, like Chicken, have unusual names, such as Clam Gulch, Candle, Beaver, Deadhorse, King Salmon, and Eek. Many were named by the adventurous and often eccentric prospectors who came to Alaska looking for gold in the 1800s.
Most Alaskans live in the cities, such as Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau, where there is work and a modern way of life. The population of Alaska is growing rapidly, and today about two-thirds of Alaskans were born elsewhere. They come from many countries to work in the oil, mining, timber, and fishing industries.
Native-born Alaskans include both native peoples and the descendants of the early settlers. The natives, which are the Eskimos, Aleuts, and Indians, migrated to Alaska from Siberia as far back as 15,000 years ago. Some of the natives still live the way their ancestors did, hunting and fishing in the wilderness. Others have modern lives in the cities. However, no matter where they live or when they got there or what ethnic group they belong to, all Alaskans have one thing in common. That is the splendors of the great land in which they live.
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