Insight Guides: Alaska

How To Use This E-Book

Getting around the e-book

This Insight Guide e-book is designed to give you inspiration for your visit to Alaska, as well as comprehensive planning advice to make sure you have the best travel experience. The guide begins with our selection of Top Attractions, as well as our Editors Choice categories of activies and experiences. Detailed features on history, people and culture paint a vivid portrait of contemporary life in Alaska. The extensive Places chapters give a complete guide to all the sights and areas worth visiting. The Travel Tips provide full information on getting around, hotels, activities from to culture to shopping to sport, plus a wealth of practical information to help you plan your trip.

In the Table of Contents and throughout this e-book you will see hyperlinked references. Just tap a hyperlink once to skip to the section you would like to read. Practical information and listings are also hyperlinked, so as long as you have an external connection to the internet, you can tap a link to go directly to the website for more information.

Maps

All key attractions and sights in Alaska are numbered and cross-referenced to high-quality maps. Wherever you see the reference [map] just tap this to go straight to the related map. You can also double-tap any map for a zoom view.

Images

Youll find hundreds of beautiful high-resolution images that capture the essence of Alaska. Simply double-tap on an image to see it full-screen.

About Insight Guides

Insight Guides have more than 40 years experience of publishing high-quality, visual travel guides. We produce 400 full-colour titles, in both print and digital form, covering more than 200 destinations across the globe, in a variety of formats to meet your different needs.

Insight Guides are written by local authors who use their on-the-ground experience to provide the very latest information; their local expertise is evident in the extensive historical and cultural background features. All the reviews in Insight Guides are independent; we strive to maintain an impartial view. Our reviews are carefully selected to guide to you the best places to stay and eat, so you can be confident that when we say a restaurant or hotel is special, we really mean it.

Like all Insight Guides , this e-book contains hundreds of beautiful photographs to inspire and inform your travel. We commission most of our own photography, and we strive to capture the essence of a destination using original images that you wont find anywhere else.

2013 Apa Publications (UK) Ltd

Introduction: The Last Frontier

Some people say there are no more frontiers to explore without leaving the planet. But theyre forgetting about Alaska, where the wild landscape remains untouched by the modern world.

Alaska: the Great Land, the Last Frontier more than 580,000 sq miles (1.5 million sq km) that taunted early explorers and still challenges modern-day researchers. It also provokes a fascination that attracts more and more travelers looking for something that a conventional vacation cannot give them. The hint of urban sophistication in Anchorage and Juneau rapidly gives way to the frontier, where outdoor survival skills are among the most useful attributes a resident can possess.

Americas 49th state is so broad, so unpeopled, and so roadless that small airplanes are more common than cabs in other states. There are more private pilots than truck drivers and cabbies combined. Men outnumber women (though women have coined the phrase The odds are good, but the goods are odd). The population numbers nearly 700,000, almost half of whom live in one city, Anchorage. Nearly the entire state is raw, wondrous wilderness.

The Northern Lights are best seen between late September and early April.

SuperStock

Alaska has lush rain-drenched forests and fragile windswept tundras. There are lofty mountains, spectacular glaciers, and still-active volcanoes, as well as 3 million lakes and endless swamps. Along with a handful of modern high-rise buildings, there are countless one-room log cabins. This varied land is best viewed from a small plane or surveyed from a canoe or kayak or by foot; it cannot be seen properly from a car (though increasing numbers of people are exploring parts of the state by traveling the highways). And, although it would take forever to cover on foot, hiking is often the best way to touch the landscape, to appreciate its vastness. Alaska is an outdoor world, a wilderness, a land of many faces.

The Alaskan experience includes the sheer wonder of finding what hides beyond the horizon or over the next ridge. No one person has ever seen it all; no one person ever will. Therein lies the essence of Alaska. Its huge untamed spaces, it has been said, are the great gift Alaska can give to a harassed world.

The spirit of adventure: a woman heads out into white water rapids with her dogs and bicycle.

iStockphoto

When to go

Springtime (or breakup) to an Alaskan is a hopeful time of dwindling snow berms, widening streets, emerging lawns and, most exciting of all, lengthening daylight hours. But to a visitor in the here-and-now of Alaska spring, it may look like dirty snow melting to reveal accumulated trash, huge puddles trapped by still-frozen drains on winter-ravaged roads and fickle weather conditions. March, April, and early May are months of renewal for Alaskans, but visitors would be wise to allow sufficient time for the state to wake up, spruce up, and set up for the tourist season.

Just before the first cruise ship arrives, store merchants bring out colorful hanging flower baskets and the cities seem to bloom overnight. Gift shops, which may have been closed over the winter, are re-opened, swept out, shelves stocked and windows polished. The visitor season runs from mid-May to mid-September. During those months, all tours, parks, campgrounds, trains, buses, ferries, restaurants, hotels, B&Bs, and other service-related facilities are running at full speed. Many offer bargain rates for the shoulder seasons of late May and early September. Summer in Alaska boasts mild temperatures and, in most areas, seemingly endless daylight.

The mail arrives by floatplane.

Alaska Division of Tourism

If springtime is when Alaska showers and shaves, and summer is open house, fall feels like a time for getting together with a few close friends. Like spring, the timing of autumn in Alaska is a fickle business, and one can miss it altogether. Generally it begins to feel like fall in late August and continues through mid-September. The trees and grasses turn golden, the spent fireweed magenta, and the mountains, below the termination dust of newly snowcapped peaks, a warm russet. Fall brings darkness back to the night sky of most of Alaska, and with it displays of the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights.