Gulf Hagas Rim Trail
The rim route links Screw Auger, Buttermilk, Billings, and Stair falls above the West Branch Pleasant River.
Places and wildlife — page 17
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Bigelow Range via Fire Warden’s Trail
The route climbs from hardwood forest to Avery Peak, where a fire-tower foundation and long lake views reveal both conservation history and glacial scale.
Pleasant Mountain via Ledges Trail
A direct forest route reaches granite viewpoints and the former Shawnee Peak summit area, opening across the Lakes Region toward the White Mountains.
Camden Hills Maiden Cliff Trail
Stone steps and ledges rise to a white cross and broad lake view, pairing recreational beauty with the memory of a fatal nineteenth-century accident.
Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens
Formal beds, woodland paths, children’s spaces, ecological plantings, sculpture, and seasonal installations make the garden far larger than one flower display.
Asticou Azalea Garden
Azaleas, a sand garden, stone, water, clipped evergreen forms, and borrowed views create concentrated seasonal change.
Thuya Garden
The Asticou Terraces, Thuya Lodge, cedar woods, and an English-style garden turn the approach into a sequence from harbor view to intimate planting.
McLaughlin Garden & Homestead
Lilacs, woodland flowers, mature trees, a barn, and the historic house preserve Bernard McLaughlin’s patient, informal plant collecting.
Maine Wildlife Park
Moose, black bear, lynx, raptors, reptiles, and other native species live here because injury, habituation, or orphaning prevents release.
Maine State Aquarium
Touch tanks, local fishes, invertebrates, lobster biology, and fisheries science connect close observation with working coastal management.
Anchorage Museum
Art, science, history, Indigenous knowledge, and the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center meet without reducing Alaska to wilderness scenery.
University of Alaska Museum of the North
The Gallery of Alaska joins archaeology, wildlife, art, paleontology, and cultural belongings collected across an enormous state.
Alaska State Museum
The museum connects Alaska Native cultures, Russian America, territorial government, industry, migration, and contemporary art.
Alaska Native Heritage Center
The Gathering Place and wooded lake trail introduce the distinct peoples and regions of Alaska through community-led programs rather than static cultural types.
Sealaska Heritage Institute
The Walter Soboleff Building holds monumental formline glass, a hand-adzed clan house, exhibitions, archives, and language work.
Pratt Museum
Indoor exhibitions and a forested outdoor campus connect marine research, homesteading, Alaska Native cultures, contemporary art, and working-waterfront life.
Alutiiq Museum
Ancestral tools, language, contemporary art, repatriation work, and the adjacent Ancestors’ Memorial show how research and cultural renewal can operate together.
Kodiak History Museum
The 1808 Russian-American Magazin moves through Alutiiq homeland, colonial trade, fishing, earthquakes, military life, and a continually changing island community.
Sheldon Museum and Cultural Center
Jilkaat Aani, mission history, mining, fishing, photography, and community collections unfold at the edge of Lynn Canal.
Totem Heritage Center
Nineteenth-century Tlingit and Haida poles recovered from village sites stand close enough for careful reading, while contemporary Northwest Coast art and classes explain continuity.
Sitka History Museum
Objects, photographs, models, and community archives make a useful orientation to the city’s layered shoreline before visiting its dispersed historic sites.
Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum
Rare cars, winter adaptations, photographs, and carefully paired fashion turn technology into a social history rather than a showroom.
Alaska Aviation Museum
Four hangars connect pioneer flights, wartime aircraft, rescue, commercial aviation, and the machines that made remote Alaska more reachable.
Valdez Museum and Historical Archive
The museum connects the 1964 earthquake, Old Town Valdez, the trans-Alaska pipeline, the Exxon Valdez spill, transportation, and regional Indigenous history.
Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum
Oral histories, ivory art, mining material, the first Iditarod sled, and a restored telephone booth place boomtown mythology beside longer regional life.
Ilanka Cultural Center
The Native Village of Eyak operates a museum, tribal library, language and arts programs, and an articulated orca skeleton tied to a community recovery effort.
Wrangell Museum
The gallery moves from ancient occupation and clan history through Russian, British, and American rule, gold rushes, fishing, logging, and modern Wrangell.
Hammer Museum
More than 2,500 hammers move from trades and rituals to patents, medical tools, art, and deliberate oddities.
Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park
Restored Skagway structures, oral histories, the White Pass corridor, and the Chilkoot Trail reveal how a global stampede transformed Tlingit homeland.
Sitka National Historical Park
Forest, estuary, poles, and battle ground hold Tlingit and Russian histories together, grounded in 1804 battle site and totem trail
Russian Bishop’s House
Completed in 1842, the restored log building contains chapel, residence, school history, and material evidence of Russian America.
Independence Mine State Historical Park
The abandoned hard-rock complex at Hatcher Pass shows industrial ambition at a scale that winter, avalanche terrain, and transportation continually challenged.
Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark
Concentration buildings, power systems, worker housing, rail history, and the nearby Root Glacier reveal how extraordinary ore and capital produced a remote company town.
Baranof Castle State Historic Site
Tlingit use, Russian fortification, the 1867 transfer ceremony, and Alaska statehood observances are interpreted on a small rock above downtown.
Totem Bight State Historical Park
The coastal rainforest park grew from a New Deal-era program in which Native carvers restored and copied abandoned village poles.
Fort Abercrombie State Historical Park
Bunkers, gun emplacements, a military museum, lake trails, and cliff views show how Kodiak was fortified after the Aleutian campaign began.
Oscar Anderson House Museum
One modest frame house restores domestic scale to Anchorage’s founding boom, grounded in 1915 frame house and anderson family
Wickersham State Historic Site
Judge James Wickersham’s 1898 house holds diaries, photographs, furniture, and stories from courts, Congress, Denali climbing, and the campaign for an Alaska university.
Holy Assumption of the Virgin Mary Church
The current 1896 church, icons, cemetery, and adjacent chapel mark a living congregation rather than a frozen colonial exhibit.
Eklutna Historical Park
The park’s brightly painted burial houses, old log church, newer church, and village history show a distinct Dena’ina Orthodox tradition.
Big Delta State Historical Park
Rika’s Roadhouse, outbuildings, the Valdez-to-Fairbanks Trail, and Tanana River crossing preserve the logistical world that preceded the Richardson Highway.
Cape Krusenstern National Monument
More than one hundred successive shorelines hold camps, tools, house remains, and ecological evidence spanning roughly five millennia.
Petroglyph Beach State Historic Site
Dozens of petroglyphs appear on bedrock and boulders along the Wrangell shore, some visible only under favorable tide and light.
Bering Land Bridge National Preserve
The preserve protects Serpentine Hot Springs, lava fields, archaeological landscapes, and living Iñupiat connections to the region once joined with Asia.
Denali National Park and Preserve
Tundra, braided rivers, glaciers, wildlife, and Athabascan homeland stretch far beyond any single mountain viewpoint.
Kenai Fjords National Park
The Harding Icefield, tidewater glaciers, seabird colonies, forests, and coastal waters reveal connected climate and ocean processes.
Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve
Tidewater glaciers, marine mammals, seabirds, rainforest, and the Huna Tlingit story unfold across water rather than a road network.
Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve
S. national park. The park’s scale includes road-accessible valleys, Nabesna and McCarthy corridors, Kennecott industry, subsistence landscapes, and immense trackless ice.