Tucked into the wild southeastern corner of Alaska, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve is a landscape of superlatives — the largest national park in the United States, home to nine of the sixteen highest peaks in the country, and a place where glaciers outnumber roads by the thousands. Formed by the ongoing collision of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates, this rugged wilderness rises straight from the Gulf of Alaska to summits over 18,000 feet, encompassing four major mountain ranges, a copper-mining ghost town frozen in time, and one of the last truly untamed corners of North America. Dive into these 25 fun facts to discover why this remote giant is unlike any other park in the system!
25 Fun and Unusual Facts about Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve
1) Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve is the largest national park in the United States, encompassing an impressive 13,188,000 acres in Alaska.
3) At over 13 million acres, it is nearly six times the size of Yellowstone National Park.
3) The park is the same size as Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Switzerland combined.
4) The park portion alone covers 8,323,148 acres, with an additional 4,852,753-acre preserve, for a total of 13,175,901 acres.
5) Of that total, 9,431,741 acres are designated wilderness.
6) Tucked inside the park is Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark, an early-1900s copper mining operation that overcame enormous logistical challenges to succeed deep in the Alaskan wilderness.
7) The Kennecott Mining Co. began operating near McCarthy in the early 1900s, drawing huge numbers of workers before shutting down in 1938; its ruins are now on the National Register of Historic Places.
8) Access to the historic mining town is limited to the long, unpaved McCarthy Road — one of only two significant roads in the entire 13-million-acre park.
9) Beyond its two rough roads, chartered aircraft are allowed into the backcountry on a case-by-case basis, since so much of the park is otherwise unreachable.
10) Despite its massive size, the park sees only about 87,000 visitors a year — a fraction of what smaller parks like Yellowstone draw.
11) The park’s biodiversity includes Dall sheep, grizzly bears, caribou, and Steller sea lions.
12) The park contains parts of four major mountain ranges — including the Wrangell and St. Elias ranges — and is home to nine of the sixteen tallest mountains in the country.
13) It includes 25 percent more mountains than exist in all of Switzerland.
14) The Wrangell Mountains lie entirely within the park and reach 16,390 feet — an entire mountain range that never leaves park boundaries.
15) Mount St. Elias, at 18,008 feet, is the second-highest peak in the entire United States.
16) Mount Wrangell, at 14,163 feet, is one of the largest active volcanoes in North America.
17) Wrangell-St. Elias holds the greatest concentration of glaciers in North America — more than 3,000 glaciers cover over three million acres of the park.
18) The Malaspina Glacier alone is larger than the entire state of Rhode Island.
19) Hubbard Glacier, a tidewater glacier reaching all the way to the ocean, is the longest tidewater glacier in Alaska at 76 miles from snout to end.
20) The park’s footprint nearly encapsulates the entire 43,440-square-mile Saint Elias mountain range, and stretches out to Yakutat Bay, the Tongass National Forest, and the Gulf of Alaska.
21) The Pacific Plate is colliding with the North American Plate here at a rate of roughly 2 to 2.5 inches per year — the slow-motion crash that keeps building these mountains higher.
22) Wrangell-St. Elias is a vast park that rises straight from sea level all the way up to 18,008 feet — a nearly unmatched vertical range within a single protected area.
23) Wrangell-St. Elias borders Canada’s Kluane National Park Reserve, and together with two other Canadian parks — Glacier Bay and Tatshenshini — the four form a single UNESCO World Heritage Site.
24) People have lived in this rugged region for thousands of years, including Indigenous Ahtna and Tanana Athabascan peoples, who continue to adapt to and live off this wild landscape today.
25) The park was first designated a national monument on December 1, 1978, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site on October 24, 1979, and was formally established as a national park and preserve on December 2, 1980.
From copper barons to glacier-carved peaks twice the height of anything east of the Rockies, Wrangell-St. Elias proves that Alaska doesn’t do anything small. Whether you’re chasing the ghost town of Kennecott, flightseeing over the Bagley Icefield, or just trying to wrap your head around a park six times the size of Yellowstone, this is bucket-list wilderness at its most extreme.
Address: Mile 106.8 Richardson Highway, Copper Center, AK 99573
Website: https://www.nps.gov/wrst/
Video: https://youtu.be/pO4-fhDX0ws?si=gkTReNiMX1ZFNi75
