Alaska Land

For millennia, the land we now call Alaska has nurtured,
on land and sea, mammals great and small, millions of waterfowl, sea birds and songbirds in their annual migration to lush nesting habitat, and millions of shellfish, groundfish and finfish in its waters. The land and sea have helped sustain, for much of the Earth's people, an abundance of wildlife that provides food, clothing and shelter, plus enormous recreational opportunities for this and coming generations.

Archeologists believe that 50,000 and 15,000 years ago, an
early wave of migrants arrived via a land bridge from Siberia, probably in pursuit of mammoth, mastodon and other large herbivores. While they are generally believed to have traveled south to occupy North, Central and South America over the next several thousand years, there came a second wave of migrants, about 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, the ancestors of contemporary Alaska Natives.
The oldest link to human occupation of Alaska comes from a cave north of Nome, where archeologists found a cracked bison leg bone and a bone point about 15,000 years old. Evidence of human occupation after 11,000 years ago is more readily found. The search for untold chapters of Alaska's history continues today at archeological sites, while scientists continue to launch space-age rockets to study worlds beyond Earth.

With firm roots in a land before time, Alaska is blasting
into the 21st century. This is a land of contrasts, with glaciers, fjords, tundra and rain forests, sprawled over 586,412 square miles. Native peoples who have lived here for more than 500 generations have adapted to the "Great Land," with lifestyles that allow survival. What is new, in the last century in particular, is the adaptation of newcomers who came in search of oil and gold and found much more.
These people are whom the poet Robert Service must have had in mind when he wrote, in "The Law of the Yukon," of the children yet to be born and cities yet to leap to stature. Service wrote of "visioning campfires at twilight, sad with a longing forlorn, feeling my womb o'er pregnant, with the seed of cities unborn." Service never mentioned the earthquakes, floods and volcanoes that have made their mark on Alaska, though he did warn that the Law of the Yukon is "that only the strong shall thrive."
State labor department statisticians now estimate that if population trends of the 1990s continue for the next two decades, Alaska's total population will grow to 776,488 by 2018. The forecast is for the most growth to occur in the Anchorage/Matanuska-Susitna region.

For all this growth, much of Alaska will remain the same,
because millions of acres are included in federal and state forests, parks and wildlife refuges. In all, Alaska contains over 322 million acres of public lands, including more than 100 state parks and recreation areas, and 15 national parklands.

Of the latter, some of the best known are Denali National Park, Katmai National Park and Preserve, Kenai Fjords National Park, Tongass National Forest and Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.