We’ve visited some rather remote parks and preserves in Alaska to complete my Treasured Places quest, many of which required chartering a bush flight and consulting with maps and the pilot to figure out where we might be able to land1. Sometimes that’s on a lake, sometimes on a beach, sometimes it’s a gravely flat spot…but it’s nearly always a unique experience.

Here are a dozen such landings.

Misty Fjords National Monument

Aniakchak National Monument

Gates of the Arctic National Park

Admiralty Island National Monument

Alagnak Wild River

Katmai National Park

Bering Land Bridge National Preserve

(And yes, those are indeed grizzly bear prints on the right side of the beach)

Cape Krusenstern National Monument

Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve

Denali National Preserve

Noatak National Preserve

Kobuk Valley National Park

  1. While flightseeing is an excellent way to experience many of these remote landscapes, for the purposes of completing my quest, I wanted to set foot within each protected unit—and yes, including both the park and preserve sections if it was a combined national park unit. ↩︎