Sunday, July 11, 2010

Wrangell-St. Elias National Park

Weighing in at 13.2 million acres, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park is the largest park in the US. It's the equivalent of SIX Yellowstone Parks, a couple of states (which ones I can't remember) or the country of Switzerland (but we've got taller mountains than the Swiss!) and I've yet to actually see a single one of them (they do a really good job of hiding them up here!)

After our brief sojourn to Copper Center, AK (pop. 300 and I think that actually includes the larger wildlife), we shuttled out to the main visitor center at Wrangell-St. Elias NP. I've been to a couple of these so I feel qualified to say that this was the best NP Visitor Center I've ever seen (but since this is one of the newest national parks - 1980 - I'm thinking they've had some practice at setting these up by now).

We visited the exhibit building, the main visitor center building (which had a great interactive display) and learned that 9 of the 15 tallest mountains on this continent are in W-St.E (or the neighboring Canadian park) and all of them are taller than Rainier.

I had some pictures of random mountains that we took on the drive out here on Saturday that I was going to insert here but we'll just hope for sunshine tomorrow and then I can insert the real thing here!

~later, tw

(PS - A woman on the bus was explaining to her husband that Princess has other Lodges. Specifically she was telling him about the one in Kenya. Took me a couple of minutes to realize she was actually talking about KENAI! I mean I know that Alaska is big but I didn't know it extended to Nairobi!)

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