Quick answer: Alaska has 8 national parks — more than any other U.S. state. Six have no entrance fee. Most are roadless wilderness reachable only by small plane; Denali is the only one with a road. Wrangell-St. Elias, at 13.2 million acres, is the largest national park in the United States.
Alaska holds 8 of the 63 U.S. national parks — more than any other state — yet fewer than 1.5 million people visit all of them combined each year, less than a single busy weekend at the Grand Canyon. That's because most are true wilderness: no roads, no trails, no visitor centers. Getting to Gates of the Arctic, Kobuk Valley, or Lake Clark typically means a charter flight from a small Alaskan town. Denali is the exception — a road connects it to Anchorage — and it accounts for the majority of Alaska's park visitors. Wrangell-St. Elias, larger than Switzerland, is the biggest national park in the country and one of the least explored.
| # | Park | Visitors (2023) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ≈ 601K (2023) | |
| 2 | ≈ 60K (2023) | |
| 3 | ≈ 11K (2023) | |
| 4 | ≈ 12K (2023) |
Key Facts
Denali National Park & Preserve protects 6,045,153 acres of Alaska wilderness centered on Denali — North America's highest peak at 20,310 feet — established as Mount McKinley National Park in 1917 and renamed in 1980. A single 92-mile road bisects the park; private vehicles are permitted only to mile 15, and most visitors see the interior by park bus.
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Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve in southeastern Alaska, established in 1980 and designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992, contains the world's largest assemblage of tidewater glaciers in a single protected area — 3,283,168 acres where a massive ice sheet has retreated 65 miles in roughly 250 years.
Read more about Glacier Bay National Park & PreserveKey Facts
Gates of the Arctic National Park & Preserve was established in 1980 and named for two Brooks Range peaks that explorer Robert Marshall called the 'gates of the Arctic' in 1930 — a 7,523,898-acre roadless wilderness in Alaska above the Arctic Circle with no maintained trails or visitor facilities of any kind.
Read more about Gates of the Arctic National Park & PreserveKey Facts
Lake Clark National Park and Preserve protects 2,619,733 acres of southwest Alaska where the Alaska Range meets the Aleutian Range in the glacier-covered Chigmit Mountains. Two active volcanoes rise over tundra valleys, sockeye salmon crowd five river systems each summer, and brown bears gather on the Cook Inlet coast in concentrations rare anywhere in the world. The park has no road access; the only way in is by small aircraft or, along the southern coast, by boat. About 12,000 visitors arrived in 2023, and Dena'ina Athabascan communities have relied on the land for thousands of years under federally recognized subsistence rights.
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