Wrangell-St. Elias National Park United States

Legendary

The largest of the 63 US National Parks, tall mountain peaks, volcanoes, ice fields and glaciers make up this remote terrain.

Photo by GPA Photo Archive

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The biggest copper company in this part of Alaska has a typo in its name. The town was named Kennicott, after a nearby glacier, but a clerk misspelled it as Kennecott when the company was formed.

The mistake stuck. Today you'll see both spellings, sometimes on the same sign.

Wrangell-St. Elias is the largest national park in the United States. It covers about 13.2 million acres in southeastern Alaska, nearly six times the size of Yellowstone and bigger than the whole country of Switzerland.

Four mountain ranges come together here. Nine of the 16 tallest mountains in the United States are inside the park.

The tallest is Mount Saint Elias, which rises 18,008 feet. It's the second-highest mountain in both the United States and Canada, and it sits right on the border between the two countries.

What makes it so dramatic is how fast it climbs. The park starts at sea level on the coast of the Gulf of Alaska and soars to more than 18,000 feet.

In 1900, prospectors found copper in these mountains, and it turned out to be one of the richest deposits ever discovered. Wealthy investors built a mine and a whole company town called Kennicott.

They also built a railroad nearly 200 miles long, with a famous bridge called the Million Dollar Bridge, to carry the copper to ships on the coast. The mine produced more than $200 million worth of copper.

By 1938, the copper had run out. The mine closed, the trains stopped, and almost everyone left.

Many of the old mine buildings are still standing. Today they're protected as Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark.

The land around them became a national monument in 1978 and a national park on December 2, 1980. Along with neighboring parks in Canada, it forms one of the largest protected wilderness areas on Earth.

Drive the long gravel McCarthy Road, which follows the path of the old railroad, into the heart of the park. Take a guided tour through the giant mill at Kennecott, where copper was crushed and sorted. Then walk out onto the Root Glacier, right next to the old mine buildings, with spikes strapped to your boots.

Sources: Travel Alaska, NPS History, and EBSCO Research.