Lake Clark National Park

Two active volcanoes stand guard over Lake Clark National Park. Mount Redoubt, 10,197 feet (3,108 m) high, erupted in 1989, when its ash stalled all four engines of a passing jetliner, and again in 2009, while neighboring Mount Iliamna steams at 10,016 feet (3,053 m). Between them and the Alaska Range lie glaciers, tundra and turquoise lakes that feed the Kvichak River system, the most productive sockeye salmon watershed in the world and a mainstay of the Bristol Bay fishery.

Lake Clark itself, about 42 miles (68 km) long, is the heart of the homeland of the Dena'ina people, whose 19th-century village at Kijik is now a National Historic Landmark. At Twin Lakes, Richard Proenneke built a log cabin by hand in 1968 and lived there alone for three decades, and his journals and films made the place famous. No roads reach the park, which lies only about 100 miles (160 km) from Anchorage, so visitors arrive by floatplane or small aircraft, often to watch brown bears along the Cook Inlet coast. It became a national monument in 1978 and a park and preserve in 1980.

• Alaska
  The largest U.S. state, a sub-Arctic giant located in
• Anchorage
  Alaska's largest city, between mountains and sea near
• Katmai National Park
  Alaska Peninsula volcanoes, the 1912 eruption and Brooks Falls bears near