Yukon River
Alaska’s longest river, flowing from British Columbia to the Bering Sea
Chinook salmon entering the mouth of the Yukon River in early June may swim as many as 2,000 miles (3,200 km) upstream to spawn, one of the longest salmon runs on Earth. The river itself runs about 1,980 miles (3,190 km) from glacial headwaters in northern British Columbia, across Canada's Yukon Territory and the full width of Alaska, to the Bering Sea. It is the longest river in Alaska, and its basin of about 330,000 square miles (854,700 km²) is larger than Texas, with nearly two-thirds of it inside Alaska.
The Gwich'in name, Yuk Han, means white water river, after the pale glacial silt that colors it, while Yup'ik speakers near the mouth call it Kuigpak, the big river. For more than a century the Yukon was the main highway of the interior. Prospectors floated it to the Klondike during the 1896–1903 gold rush, and sternwheelers carried freight until the 1950s. Even now it is crossed by only four highway bridges along its whole length, just one of them in Alaska, where the Dalton Highway bridges the river north of Fairbanks.
In Alaska the river passes through Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, crosses the Arctic Circle near Fort Yukon and spreads through the wetlands of Yukon Flats before turning southwest. It ends in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, a vast lowland of lakes and channels home to more than 50 Yup'ik and other Indigenous communities and some of the continent's richest waterbird nesting grounds.