We drove to the end of the Glenn Highway in Glenallen and went to the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park Visitor Center in Copper Center. We were trying to make a firm plan for our backpacking trip but were a little overwhelmed by the options. Wrangell-St. Elias is the largest national park in the US, but has essentially no trails and has only two roads into it. We had descriptions of different dropoff sites (you have to get flown in to the backcountry) and possible routes, but it's like picking out one piece of candy in an entire candy store where no samples are given.
The Park Service brochure for the park begins:
"Incredible. You must see Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and National Preserve to believe it. Number and scale loom large here, magnified by splendid isolation. The largest U.S. national park, it equals six Yellowstones, with peaks upon peaks and glaciers after glaciers.... The peaks' sheer numbers quickly quell your urge to learn their names.... Four major mountain ranges meet in the park, which includes nine of the 16 highest peaks in the United States.... The Malaspina Glacier flows out of the St. Elias Range between Icy and Yakutat bays in a mass larger than the state of Rhode Island [my note: and takes up a tiny corner of the park].... [T]he park's designated wilderness represents nearly 10 percent of the entire National Wilderness Preservation System."
So, how do you pick a route when everything is superlative? You let someone else pick. I told them we didn't have any glacier experience and didn't want to do any major stream crossings, and that we had 6 days and wanted to have a few days of poking around without feeling rushed. They made some suggestions and we thought we'd finally made a decision.
We started down the road (it's still 4 hours from the visitors center to the town we'd be leaving from), and the rain really started coming down hard. We'd checked the weather and the entire state was forecast for showers for the entire week, but there was the possibility of sun after that. We drove for about 30 minutes before we decided we really didn't feel like spending a week in the remote backcountry among superlative peaks that we couldn't see because it was raining so hard.
[Click here if you want to skip the photos of the Denali Highway and Fairbanks and go straight to the rest of the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park backpacking trip.]
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