Best Week Ever!! Wrangell Part 1

Most people interested in Alaska have heard of Denali National Park. It’s home to the tallest mountain in the United States: Mt. McKinley. Many have also heard of the Kenai Peninsula, famous for its fjords and a popular cruising destination.

But has anybody heard of Alaska’s Wrangell St. Elias National Park, which, by the way, is the largest national park in the United States? It has stunning scenery, interesting history, and an awesomely quirky local culture. It was far and away our favorite place in both Alaska and Canada.

This gem of a national park is hiding in plain sight. At over 13 million acres, it’s six times the size of Yellowstone. One of its glaciers, Malaspina, is the size of the entire Yellowstone park. It has four separate mountain ranges, thousands of miles of glaciers, and the largest ice field in North America.

And yet, only about 70,000 people a year go to Wrangell every year. Denali gets about ten times that number of visitors a year.

So…why is this incredible place such a secret?

Well, it’s a bit hard to reach. The park is an eight-hour drive northeast from Anchorage, and the last 70 miles of the drive are on a not-so-great road. Its conditions ranged from merely gravelly to terribly pot-holed.

Also, a lot of people in Alaska travel around by RVs. Wrangell has two campgrounds, one of which is awesomely located right on a wild river. But they’re both rough, and not particularly RV-friendly. Each has outhouses, but no showers, RV hookups, or dump stations anywhere around the park. There also aren’t a lot of hotels or hostels, so early reservations are critical.

Our own discovery of Wrangell was random. When we were planning our route up through Canada, we knew we wanted to dip into Alaska. On the map, we could see that Wrangell St. Elias was a huge national park – 13 million acres. It looked (sort of) close to where we were going to be in Canada.

Upon further investigation, we learned it has 9 of the 16 highest peaks in the United States, including the second highest – Mt. St. Elias. Along with multiple glaciers, it even had a UNESCO world heritage site – the historic Kennecott Copper Mine.

It looked like an overall splurge-worthy destination, and we decided to work with a local guide company to organize a trip.

At this point, we also asked our close friends (and frequent travel buddies) Stephanie and Chip to join us. They have two girls, 9 and 5, and Wolf adores them both. We also invited Matt’s son (and my stepson!) Justin, as his college graduation present.

They all said yes!

I quickly got to work with Betsy at the awesome and highly recommended Kennecott Wilderness Guides to plan the trip.

What we eventually planned was that for $1,500 per person, our group would spend five days glacier trekking, ice climbing, base camping in the backcountry, and packrafting through an iceberg-filled glacial lake.

Everyone was excited for the trip to begin…