Kobuk Valley National Park United States

Legendary

Sitting 25 miles north of the Arctic Circle, the park preserves the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes.

Photo by Western Arctic National Parklands

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In summer, the sand here can climb past 100°F. That's in a park sitting entirely north of the Arctic Circle.

The Great Kobuk Sand Dunes cover about 25 square miles of northwestern Alaska. They rise to roughly 100 feet, surrounded by spruce forest and tundra.

Photographs of them look like the Sahara. They're actually the largest active dune field in the Arctic.

Glaciers made the sand. As they ground across the mountains, they crushed rock into fine grains, and wind and water carried it into this valley.

The wind still moves it. The dunes change shape constantly.

Cutting through the park is the Kobuk River, and it's the reason people have come here for thousands of years. Twice a year, the Western Arctic caribou herd crosses it.

The herd numbers in the hundreds of thousands. They travel about 600 miles between their summer calving grounds and their winter range, and the Park Service calls it one of the last great migrations left on Earth.

The animals funnel toward a bend in the river called Onion Portage. It's a natural bottleneck where the caribou have to swim across.

People figured that out a very long time ago. Archaeologists digging at Onion Portage have found evidence of human hunting going back at least 12,500 years.

Iñupiat families still hunt caribou at the same crossing each fall. Congress protected the valley in 1980, and local people kept those traditional rights.

The park is one of the least visited in the country, and getting there explains why. There are no roads, no trails, no campgrounds, and no facilities of any kind.

Fly in by chartered small plane from Kotzebue, about 100 miles away, and be ready to carry everything you need. Climb a dune and look for caribou tracks pressed into the sand. Paddle a stretch of the Kobuk River, the same route people and animals have used for thousands of years.