Alaska is the largest and most sparsely populated U.S. state. It's known for its diverse terrain of open spaces, mountains, rivers and forests, with abundant wildlife and many small towns. It’s a destination for outdoor activities like skiing, mountain biking and kayaking. Massive Denali National Park is home to Denali (Mount McKinley), North America’s highest peak.
Capital: Juneau
Statehood granted: January 3, 1959
Population: 736,732 (2014)
State bird: Willow ptarmigan
Governor: Bill Walker
Size: 586,412 square miles
Access: Via air, sea, highway
Major Attractions: Denali (Mt. McKinley,) the highest peak in North America; the Yukon River, third longest river in the U.S.; thriving Alaska Native cultures; snow-capped mountain ranges; 5,000 glaciers covering 100,000 square miles; 6,640 miles of coastline; and 70 active volcanoes.
Alaska's wildlife is as varied as the land itself, from bald eagles, owls, hawks, falcons and thousands of migratory waterfowl to Kodiak brown bears, polar bears, wolves, wolverines, moose, caribou and 16 varieties of whales, including narwhals, with a single tusk similar to the mythical unicorn.
Back in the 1960s, still recovering from the throes of the Good Friday earthquake, the strongest recorded to date on the North American continent, Alaskans often slapped on their motor vehicles bumper stickers that read "We don't give a damn how they do it outside." In the face of disaster, they had an attitude about doing things with an Alaskan twist.
It was a time when most doors were not locked, when folks shopped by catalog, grew vegetables in their gardens, and could hardly walk down a street or board an airplane without recognizing half the people they saw. Moose still roamed in downtown Anchorage, where Walter J. Hickel, later governor of Alaska and Secretary of the Interior, was building the Captain Cook Hotel, honoring an earlier arrival with equal gusto for adventure. Newcomers to Anchorage got a party line from the telephone utility and waited for months to get a private telephone line, while in many isolated rural communities there was one telephone , not always in working order. Then in 1968, about 130 years after an agent for the Hudson's Bay Company first reported oil seepages on the North Slope, geologists for the Atlantic Richfield Co. found oil-soaked rocks at Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic coast. The Prudhoe Bay discovery, culminating with construction of an 800-mile pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, forever changed the state's destiny.
The hunt for oil, a modern-day gold rush, created a rush for land, prompting Interior Secretary Stewart Udall to halt further state land selections and federal oil and gas leasing until Alaska Native land claims were settled.
The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of Dec. 18, 1971, laid the groundwork for powerful Alaska Native regional and village corporations, to whom the government agreed to return 40 million acres and $1 billion for lands not returned. Many leaders of today's diversified Alaska Native regional corporations, the sons and daughters of subsistence hunters, are college educated and sending their own children to some of the nation's finest universities.
Alaska today is still a land of extremes, with roots deep in the past and space-age technology at work, from the dog mushers who run more than 1,000 miles in the Iditarod Sled Dog Race from Anchorage to Nome to rocket scientists at Kodiak and Poker Flats, the latter a project of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
While archeologists dig at Kodiak Island to learn more about the past, others use state-of-the-art technology to bring residents better communications, transportation, health care and lifestyles. Residents of rural villages that once had no phones now communicate from home via phone, fax and electronic mail to points all over the world.
Capital: Juneau
Statehood granted: January 3, 1959
Population: 736,732 (2014)
State bird: Willow ptarmigan
Governor: Bill Walker
Size: 586,412 square miles
Access: Via air, sea, highway
Major Attractions: Denali (Mt. McKinley,) the highest peak in North America; the Yukon River, third longest river in the U.S.; thriving Alaska Native cultures; snow-capped mountain ranges; 5,000 glaciers covering 100,000 square miles; 6,640 miles of coastline; and 70 active volcanoes.
Alaska's wildlife is as varied as the land itself, from bald eagles, owls, hawks, falcons and thousands of migratory waterfowl to Kodiak brown bears, polar bears, wolves, wolverines, moose, caribou and 16 varieties of whales, including narwhals, with a single tusk similar to the mythical unicorn.
Back in the 1960s, still recovering from the throes of the Good Friday earthquake, the strongest recorded to date on the North American continent, Alaskans often slapped on their motor vehicles bumper stickers that read "We don't give a damn how they do it outside." In the face of disaster, they had an attitude about doing things with an Alaskan twist.
It was a time when most doors were not locked, when folks shopped by catalog, grew vegetables in their gardens, and could hardly walk down a street or board an airplane without recognizing half the people they saw. Moose still roamed in downtown Anchorage, where Walter J. Hickel, later governor of Alaska and Secretary of the Interior, was building the Captain Cook Hotel, honoring an earlier arrival with equal gusto for adventure. Newcomers to Anchorage got a party line from the telephone utility and waited for months to get a private telephone line, while in many isolated rural communities there was one telephone , not always in working order. Then in 1968, about 130 years after an agent for the Hudson's Bay Company first reported oil seepages on the North Slope, geologists for the Atlantic Richfield Co. found oil-soaked rocks at Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic coast. The Prudhoe Bay discovery, culminating with construction of an 800-mile pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, forever changed the state's destiny.
The hunt for oil, a modern-day gold rush, created a rush for land, prompting Interior Secretary Stewart Udall to halt further state land selections and federal oil and gas leasing until Alaska Native land claims were settled.
The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of Dec. 18, 1971, laid the groundwork for powerful Alaska Native regional and village corporations, to whom the government agreed to return 40 million acres and $1 billion for lands not returned. Many leaders of today's diversified Alaska Native regional corporations, the sons and daughters of subsistence hunters, are college educated and sending their own children to some of the nation's finest universities.
Alaska today is still a land of extremes, with roots deep in the past and space-age technology at work, from the dog mushers who run more than 1,000 miles in the Iditarod Sled Dog Race from Anchorage to Nome to rocket scientists at Kodiak and Poker Flats, the latter a project of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
While archeologists dig at Kodiak Island to learn more about the past, others use state-of-the-art technology to bring residents better communications, transportation, health care and lifestyles. Residents of rural villages that once had no phones now communicate from home via phone, fax and electronic mail to points all over the world.
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