Wrangell-St. Elias Wilderness

At 9,078,675 acres, Wrangell-St. Elias Wilderness is easily the largest designated US Wilderness. It lies wholly within the boundaries of the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, the largest National Park in the United States.

This is an area of large, braided rivers and remote valleys. Several of the mountains here top 16,000' (Mount St. Elias goes to 18,008', second highest in the United States), and massive glaciers drop to the south, running almost to the Gulf of Alaska. To the north, the mountains fall away to boreal upland forests and subarctic tundra. There are waterfalls here as high as 1,500 feet.

There are several good trails that head across the mountains but travel is hard... unless you are really good at building packrafts or you carry your own canoe/kayak. However, the rivers run high with snowmelt from late spring into early fall, then everything freezes. There's always enough snow in the high country to make avalanches a year-round problem.

In the wilderness you'll find black bear, grizzly bear, bison, moose, gray wolf, mountain goat, Dall sheep, beaver, wolverine, coyote, lynx, marmot and red fox.