Katmai National Park and Preserve
Brooks River bear viewing is only one concentrated window into a park shaped by the 1912 Novarupta eruption, lakes, coast, and longstanding Sugpiaq presence.
Places and wildlife — page 18
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Lake Clark National Park and Preserve
Lake Clark joins the Chigmit Mountains, Cook Inlet coast, brown-bear habitat, river systems, and living Dena’ina communities.
Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve
Mountain passes, wild rivers, Arctic ecosystems, archaeology, and Iñupiat and Athabascan homelands fill a park with no roads, maintained trails, or built visitor attractions.
Kobuk Valley National Park
The Great Kobuk Sand Dunes, Kobuk River, Onion Portage archaeology, and Western Arctic caribou herd make a surprising landscape where desert-like forms are built by glacial sediment and wind.
Chugach State Park
Coastal mudflats, alpine ridges, boreal forest, glaciers, lakes, and wildlife spread across multiple trail systems rather than one central entrance.
Kachemak Bay State Park
The roadless park combines Grewingk Glacier, alpine lakes, coastal forest, marine travel, cabins, and small trail systems reached mainly by water taxi.
Denali State Park
The state park spreads along the Parks Highway with Kesugi Ridge, Byers Lake, river access, campgrounds, and broad Alaska Range views.
Wood–Tikchik State Park
Wood-Tikchik protects a vast Bristol Bay watershed used for salmon, subsistence, paddling, sport fishing, and remote camping.
Caines Head State Recreation Area
Beaches, rainforest, coves, Fort McGilvray, cabins, and marine travel combine history with a route whose lower sections can disappear at high tide.
Mendenhall Glacier
The glacier, iceberg-filled lake, Nugget Falls, salmon streams, and young succession landscape make climate change visible without requiring ice travel.
Exit Glacier
The road-accessible tongue of the Harding Icefield sits above outwash, alder, cottonwood, and exposed bedrock that record rapid landscape change.
Brooks Falls
Falls, platforms, trails, fish runs, and strict movement rules create one of the world’s best-known bear-viewing systems.
Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes
Novarupta’s deposits, welded tuff, river-cut canyons, and distant volcanic walls remain stark even after the original fumaroles faded.
Hubbard Glacier
A vast ice front fed from the Saint Elias Mountains calves into Disenchantment Bay and has repeatedly dammed Russell Fjord.
Columbia Glacier
The glacier’s retreat since 1980 exposes fjord geometry while calving ice shapes marine navigation and wildlife habitat.
Tracy Arm
Granite walls, hanging valleys, harbor seals, ice, and the Sawyer glaciers create a long marine sequence rather than one viewpoint.
Matanuska Glacier
Crevasses, meltwater, moraine, blue ice, and an active terminus reveal glacier mechanics at ground level.
Worthington Glacier
Short paths and viewpoints below Thompson Pass expose moraine, rock, snow, and changing ice without claiming safe glacier access.
Turnagain Arm Bore Tide
The bore forms only when large Cook Inlet tidal swings, timing, wind, and channel geometry align.
Misty Fjords National Monument
Sea cliffs, lakes, waterfalls, estuaries, forest, and long inlets create a landscape understood through boat or floatplane movement.
Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve
The Chilkat’s unusual groundwater and channel system keeps feeding areas open late in the year, supporting a spectacular eagle gathering within Tlingit homeland.
Harding Icefield Trail
The roughly eight-mile round trip gains about 3,000 feet through rapidly changing ecological zones.
Flattop Mountain Trail
Tundra, broad Cook Inlet views, and the Chugach front range make the mountain accessible without making it easy.
Crow Pass Trail
The long traverse follows part of the Iditarod National Historic Trail past Crow Pass, Raven Glacier, waterfalls, and an unbridged Eagle River crossing.
Kesugi Ridge Trail
Rolling tundra, granite outcrops, tarns, and broad Alaska Range views make the route less technically severe than many Alaska traverses but no less exposed.
Root Glacier Trail
The trail passes mill-town remains and forest before reaching debris-covered ice, blue pools, and views toward Stairway Icefall.
Savage Alpine Trail
The trail climbs quickly to open ridge views, patterned ground, Dall sheep habitat, and changing perspectives on the Alaska Range.
Mount Marathon Trail
The famous Fourth of July race route climbs loose forest, roots, scree, and a direct mountain chute, while hikers often use the longer Jeep and Bench trails.
Lost Lake Trail
The route moves from spruce through hemlock into open tundra and lake country, with options for an out-and-back or point-to-point using the Primrose side.
Deer Mountain Trail
Roots, boardwalk, steep forest, muskeg, and subalpine terrain compress several Southeast Alaska environments into a short horizontal distance.
Angel Rocks Trail
The loop climbs through spruce and birch to weathered rock towers, open ridges, and Interior views.
Granite Tors Trail
The route climbs from Chena River forest through burn and tundra to isolated tors sculpted by frost.
West Glacier Trail
The municipal trail climbs through wet forest, bedrock, and side routes above the lake’s west shore.
Alaska Botanical Garden
Rock gardens, peonies, herbs, wildflowers, heritage vegetables, art, and boreal forest show what northern horticulture can accomplish.
Georgeson Botanical Garden
Eight cultivated acres at the Fairbanks Experiment Farm test crops and ornamentals under extreme light and cold.
Jensen–Olson Arboretum
Nationally significant Primula collections, rhododendrons, vegetables, meadow, and forest grow between mountains and Favorite Channel.
Alaska SeaLife Center
Seabirds, seals, sea lions, fish, invertebrates, touch pools, laboratories, and rehabilitation work interpret Alaska’s cold-water ecosystems without disguising the institution’s scientific mission.
Alaska Zoo
Polar bear, Amur tiger, musk ox, wolves, moose, birds, and rescued wildlife occupy a wooded hillside rather than a formal urban promenade.
Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center
Bears, wood bison, musk ox, elk, wolves, moose, and other Alaska wildlife occupy a 1.
Musk Ox Farm
A nonprofit herd, calves, research, fiber production, and agricultural interpretation show musk oxen as more than distant tundra icons.
Sitka Sound Science Center
Touch tanks, local fish, a wolf eel, hatchery systems, laboratories, and a historic hydroelectric building connect public learning with active coastal science.
Bishop Museum
Hawaiʻi’s largest museum places Hawaiian and Pacific histories beside active natural-science research, without separating cultural knowledge from the islands that shaped it.
Honolulu Museum of Art
Arcaded courtyards and intimate galleries connect exceptional Asian and Pacific holdings with European, American, and contemporary art made in and beyond Hawaiʻi.
Capitol Modern
Capitol Modern presents changing exhibitions from Hawaiʻi’s artists and the state collection inside the former Armed Services YMCA, directly beside the Capitol district.
Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design
Shangri La combines a 1930s Honolulu residence with Islamic art, architectural fragments, gardens, and contemporary commissions overlooking the Pacific.
Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum
Historic Hangars 37 and 79 hold aircraft, engines, personal stories, and visible battle damage on Ford Island, inside the active Pearl Harbor military environment.
Pacific Fleet Submarine Museum
The USS Bowfin, launched one year after the Pearl Harbor attack, anchors a museum about American submarine warfare, technology, crews, and the Pacific campaign.
Lyman Museum and Mission House
The Lyman Museum joins volcanic geology, shells, ecosystems, cultural history, and a restored 1839 mission house in central Hilo.