Mountain Kingdom

Above the banks of Alaska’s mighty Copper River, past the old railroad town of Chitina, the pavement of the Edgerton Highway ends next to a sign that reads “McCarthy: 60 miles.” This, believe it or not, marks the entrance to North America’s largest and wildest national park.

Just beyond the sign, a 1,400-foot steel bridge spans the roaring river that forms the western boundary of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. It’s one of the few remaining marks of civilization left in a land reclaimed by nature. A railroad here used to shuttle workers to the old copper-mill town of Kennecott, but today, McCarthy Road buries most signs of it, and the country has returned to its original state: raw, rugged, and intimidating in its wilderness and scale.

To the east of McCarthy Road lies the greatest concentration of North American peaks over 16,000 feet, the biggest glaciers on the continent, and the largest concentration of volcanoes. They form the rugged heart of Wrangell-St. Elias in the region Alaskans call “South Central,” and there are only two roads in: one on the north side, the other on the south. Both lead to the park’s gateway towns of Kennicott and McCarthy. The southern route—McCarthy Road—begins as a rough, winding gravel path barely two lanes wide that pushes across 60 miles of America’s most remote landscapes and homesteads on the edge of an extreme Alaskan wilderness.

From the end of the road, a footbridge continues across the Kennicott River into the charming, vibrant communities of McCarthy and Kennicott which serve as jumping-off points for the vast, surrounding wilderness. Here, the mountains climb north and east into a wilderness where you really can lose yourself; in 1937, one of America’s greatest adventurers almost did. The late Bradford Washburn, world-famous photographer, cartographer, and the founder of the Boston Museum of Science, barely survived an attempt to climb 17,147-foot Mount Lucania just across the border in Canada’s Yukon Territory; Wrangell-St. Elias proved bigger, wilder, and more unpredictable than Mount McKinley, where Washburn pioneered what has become the main climbing route today. Author Dave Roberts would later chronicle Washburn’s fight to survive in Escape from Lucania: An Epic Story of Survival.

Amazingly, in the 63 years since, little has changed. If anything, the park is wilder now than it was then. Wrangell-St. Elias is a sprawling 20,587 square miles, big enough to hold six Yellowstones. About 70 percent of that land is designated wilderness, which connects to an additional 9,500 square miles of protected lands in Kluane National Park and Reserve of Yukon Territory, Canada, and British Columbia’s Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Park, next to Glacier Bay National Park. Together, these four parks—declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979—are nearly the size of New York State.

Even so, the immensity of this place is hard to imagine until you’re in it, and being in it can feel exhilarating, liberating, and frightening at the same time. What initially seems like a straightforward hike toward a 6,696-foot peak above Root Glacier turns intimidating when animal trails begin to mimic the hiking route but shoot off in various directions, destinations unknown. In this land of long winters and short, lush summers, a clearly worn trail in June can all but disappear by August—if, of course, there’s any trail at all. The park has only a few designated trails. Hikers are free to blaze new routes, but bushwhacking—or “alder bashing” as some Alaskans call it—can prove challenging. Unless you’re highly confident in your wilderness survival skills, it might be best to join one of the outfitters that lead guided, backcountry trips (see Travel Essentials below).

Wrangell-St. Elias is one of just four Alaskan national parks that can be reached by road, attracting approximately 65,000 people per year. Yellowstone draws 10 times that in the month of June alone. You can get caught in a traffic jam in a visit to Yellowstone; gridlock is nonexistent here. In fact, if you fly to Anchorage and make the spectacular nine-hour drive to McCarthy (see Travel Essentials), you might actually find yourself wishing for more traffic; seeing other people can be comforting in a place so wild.

So keep pushing on, because McCarthy has slowly but steadily been transforming itself into an adventure-recreation destination. You’ll be in good company at the comfortable Kennicott Glacier Lodge (www.kennicottlodge.com), where views from the deck reveal the gray jumble of Root Glacier spreading out across the valley to the west. Don’t miss the four-mile hike on the Root Glacier trail—this is one of the easiest and safest places in Alaska to actually put your feet on a glacier. If you’re uncomfortable going by yourself, hook up with Kennicott Wilderness Guides (www.kennicottguides.com) or St. Elias Alpine Guides (www.steliasguides.com), who offer everything from wilderness training, to ice-climbing lessons, to whitewater raft trips on the Kennicott and Nizina Rivers.

When you need a break from the adrenaline, visit the park’s most famous historic artifact: the Kennecott Mine National Historic Landmark. This mine is the reason anything exists at all in this corner of Alaska. In the early 1900s, the Kennecott Copper Corporation began construction of a railroad from the port of Cordova on Prince William Sound upstream along the Copper River and then east along the Chitina River to a rich copper ore deposit four and a half miles up the valley from McCarthy. The railroad itself was a miracle of engineering for its day; its first section crossed the “Million Dollar Bridge” just outside of Cordova and traced the Miles Glacier, where the railbed had to be rebuilt constantly as the glacier moved slowly but steadily downhill. Upstream from the glacier along the Copper River, workers blasted a route through Wood Canyon where the railroad clung to steep, rocky walls and crossed chasms on trestles. This continued on through Chitina and then east to the mine. The Gilahina Trestle and Kuskulana Bridge, towering more than 200 feet over raging whitewater, are the railroad’s remnants, still visible from McCarthy Road.

For years, Kennecott Mine’s mill buildings were off limits to the public because of the danger of walls collapsing or visitors falling into a hole, but a major stabilization and restoration effort is in progress by the Park Service, which now offers daily tours. The mill building is a massive, incongruous structure rising 14 stories above the historic mining town of Kennecott, which visitors can reach via a quick shuttle bus ride from McCarthy. On another building, enormous smokestacks rise starkly into clear skies, but it’s not hard to imagine a day when they belched smoke and the whole valley thundered to the tune of a mine in its prime.

Mining started here in 1908, and by 1911 the company town of Kennecott was sending train loads of ore south to America. Kennecott’s strict rules banning drinking and gambling, so miners hiked down the road to seek recreation; McCarthy quickly grew to accommodate their needs. At its peak, the city had 800 residents, a newspaper, stores, hotels, restaurants, bars, and a red-light district. Today, the year-round population tops out at about 50 residents, and the town swells with summer tourists and seasonal workers. The McCarthy Lodge & Ma Johnson’s Historic Hotel (www.mccarthylodge.com) remains a happening place, landing a spot among National Geographic Traveler’s “129 Hotels We Love To Stay At” in 2009. And Lonely Planet’s latest travel guide named Kennicott River Lodge (www.kennicottriverlodge.com) as “our pick” for local lodging, as it’s located conveniently on the McCarthy road side of the footbridge and offers stunning glacier views.

Farther down the McCarthy Road, this tradition continues. At the Alaska Halfway House Bed and Breakfast at mile 27, Bruce and Kayane James are new-age pioneers who ventured north in 2007 when the Michigan economy crumbled, landing in what Kayane now calls “our little piece of heaven.”

“We look at things so differently now,” she says. “Living out here, you have to think of things before you do them so you don’t get hurt; precaution is a way of life. We go into Anchorage twice a year to buy our groceries, and I make everything I can from scratch: homemade breads, pizzas, cakes, cookies, jams, jellies. We get our news from the radio—there are limited cell phone signals out here. And wintertime is like magic. It never ceases to amaze me just how quiet it is when you step outside and take a walk.”

And that might be the greatest treasure of all in a world where noise has become one of the most difficult things to escape.