The Most Beautiful Places in Alaska
7 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Alaska are Denali, Hubbard Glacier and Tracy Arm. The list covers 7 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Alaska is the largest state in the United States and its most mountainous, with the Alaska Range in the interior, the Wrangell and Saint Elias Mountains in the southeast and a long chain of volcanoes along the Alaska Peninsula and the Aleutians. Heavy snowfall from the Gulf of Alaska feeds some of the biggest glaciers outside the polar ice sheets, many of which still reach the sea.
Denali, the highest mountain in North America, rises from lowlands to well over 6,000 metres, giving it one of the greatest base-to-summit heights of any peak on land. On the coast, Hubbard Glacier is among the largest tidewater glaciers in North America, a wall of ice ending in Disenchantment Bay that has been advancing for decades while most glaciers retreat. In Glacier Bay, the Margerie Glacier calves blocks of blue ice into the fjord beneath the Fairweather Range.
The interior holds marks of human ambition and volcanic force. The Kennecott Mines, inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, preserve the red wooden buildings of a copper mining town abandoned in 1938. On the Alaska Peninsula, the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes was buried under ash by the 1912 eruption of Novarupta, the largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century; the countless steaming vents that gave it its name have since cooled.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Denali | Mountain | |
| 2 | Hubbard Glacier | Glacier | |
| 3 | Tracy Arm | Fjord | |
| 4 | Tongass National Forest | Forest | |
| 5 | Margerie Glacier | Glacier | |
| 6 | Kennecott Mines | Mine | |
| 7 | Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes | Volcano |
01 Denali
United States63.069° N 151.006° W
Image by brigachtal from Pixabay Denali, the highest mountain in North America, rises to 20,310 feet (6,190 m) in the Alaska Range.
Did you know? A self-recording thermometer left by the 1913 party was recovered in 1932 and showed a low of about −73 °C.
02 Hubbard Glacier
United States60.314° N 139.371° W
Image by spalla67 from Pixabay Hubbard Glacier is the largest tidewater glacier in North America, a river of ice about 122 km long that begins high in the Saint Elias Mountains of Canada's Yukon and ends in a wall of ice facing the sea in Alaska.
Did you know? The 1986 closure of Russell Fjord was set off by a surge of the Valerie Glacier, a tributary that joins Hubbard only a few miles from its terminus.
03 Tracy Arm
United States57.911° N 133.402° W
InformationCraftsman · CC BY-SA 4.0 Tracy Arm is a narrow glacial fjord that cuts some 45 km into the Coast Mountains of Southeast Alaska, running from Holkham Bay up to the twin tidewater fronts of the North and South Sawyer glaciers.
Did you know? No one was hurt in the 2025 tsunami because it struck around dawn, before the day's tour boats had entered the arm.
04 Tongass National Forest
United States56.750° N 133.000° W
Forest Service Photography · Public domain The Tongass is less a forest than a whole coastline. It covers almost the entire Alaska Panhandle, nearly 17 million acres of islands, fjords, icefields and mountains along the Pacific, and it is by far the largest national forest in the United States, bigger than several US states.
Did you know? Theodore Roosevelt created the Tongass National Forest by proclamation in 1907.
05 Margerie Glacier
United States58.968° N 137.176° W
Image by gwynethjones from Pixabay Margerie Glacier ends at the head of Tarr Inlet, in the far northwestern reach of Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska, as a wall of ice about a mile wide and roughly 350 feet high, of which some 250 feet stand above the water.
Did you know? At its fastest the glacier was measured moving about 2,000 feet a year, roughly six feet every day.
06 Kennecott Mines
Kennecott
United States61.486° N 142.889° W
Christoph Strässler from Oberdorf BL, Schweiz · CC BY-SA 2.0 Kennecott is a company town left almost intact where a copper boom ended: a cluster of wooden buildings stacked up a hillside above the Kennicott Glacier, deep inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska.
Did you know? The company reported gross revenues above 200 million dollars and a net profit of more than 100 million from its Alaskan mines.
07 Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes
United States58.394° N 155.385° W
Captain Budd Christman, NOAA Corps. · Public domain In June 1912 a vent called Novarupta, on the Alaska Peninsula, produced the largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century by volume, releasing roughly 13 cubic kilometres of magma in about sixty hours.
Did you know? Rafts of floating pumice were still being seen in 1913 in Katmai Bay, about 240 kilometres away.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Alaska?
- On our list, Denali ranks first, followed by Hubbard Glacier and Tracy Arm.
- How high is Denali?
- Denali reaches about 6,190 metres, making it the highest mountain in North America. It stands in the Alaska Range within Denali National Park.
- Why is Hubbard Glacier advancing?
- Hubbard Glacier is a tidewater glacier with a very large, high accumulation area in the Saint Elias Mountains. Its cycle as a tidewater glacier lets it advance even as many glaciers around it retreat.
- What created the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes?
- The 1912 eruption of Novarupta filled the valley with a thick layer of hot volcanic ash. Water trapped beneath it produced thousands of steaming fumaroles, which gave the valley its name.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Alaska?
- In our collection, the places in Alaska are most often glaciers (2), mountains (1), volcanoes (1) and fjords (1).
- How many places are on this list in Alaska?
- The list covers 7 places.