I’m pretty damn excited now. My brother and I are in the middle of finalizing our vacation plans for a few weeks from now; on tap, Alaska. Specifically, Anchorage, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Denali National Park and Preserve, and the Prince William Sound. To name a few destinations…

Wrangell-St. Elias is the largest national park in the U.S. — it would fit six Yellowstones inside it, or to put it differently, it’s bigger than Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island put together. Check out this map for a sense of its size; it’s unfathomable. It contains the second-tallest mountain in the U.S. (Mt. St. Elias) and a glacier larger than Rhode Island (Malaspina Glacier); there aren’t any paved roads in it at all. (I think that I should get a GPS receiver, so we can find our way back to our camping gear.)

Denali, of course, contains North America’s tallest mountain, Mt. McKinley. (Denali is actually the name given to the mountain by the native Alaskans; the word is a transliteration of a Koyukon word which generally means “great one.”) I don’t imagine we’ll be trekking up the mountain.

Found at peterme: the strangely intriguing and startling screenshots. Go there. Now.