48 Fun Facts About Wrangell-St. Elias National Park

The Copper River, the western boundary of Wrangell-St. Elias, is famous among chefs for its runs of which fish?

Salmon from the Copper River are prized for their rich fat content and are usually the first caught commercially in Alaska each year; they fetch a high price in restaurants across the country.

Wrangell-St. Elias holds which record among all U.S. national parks?

Greatest area: its 13.2 million acres match Yellowstone, Yosemite and Switzerland combined, room enough for four mountain ranges and nine of the sixteen highest peaks in the United States.

Beyond the two gravel roads into Wrangell-St. Elias, which transport do backcountry hikers usually hire to reach remote valleys?

Air taxis are the usual way in because the backcountry has no maintained trails, so small planes set hikers down on remote airstrips scattered around the park.

Mount St. Elias, the high point of Wrangell-St. Elias, is the second-tallest peak in the United States behind which mountain?

Denali is about 2,300 feet taller, but Mount St. Elias climbs its full 18,008 feet within about ten miles of the sea, one of the greatest vertical reliefs in the world.

Which peak rises just across the Canadian border from Wrangell-St. Elias and sends ice down into the park?

Mount Logan, the second-tallest peak in North America, feeds a glacier that flows for more than 75 miles and crosses the border before breaking off into the sea inside the park.

Which Italian nobleman led the first ascent of Mount St. Elias in 1897?

The Duke of the Abruzzi went on to K2 in 1909, where the ridge his expedition tried became part of the standard route and still bears his name, the Abruzzi Spur.

Whose 1741 expedition made the first European sighting of Mount St. Elias?

Vitus Bering sighted the peak in July 1741 while sailing for Russia, but he never made it home: he died that December on the island that now carries his name.

Wrangell-St. Elias holds one of North America's largest concentrations of which white, curly-horned mountain animal?

Dall sheep number about 13,000 in the park. They graze open ridges and bolt for nearby crags when wolves or eagles come close, so look for them on rocky mountainsides.

What 16,390-foot peak is the highest in the Wrangell Mountains?

Mount Blackburn was climbed in 1912 by Dora Keen, who took local prospectors rather than Swiss guides and camped in snow caves instead of tents for much of the climb.

The big peaks of the western Wrangell Mountains are unusually large examples of which eruptive landform?

Shield volcanoes such as Mount Sanford were built up by floods of lava, and glaciers have since carved all but Mount Wrangell into steeper, sharper peaks.

Which glacier in Wrangell-St. Elias is the largest piedmont glacier in North America?

Malaspina forms where ice squeezes out of the St. Elias Mountains and fans across the flat coastal plain, spreading into a sheet about the size of Rhode Island.

Which glacier, a cruise-ship favourite in Yakutat Bay, is the longest tidewater glacier in North America?

Hubbard has kept advancing for a century while most Alaskan glaciers shrink, and in 1986 and 2002 it pushed far enough to dam Russell Fjord and briefly turn it into a lake.

Which glacier in Wrangell-St. Elias, over 53 miles long, is called the world's longest interior valley glacier?

Nabesna never reaches the sea: it gathers on icefields high in the Wrangell Mountains and melts into a river that runs inland toward the Tanana instead of the coast.

Which glacier can visitors to Wrangell-St. Elias walk onto after a short trail from the park's old copper town?

Root Glacier is the park's most accessible ice: the trail from the old town runs to its toe, where hikers strap on crampons and step out onto the surface.

Which abandoned copper boomtown at the centre of Wrangell-St. Elias is a National Historic Landmark district?

Kennecott owes its spelling to a slip: the mining company took its name from the Kennicott Glacier beside the lode, a clerical error swapped one letter, and the mistake stuck.

In mining lore, a hillside patch of which colour led two prospectors to the copper lode in Wrangell-St. Elias in 1900?

Green was the clue, the story goes: the patch sat too high on the mountain to be a meadow, and it proved to be copper ore weathered to malachite.

Which financiers bankrolled Wrangell-St. Elias's copper mines as the 'Alaska Syndicate'?

J. P. Morgan and the Guggenheims paid for far more than mines: their money also built a railway to the coast and a steamship line to carry the copper south.

Which coastal town was the terminus of the railway built to carry copper out of what is now Wrangell-St. Elias?

Cordova's docks took in the ore trains from 1911 until 1938, when the mines closed and the railway shut down with them.

Why did Wrangell-St. Elias's copper mines close in 1938?

Worked-out ore: the best veins were largely gone by the early 1930s, and when the last train pulled away in November 1938 it left a ghost town behind.

At the old copper camp in Wrangell-St. Elias, how did ore travel down the mountain from the mines to the mill?

By aerial tramway: loaded ore cars rode cables down from the mines high on the ridge and arrived at the top of the mill, where the crushing began.

Which president first protected Wrangell-St. Elias by proclaiming it a national monument?

Jimmy Carter used the Antiquities Act to proclaim 17 Alaskan monuments on a single day in 1978, after a filibuster threat in the Senate stalled the lands bill.

Which 1980 law established Wrangell-St. Elias as a national park and preserve?

The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act created most of Alaska's national parklands at a stroke and doubled the size of the national park system.

Which activity is allowed in the preserve at Wrangell-St. Elias but banned on its national park land?

Sport hunting is why the preserve exists: the label is used for land with a park's protections where hunting can continue, though local rural residents may hunt for subsistence on both sides of the line.

Which Canadian park adjoins Wrangell-St. Elias on its eastern border?

Kluane lies in Yukon on the far side of the border, which runs right over the summit of Mount St. Elias and leaves one flank of the mountain in each park.

Which Discovery Channel reality series followed the residents of McCarthy, the tiny town inside Wrangell-St. Elias?

Edge of Alaska ran on Discovery for four seasons from 2014, setting residents who wanted to keep McCarthy's frontier way of life against those pushing the town of a few dozen people into the modern age.

Why do many visitors to Wrangell-St. Elias take a shuttle rather than drive the McCarthy Road themselves?

Car-hire contracts forbid it: most big rental agencies will not let their cars onto gravel roads, and both roads into the park are gravel.

At the end of the McCarthy Road, how do visitors to Wrangell-St. Elias cross the river?

By footbridge: cars stay parked on the near bank, and from the far side it is half a mile to McCarthy and five miles on foot, by bike or by shuttle to the old mines.

Which town, where the Edgerton Highway meets the McCarthy Road, is the Copper River gateway to Wrangell-St. Elias?

Chitina sprang to life in 1910 as the main stopover and service point for the ore trains, and today the paved highway ends there and the gravel begins.

Unlike the copper mines in southern Wrangell-St. Elias, the mine reached by the park's northern road was dug chiefly for which metal?

Gold was the prize: the 42-mile gravel road was built to supply the mine, whose buildings still stand, privately owned, at the end of the road.

About two-thirds of the land in Wrangell-St. Elias carries which additional layer of federal protection?

Designated wilderness covers about nine million acres here, the biggest such area in the country, yet its Alaska rules are somewhat looser than those for wilderness in the lower 48.

Which Native people settled along the Copper River in the interior of what is now Wrangell-St. Elias?

The Ahtna have two names for Mount Wrangell: K'elt'aeni in quiet times, and Uk'eledi when the volcano is smoking.

Lieutenant Henry Allen's 1885 trek up the Copper River earned him comparison with which famous pair of explorers?

Lewis and Clark is the comparison his general made: Allen's tiny party pushed up the river, crossed the mountains to the Tanana and the Yukon, and came out on Alaska's west coast.

Katie John spent decades in court for the right to do what at her old village inside Wrangell-St. Elias?

Fish its waters: the state had closed the village fishery, and the lawsuit she began in 1985 ended by securing a subsistence priority for rural Alaskans on federal waters.

At the foot of the western Wrangell Mountains, warm, gas-charged springs have built up deposits known as what?

Mud volcanoes: the three largest, Shrub and Upper and Lower Klawasi, bubble with carbon dioxide, a sign that there is still heat at shallow depth beneath the range.

Besides its two namesake ranges, Wrangell-St. Elias covers the eastern end of which mountains that also rise behind Anchorage?

The Chugach Mountains form the park's southern wall: the boundary follows their crest, and the Copper River cuts through them on its way to the sea.

The gunman who killed six of McCarthy's 22 residents in 1983 planned to go on and sabotage what?

The Alaska pipeline was his real target, but a wounded survivor raised the alarm and troopers caught him fleeing by snowmobile; he was sentenced to 634 years.

What did the 14-storey mill above the old copper town in Wrangell-St. Elias do to the ore?

Sorted it from waste rock: the copper came down the mountain mixed with worthless limestone, which was far too costly to ship out by train and steamship.

Which animal roams Wrangell-St. Elias in two herds descended from stock shipped north from Montana in 1928?

Bison were first released near Delta Junction, and animals moved on from that herd founded the two small herds that now graze the park's river valleys.

Which 1979 UNESCO designation covers Wrangell-St. Elias and three neighbouring parks in the U.S. and Canada?

World Heritage Site: UNESCO listed the cross-border parks for their spectacular glacier and icefield landscapes and as vital habitat for grizzly bears and caribou.

Which tectonic plate dives beneath Alaska's southern coast, pushing up the mountains of Wrangell-St. Elias?

The Pacific Plate is still at work: as it pushes north, the latest far-travelled block of crust, the Yakutat terrane, is jamming against Alaska, where much of the park stands on rock that formed somewhere else.

The magnitude-9.2 earthquake that shook Wrangell-St. Elias in 1964 struck on which holiday?

Good Friday, March 27: among much else, the quake knocked a span of the Million Dollar Bridge, built for the old copper railway, off its footing.

Which senator's filibuster threat killed the 1978 lands bill, prompting Carter's monument proclamations?

Local hostility followed; a Park Service plane was burned in August 1979.

Why do summer visitors to Wrangell-St. Elias almost never see the northern lights?

Nights never get dark: the aurora shows only between dusk and dawn in real darkness, so the viewing season here runs from September through April.

Steelhead, native to Wrangell-St. Elias's Copper River, are the sea-going form of which trout?

Rainbow trout keep that name if they spend their whole lives in fresh water; the ones that migrate to the ocean and back are called steelhead and grow much larger.

Which vast icefield fills the heart of the coastal mountains in Wrangell-St. Elias and feeds dozens of its glaciers?

Bagley Icefield runs for about 127 miles and lies up to 3,000 feet thick, and the ice spilling from it feeds dozens of valley glaciers on both sides of the range.

Which people attacked and destroyed the Russian trading fort at Yakutat in 1805?

Tlingit warriors destroyed the fort about a decade after it was built for the sea-otter trade, in one account because the Russians had cut them off from nearby fishing grounds.

Which volcano, the westernmost of the Wrangell Mountains, is the great peak drivers see on the highways near Glennallen?

Mount Drum is 12,010 feet high, well short of the tallest in the range, yet standing alone at the western end it dominates the view more than its much higher neighbours.

The headquarters of Wrangell-St. Elias sit on the Richardson Highway near which settlement?

Copper Center's visitor centre stands beside the highway south of Glennallen, so travellers can check conditions with the rangers there before committing to either of the park's gravel roads.