Alaska is nicknamed “The Last Frontier,” a name that reflects both its rugged, sparsely populated geography and its relatively late entry into the United States (it became the 49th state in 1959). The state capital is Juneau, in the Southeast region, and Alaska is home to seventeen of the twenty highest peaks in the United States.
The tallest of those peaks is Denali, at 20,310 feet the highest mountain in North America. The mountain was officially renamed Denali, its traditional Koyukon Athabascan name, in 2015; for decades before that it was known as Mount McKinley. Alaska is also home to the Yukon River, the third-longest river in the United States, along with thousands of smaller rivers and more than three million lakes — the largest, Lake Iliamna, covers over 1,000 square miles.
Glaciers and volcanoes are both defining features of the state. Alaska has roughly 100,000 glaciers, covering about 29,000 square miles; the largest, the Malaspina Glacier, spans well over 1,000 square miles on its own. The state also has more than 70 volcanoes, some of which remain active today, and around 6,640 miles of coastline.
Because so much of the state has no road access, Alaska relies heavily on small aircraft and marine transportation. It has far more pilots and aircraft per capita than the rest of the country, and Anchorage’s Lake Hood is the busiest seaplane base in the world. The Alaska Marine Highway System’s ferries connect around three dozen coastal communities from Southeast to Southwest Alaska, with some routes also reaching Bellingham, Washington and Prince Rupert, British Columbia. The Alaska Railroad covers about 470 miles between Seward, Anchorage, and Fairbanks, while the separate White Pass and Yukon Route railroad connects Skagway with Canada’s Yukon Territory.