Alaska is Big

• Alaska is 1/5th the size of the Lower 48 states.


• The largest national park in the national park system is Wrangell St. Elias National Park, 13.2 million acres/5.34 million hectares.


• Alaska is about 365,000,000 acres. If you walked 1,000,000 acres/day it would take you a year to cover the state.


• Glaciers cover 5% of Alaska, there are about 100,000 of them covering approximately 29,000 square miles/75,091sq km.


• East to west, Alaska spans 2,400 miles/3862km.


• North to South, Alaska runs 1,420 miles/2285km.


• Alaska has almost 34,000 miles/54,718km of shoreline compared with the 12,452 miles/19,924km of shoreline of the rest of the United States.


• Some say that due to Alaska’s geographic location it is the northern-most, western-most AND, because it straddles the International Date Line, eastern-most state in the union!


• Alaska has 39 mountain ranges with 17 of the 20 tallest peaks in the United States, including Denali (Mt. McKinley,) the tallest mountain (20,320 ft./6,194 m).


• There are more than 3,000,000 lakes in Alaska larger than 20 acres.


• The Yukon River runs 1,875 miles/3,018km in Alaska, 2,298/3,698km total.


• The Alaska Pipeline runs 800 miles/1,287km from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez.


• Alaska has its own time zone. We are four hours earlier than the East Coast, one hour earlier than the West Coast.