Wrangell-St. Elias National Park Trivia
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48 free Wrangell-St. Elias National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Wrangell-St. Elias National Park trivia quiz covers the biggest national park in the United States, a 13-million-acre slab of Alaska larger than nine states that runs from tidewater to the second-highest peak in North America. It ranges across the volcanoes of the Wrangells, the record-setting Malaspina, Hubbard and Nabesna glaciers, the Bagley Icefield, the McCarthy and Nabesna roads, and the Ahtna, Eyak and Tlingit peoples who lived here first. There is plenty of history too: Vitus Bering's 1741 landfall, the Russian copper hunters, Lieutenant Allen's 1885 expedition, the green hillside that became the Kennecott mines and the Alaska Syndicate of Morgan and Guggenheim, the 195-mile railway to Cordova, the ghost-town years, Jimmy Carter's 1978 monument and the bitter fight over the 1980 lands act, plus the World Heritage listing shared with Canada's Kluane. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one, so it works for a long drive down the McCarthy Road or a serious park-nerd challenge. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our Denali, Glacier Bay and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Copper River, the western boundary of Wrangell-St. Elias, is famous among chefs for its runs of which fish?
Salmon
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.
Q 02Wrangell-St. Elias holds which record among all U.S. national parks?
Greatest area
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.
Q 03Beyond the two gravel roads into Wrangell-St. Elias, which transport do backcountry hikers usually hire to reach remote valleys?
Air taxis
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.
Q 04Mount St. Elias, the high point of Wrangell-St. Elias, is the second-tallest peak in the United States behind which mountain?
Denali
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.
Q 05Which peak rises just across the Canadian border from Wrangell-St. Elias and sends ice down into the park?
Mount Logan
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.
Q 06Which Italian nobleman led the first ascent of Mount St. Elias in 1897?
The Duke of the Abruzzi
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.
Q 07Whose 1741 expedition made the first European sighting of Mount St. Elias?
Vitus Bering
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.
Q 08Wrangell-St. Elias holds one of North America's largest concentrations of which white, curly-horned mountain animal?
Dall sheep
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.
Q 09What 16,390-foot peak is the highest in the Wrangell Mountains?
Mount Blackburn
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.
Q 10The big peaks of the western Wrangell Mountains are unusually large examples of which eruptive landform?
Shield volcanoes
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.
Q 11Which glacier in Wrangell-St. Elias is the largest piedmont glacier in North America?
Malaspina
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.
Q 12Which glacier, a cruise-ship favourite in Yakutat Bay, is the longest tidewater glacier in North America?
Hubbard
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.
Q 13Which glacier in Wrangell-St. Elias, over 53 miles long, is called the world's longest interior valley glacier?
Nabesna
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.
Q 21Which president first protected Wrangell-St. Elias by proclaiming it a national monument?
Jimmy Carter
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.
Q 22Which 1980 law established Wrangell-St. Elias as a national park and preserve?
Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act
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.
Q 23Which activity is allowed in the preserve at Wrangell-St. Elias but banned on its national park land?
Q 14Which glacier can visitors to Wrangell-St. Elias walk onto after a short trail from the park's old copper town?
Root
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.
Q 15Which abandoned copper boomtown at the centre of Wrangell-St. Elias is a National Historic Landmark district?
Kennecott
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.
Q 16In mining lore, a hillside patch of which colour led two prospectors to the copper lode in Wrangell-St. Elias in 1900?
Green
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.
Q 17Which financiers bankrolled Wrangell-St. Elias's copper mines as the 'Alaska Syndicate'?
J. P. Morgan and the Guggenheims
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.
Q 18Which coastal town was the terminus of the railway built to carry copper out of what is now Wrangell-St. Elias?
Cordova
Cordova's docks took in the ore trains from 1911 until 1938, when the mines closed and the railway shut down with them.
Q 19Why did Wrangell-St. Elias's copper mines close in 1938?
Worked-out ore
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.
Q 20At the old copper camp in Wrangell-St. Elias, how did ore travel down the mountain from the mines to the mill?
By aerial tramway
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.
Sport hunting
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.
Q 24Which Canadian park adjoins Wrangell-St. Elias on its eastern border?
Kluane
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.
Q 25Which Discovery Channel reality series followed the residents of McCarthy, the tiny town inside Wrangell-St. Elias?
Edge of Alaska
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.
Q 26Why do many visitors to Wrangell-St. Elias take a shuttle rather than drive the McCarthy Road themselves?
Car-hire contracts forbid it
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.
Q 27At the end of the McCarthy Road, how do visitors to Wrangell-St. Elias cross the river?
By footbridge
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.
Q 28Which town, where the Edgerton Highway meets the McCarthy Road, is the Copper River gateway to Wrangell-St. Elias?
Chitina
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.
Q 29Unlike the copper mines in southern Wrangell-St. Elias, the mine reached by the park's northern road was dug chiefly for which metal?
Gold
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.
Q 30About two-thirds of the land in Wrangell-St. Elias carries which additional layer of federal protection?
Designated wilderness
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.