The Scale of the Thing

Before you understand anything else about Alaska, you have to sit with the size.

Alaska covers five hundred eighty-six thousand four hundred twelve square miles. If you placed it over the contiguous forty-eight states, it would stretch from Florida to California. It contains the seventeen highest mountain peaks in the United States. Its coastline, counting every inlet and island, runs thirty-three thousand nine hundred miles, longer than the combined coastlines of the other forty-nine states. Lake Iliamna, which many people outside the state have never heard of, is the largest lake in Alaska and one of the largest lakes in the entire United States.

The road system covers roughly fourteen thousand miles of roads, most of them concentrated in the southcentral corridor between Anchorage and Fairbanks. That corridor, impressive as it is, reaches perhaps fifteen percent of the state's land area. The rest is what Alaskans call the Bush: communities reachable by small plane, by river skiff in summer, by snowmachine in winter, or not at all. More than two hundred Alaska communities have no road connection to the main highway system. When a family in a village along the Yukon River needs to travel to Anchorage for medical care, they fly.

The consequences of this geography are everywhere. Grocery prices in remote communities run three to five times the Anchorage price because every pound of food arrives by air. Heating fuel is flown in during breakup season when the rivers are too dangerous for barges. Local subsistence hunting and fishing are not hobbies or traditions preserved for ceremony. They are how people eat.

The state is divided into six distinct ecological zones. You can stand in a coastal rainforest in Southeast Alaska, a boreal spruce forest in the Interior, a treeless Arctic tundra north of the Brooks Range, a volcanic landscape in the Aleutians, a maritime grassland on the Alaska Peninsula, and an ice-covered alpine environment in the Alaska Range, and you will have seen six different worlds, all of them within the same set of political borders.

Alaska is not a place. It is several places that happen to share a name.