Alaska’s national parks now available on iTunes
Now travelers can get a flavor of Alaska’s national parks without leaving home. Thanks to a series of video podcasts available on iTunes and local National Park Service Web sites, viewers can catch a glimpse of what three of Alaska’s most popular national parks have to offer. By searching for the parks in the iTunes podcast store, visitors can learn about dinosaurs (and more modern residents) of Denali National Park, gain an in-depth look at science and research at Kenai Fjords National Park and watch bears in Katmai National Park. The video podcasts began airing on iTunes last fall, and the newest videos premiered in October 2008. Both the iTunes and nps.com podcasts are available free of charge.
Claiming over half of the parklands in the United States, Alaska boasts over 322 million acres of public land, including 15 units of national parks, national preserves and national monuments. The most visited of Alaska’s national parks is the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park, which welcomes aver 800,000 visitors a year. Also among the top five most visited parks are Denali National Park and Preserve, Glacier Bay National Park, Sitka National Historical Park and Kenai Fjords National Park. Due to the vast and unique environment of Alaska, it would be close to impossible to see everything (though that shouldn’t keep you from trying!) but a good place to start would be visiting the top 10 icons within Alaska’s national parks. They are:
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1. Glacier Bay: Located in the Inside Passage, this area has grown from a small indent in the Grand Pacific Glacier into a popular bay for fishing, boat tours, kayaking, whale watching and more.
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2. Mount McKinley: Standing at 20,320 feet, this is North America’s tallest mountain. Gaze upon this megalith, located in Denali National Park and Preserve, from a flightseeing tour, from the “park road,” the only route into the rugged park, or up close and personal on a mountaineering expedition.
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3. Chilkoot Trail: The 33-mile trail located in the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park has carried the feet of tens of thousands of hopeful gold prospectors from Alaska to the Yukon goldfields during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897.
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4. Kennecott Mine town site: Once a thriving copper mine in 1911, this area is now a ghost town located in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. Many of the original mine structures still stand and are considered the best remaining example of early 20th century copper mining.
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5. Yukon River: the 1,800-mile Yukon River stretches from Canada and across Alaska and is part of the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. Once a major transportation route in the gold rushes of the late 1800s, the Yukon is popular for rafting, kayaking and canoeing.
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6. Great Kobuk Sand Dunes: Not for sunbathing, this 25-square-mile stretch of dunes in Kobuk Valley National Park in Northwest Alaska was created by the grinding action of ancient glaciers.
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7. Bering Land Bridge National Monument: More than 13,000 years ago, this bridge linked the Seward Peninsula in Northwest Alaska with Siberia and provided a route for humans migrating from Asia to the Americas. Once thousands of miles wide, the majority of the bridge now lies beneath the sea.
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8. Harding Icefield: One of only four remaining icefields in the United States, this 700-square-mile icefield is located in Kenai Fjords National Park.
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9. Tlingit totem poles: Alaska’s oldest federally designated park, Sitka National Historical Park, gives visitors a peak into Tlingit culture through totem poles collected from villages all over Southeast Alaska.
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10. Bears of Katmai: More than 2,000 brown bears make their home in Katmai National Park and Preserve on the Alaska Peninsula.
To learn more about Alaska’s National Parks and public lands, visit http://www.travelalaska.com/regions/StateParks.aspx.
