Alaska has 8 national parks, more than any state except California. Together they cover about 54 million acres, roughly two thirds of all the national parkland in the country (thank you, Jimmy Carter).
Parks Featured in This Guide
8 parks mapped — click a pin for details
Here’s the catch. You can only drive to three of them (Denali, Kenai Fjords, and Wrangell-St. Elias), and five of the ten least visited national parks in America are in Alaska. Not because they aren’t spectacular. Because getting there is the whole game.
We’ve spent years filming in Alaska’s parks and forests, and this is the guide we wish we’d had before our first trip. If you only have one trip in you, here’s the short version. Fly to Anchorage, do Kenai Fjords and Denali, and if you can swing one splurge, spend it on the bears at Katmai.
109 public lands destinations are under threat. Get the free weekly briefing that 25,000+ people use to stay informed and take action.
Below we rank all eight parks by how much they’re worth your time, explain exactly how to reach each one, and tell you what it’ll roughly cost. There’s a printable Alaska national parks map at the bottom of the article.
The 8 Alaska National Parks at a Glance
| Park | How You Get There | The Draw | 2025 Visits | Time Needed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kenai Fjords | Drive from Anchorage (2.5 hrs) | Tidewater glaciers and whales by boat | 425,369 | 1-2 days |
| Denali | Drive or train from Anchorage/Fairbanks | The tallest mountain in North America | 543,300 | 2-3 days |
| Wrangell-St. Elias | Drive, last 59 miles on gravel | Largest national park in America, Kennecott ghost town | 108,840 | 2-3 days |
| Katmai | Jet to King Salmon, then floatplane | Brown bears at Brooks Falls | 34,479 | 1-3 days |
| Glacier Bay | Cruise ship, or jet to Gustavus via Juneau | Tidewater glaciers from the deck | 740,044 | 1-2 days |
| Lake Clark | Small plane from Anchorage (1 hr) | Bears, turquoise lakes, Proenneke’s cabin | 19,778 | 1-3 days |
| Gates of the Arctic | Bush plane via Fairbanks and Bettles | No roads, no trails, pure Arctic wilderness | 14,923 | 4+ days |
| Kobuk Valley | Jet to Kotzebue, then air taxi | Sand dunes above the Arctic Circle | 7,786 | 1-2 days |
One housekeeping note before we start. Denali is the only Alaska national park that charges an entrance fee ($15 per person). The other seven are free to enter. Alaska makes up for it on airfare.
1. Kenai Fjords National Park
Kenai Fjords is the easiest Alaska national park to visit and, pound for pound, the best value in the state. A 2.5 hour drive south from Anchorage on the Seward Highway (itself one of the prettiest drives in America) puts you in Seward, the gateway town.
The park protects the edge of the Harding Icefield, a leftover chunk of the ice age that feeds nearly 40 glaciers. Most of the park is coastline you can only see by water, which is why the one thing to actually do here is a boat tour out of Seward. Half-day and full-day cruises run 3.5 to 8.5 hours and put you in front of calving tidewater glaciers, humpbacks, orcas, puffins, and sea otters. Expect to pay somewhere between $150 and $250 per adult depending on length. Worth it.
If you’d rather earn your views, the Harding Icefield Trail is the best hike in the park and one of the best in Alaska. It’s a hard 8 miles round trip, climbing roughly 1,000 feet per mile, ending at a view of ice stretching to the horizon. The easy alternative is the paved path network near the Exit Glacier Nature Center at the end of the park’s only road.
Access notes. Entrance is free. The Exit Glacier Road is the only road into the park, paved, and typically open mid-May to mid-October. You can also reach Seward without a car via the Alaska Railroad’s Coastal Classic or a bus from Anchorage. There’s one 12-site walk-in campground at Exit Glacier (first come, first served) plus plenty of lodging in Seward starting around $150 a night in season.
More from us on this park in our guide to the best things to do in Kenai Fjords.
2. Denali National Park & Preserve
Alaska’s flagship park, built around the 20,310-foot mountain that out-tops everything else on the continent. The park itself is 6 million acres of tundra, braided rivers, and the big five of Alaska wildlife (grizzly, moose, caribou, Dall sheep, wolf), most of it visible from a single 92-mile road.
First, the expectation management. Most folks who visit Denali never see the mountain. It makes its own weather and spends most of the summer wearing it. Budget more than one day if seeing the peak matters to you, and treat a clear view as a bonus rather than the plan.
The 2026 road situation, because it matters. The Pretty Rocks landslide has kept the park road closed past Mile 43 since 2021. The new bridge over the slide is substantially complete and the Park Service expects it to open mid-summer 2026, with full bus service to Eielson and Wonder Lake expected back in 2027. For now, private vehicles can drive the first 15 miles to Savage River, and buses run to Mile 43 at East Fork. So should you go in 2026 or wait for 2027? Go in 2026 if Denali is one stop on a bigger Alaska trip, because hopping off the transit bus and hiking open tundra is intact at Mile 43 and that’s the real Denali experience anyway. Wait for 2027 only if the deep-road classics, Eielson Visitor Center and the Wonder Lake reflection shot, are the entire reason you’re coming.
The one thing to actually do here is ride a bus past Savage River. In 2026 the non-narrated transit bus costs $33.50 plus the entrance fee and lets you hop off and hike anywhere that looks good. The narrated Tundra Wilderness Tour runs $144.75 per adult ($66 kids). Both operate May 20 to September 17 and book through the park’s reservation concessionaire. Our take. Take the cheaper transit bus and get off it. The open tundra hiking is the entire point of Denali.
Bikes are the loophole worth knowing about. Bicycles are allowed on the full length of the park road, past where private cars must stop. Every September the park also runs a Road Lottery where winners drive their own vehicles deep into the park.
Access notes. Entrance is $15 per person (16 and up), the only entrance fee in Alaska’s parks. The park entrance is a 2-hour drive south of Fairbanks or about 4 hours north of Anchorage. The Alaska Railroad’s Denali Star train (May 13 to September 17 in 2026) drops you right at the depot, around $205 one way from Anchorage in Adventure Class. Six campgrounds run $12 to low-$40s a night depending on site; Riley Creek is the year-round one. There are no park-run lodges, so book the entrance-area hotels early.
Planning a visit? Start with our 20 things to do in Denali and these Denali facts.
3. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve
The largest national park in America at 13.2 million acres. Six Yellowstones. Nine of the sixteen tallest peaks in the country. And somehow only 108,840 visits in 2025, fewer than the Grand Canyon gets in a busy week.
The reason is the driveway. From Anchorage it’s about 5 hours of pavement to Chitina, then the McCarthy Road, 59 miles of gravel laid over an old railbed that takes a solid 2 hours and occasionally eats tires. The road ends at a footbridge over the Kennicott River. You walk across, then catch a local shuttle or walk the last 5 miles to Kennecott. Check your rental agreement before you go, since many Alaska rental companies prohibit the McCarthy Road.
The payoff is the best single destination in any Alaska park. Kennecott is a preserved early-1900s copper mining town, a 14-story red mill building parked at the toe of a glacier, and the Root Glacier Trail leaves right from town. Strap on crampons with a local guide service and you’re walking on the glacier itself within a couple miles. It’s the most fun we’ve had in Alaska without an airplane involved.
Access notes. Free to enter, open year-round, effectively a summer park. The quieter second entrance is the 42-mile gravel Nabesna Road on the park’s north side. If you’d rather skip the driving, air taxis fly into McCarthy. Lodging in McCarthy and Kennecott is limited and books out months ahead. Give this park at least two nights; it punishes day-trip thinking.
We collected the wildest numbers about America’s biggest park in our Wrangell-St. Elias facts piece.
4. Katmai National Park & Preserve
You’ve seen the photo. A brown bear standing at the lip of a waterfall, mouth open, salmon mid-air. That’s Brooks Falls, and standing on the viewing platform watching it happen 30 feet away is the single best wildlife experience in the national park system. We say that having filmed in a lot of parks.
Katmai protects one of the largest brown bear populations on earth, plus the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, the ash-buried valley left by the 1912 Novarupta eruption, the largest volcanic blast of the 20th century. A daily bus tour runs there from Brooks Camp if you can tear yourself away from the bears.
Access notes. No roads reach Katmai. The standard route is a 1-hour Alaska Airlines flight from Anchorage to King Salmon, then a 20-minute floatplane hop to Brooks Camp. All-in day trips from Anchorage generally run north of $1,000 per person, and we think they’re worth it once in your life. Timing is everything. July is peak bear season when the sockeye run hits the falls, and September is round two when fattened bears work the river. June and August are noticeably quieter on the platforms.
There’s no entrance fee. Brooks Camp Campground books on Recreation.gov and sells out almost instantly for July when reservations open in early January. Brooks Lodge fills more than a year out through its own booking system. Plan accordingly or plan a day trip.
More on the bears and the volcano in our favorite Katmai facts.
5. Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve
Glacier Bay logged 740,044 visits in 2025, the most of any Alaska park, and the overwhelming majority of those folks never set foot on land. This is the cruise ship park. Two ships a day glide up the bay to the tidewater glaciers, rangers come aboard to narrate, and everyone goes home happy without ever touching a trail.
If that’s how you see it, fine, it’s genuinely great from a deck. Margerie Glacier calving into the water doesn’t care how you arrived. But the park rewards independent travelers who put in the small extra effort to reach Gustavus, the tiny gateway town.
Access notes. Free to enter. Alaska Airlines flies a daily jet from Juneau to Gustavus in summer (about 30 minutes), Alaska Seaplanes flies year-round, and the state ferry serves Gustavus twice weekly in season. From Bartlett Cove, the park’s only developed area, a daily tour boat runs up-bay to the glaciers and drops off kayakers and campers along the way. Glacier Bay Lodge at Bartlett Cove is the only hotel inside the park. The whale watching in Icy Strait, just outside the park, is some of the best on the planet.
More in our Glacier Bay facts piece.
6. Lake Clark National Park & Preserve
Lake Clark is everything people imagine Alaska to be, compressed into one park an hour from Anchorage by small plane. Turquoise lakes, smoking volcanoes, salmon rivers, coastal brown bears, and exactly zero roads in or out.
The hub is Port Alsworth on Lake Clark’s shore, where commercial operators fly daily in summer through the mountain slot of Lake Clark Pass. From town, the trail to Tanalian Falls and Kontrashibuna Lake is the rare maintained day hike in Alaska’s flyin parks.
The two marquee experiences are coastal bear viewing at Chinitna Bay or Crescent Lake (the photos that make Katmai jealous get taken here, with a fraction of the company) and a pilgrimage to Dick Proenneke’s hand-built cabin at Twin Lakes. Proenneke filmed himself building it alone in 1968, the footage became the documentary Alone in the Wilderness, and the cabin still stands exactly as he left it.
Access notes. No entrance fee. Flights from Anchorage or Homer run on demand and per person costs add up fast, with bear viewing day trips typically around $1,000 a head. Lodges around Port Alsworth and the coast range from rustic to very much not rustic. With 19,778 visits in 2025, you will not be fighting for elbow room.
More in these Lake Clark facts.
7. Gates of the Arctic National Park & Preserve
Gates of the Arctic sits entirely above the Arctic Circle and contains no roads, no trails, no campgrounds, and no cell service across 8.4 million acres of the Brooks Range. It is the second least visited national park in America (14,923 visits in 2025) and the most committing trip on this list.
This is not a park you visit so much as an expedition you mount. The classic trip is a bush flight to a gravel bar or lake, a week of backpacking or packrafting through country where caribou outnumber people a thousand to one, and a pickup that depends entirely on the weather cooperating.
Access notes. Free, permit-free, and completely unforgiving. The standard route is a commuter flight from Fairbanks to Bettles, then an air taxi into the park. The budget route is driving the Dalton Highway to Coldfoot or Wiseman and hiking in across the boundary on foot, which sounds easy and is not. Tussocks, river crossings, and grizzlies are all part of the deal. Unless you have real backcountry experience, go with a guide. This is honestly a park for folks who have already done the other seven.
We collected what makes this place so extreme in our Gates of the Arctic facts.
8. Kobuk Valley National Park
The least visited national park in America. 7,786 people made it to Kobuk Valley in 2025, and we’d bet most of them came for the same thing. 25 square miles of golden sand dunes sitting 30-some miles above the Arctic Circle, with dune temperatures that can crack 90 degrees on a summer afternoon while the rest of the Arctic looks on in confusion.
The other show is the Western Arctic caribou herd, which crosses the Kobuk River on its migration every fall, a scene that’s been playing on repeat for roughly 9,000 years of human memory in this valley.
Access notes. Free entry, zero infrastructure. Fly Alaska Airlines from Anchorage to Kotzebue (about 1 hour 45 minutes), then charter an air taxi to land on the dunes themselves. Day trips are realistic if the weather holds, which is a meaningful if. There are no services in the park at all, so whatever you need, you carry.
More on the strangest landscape in the Arctic in these Kobuk Valley facts.
Planning an Alaska National Parks Trip
When to Go
Mid-June through August. July and August give you the best odds of clear weather, and even then highs mostly sit in the 60s with lows in the 40s. Pack rain gear regardless of what the forecast says, because Alaska forecasts are best understood as fiction. We once planned a two week trip in late August and did not see blue sky a single day. Still worth it.
Build slack into your schedule. Bush flights and ferries cancel for weather constantly, and the folks who get burned are the ones with tight connections. If a flyin park matters to you, give it a buffer day.
A Logical Route
Anchorage is the hub for five of the eight parks. A first trip that doesn’t waste a mile looks like this. Fly into Anchorage, drive south to Seward for Kenai Fjords (2 to 3 days), come back through Anchorage and head north to Denali (2 to 3 days), and if you have the time and tire patience, swing east to McCarthy for Wrangell-St. Elias (2 to 3 days). That’s three parks, one rental car, about ten days.
Katmai and Lake Clark bolt onto that itinerary as flyout days from Anchorage. Glacier Bay belongs on a Southeast Alaska trip via Juneau or a cruise. Gates of the Arctic and Kobuk Valley are their own expeditions out of Fairbanks and Kotzebue, and trying to tack them onto a first trip is how people end up hating bush planes.
Bears, Bugs, and Other Honest Warnings
Your odds of meeting a grizzly are far higher here than anywhere in the lower 48. Carry bear spray where it’s allowed, know how to use it, and make noise on trails. The mosquitoes in the interior parks in June and July are a genuine plague; a head net weighs nothing and costs little. Coastal parks are milder on both counts.
Dogs are a poor fit for Alaska’s parks. They’re prohibited on most trails and they’re a bear magnet besides. Leave them home.
Don’t Sleep on the National Forests
Alaska also holds the two largest national forests in the country, and both deliver national park scenery without the logistics. The Tongass covers nearly 17 million acres of Southeast Alaska rainforest, fjords, and salmon streams (Mendenhall Glacier outside Juneau is Forest Service land). The Chugach wraps around Prince William Sound east of Anchorage, and the drive through it on the Seward Highway is the warmup act for Kenai Fjords. Both are free, both are spectacular, and neither requires a bush plane.
List of Alaska National Parks (by 2025 Visitation)
- Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve, 740,044
- Denali National Park & Preserve, 543,300
- Kenai Fjords National Park, 425,369
- Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve, 108,840
- Katmai National Park & Preserve, 34,479
- Lake Clark National Park & Preserve, 19,778
- Gates of the Arctic National Park & Preserve, 14,923
- Kobuk Valley National Park, 7,786
Pin the Alaska National Parks
Printable Alaska National Parks Map
Download this printable map of the Alaska national parks as a JPG.
Helpful Related Articles
Things to Do in Denali 20 Things to Do in Denali National Park
Harding Icefield Trail Hiking the Harding Icefield Trail in Kenai Fjords
Things to Do in Kenai Fjords 12 Epic Things to Do in Kenai Fjords
Wrangell-St. Elias Facts 10 Surprising Facts About Wrangell-St. Elias National Park
Katmai Facts 11 Fascinating Facts About Katmai National Park & Preserve
Least Visited Parks The 10 Least Visited National Parks (2025 Data)
Historic Sites in Alaska 10 Historic Sites in Alaska Worth Your Time
Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this page earn us a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend gear we actually use.
