Alaska

Alaska is over twice the size of Texas yet home to fewer than 750,000 people — a wilderness of extraordinary purity and scale where nature operates on its own vast terms. The state stretches from the Inside Passage in the south-east — a labyrinth of fjords, glaciers and temperate rainforest accessible from Juneau, Ketchikan and Skagway — to the tundra plains of the interior and the remote Arctic slope in the far north.

Denali National Park is Alaska’s crown jewel. North America’s highest peak, Denali (formerly Mt McKinley), at 6,190 metres, anchors a national park of over six million acres where the grizzly bear population is among the highest in the world. The park has a single road accessible by bus, and wildlife viewing — bears, caribou, Dall sheep, moose and wolves — is exceptional even from a distance.

Glacier Bay National Park in the south-east is accessible primarily by cruise ship or expedition vessel and contains over 1,000 glaciers, many of which are actively calving ice into the bay in dramatic fashion. The sound of ice breaking, the silence of the wilderness and the sight of humpback whales surface-feeding beneath snow-dusted mountains is a genuinely profound travel experience.

For wildlife watching, Katmai National Park on the Alaska Peninsula offers the unforgettable spectacle of brown bears catching sockeye salmon as they leap the Brooks Falls rapids — one of the most intense wildlife encounters on earth. The Northern Lights (aurora borealis) are visible from Fairbanks and the interior from late August through April, at their most intense in the darkest winter months.

Alaska is best visited May to September for wildlife and scenery. It’s a bucket-list destination of the highest order.