3 Best Sights in The Bush, Alaska

The Porcupine caribou herd, with nearly 200,000 animals, migrates through Alaska's Arctic and Canada's adjacent Vuntut and Ivvavik National Parks, flowing like a river of animals across the expansive coastal plain, through U-shape valleys and alpine meadows, and over high mountain passes. Their range includes the Northwest Territories and Yukon of Canada, and Arctic Alaska, where many give on the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge. The herd's numbers appear strong, though the threat of oil and gas drilling and climate change on their birthing and nursing grounds worries many Arctic communities in Alaska and Canada.

If you're hiking the wildflower-carpeted tundra around Kotzebue, you are entering a living museum dedicated to permafrost, the permanently frozen ground that lies just a few inches below the spongy tundra. Even Kotzebue's 6,000-foot airport runway is built on permafrost—with an insulating layer between the frozen ground and the airfield surface to ensure that landings are smooth. These days, thawing permafrost can cause problems for communities like Kotzebue: as the ice that binds frozen ground melts due to warm temperatures, the ground collapses and splits, damaging buildings, roads, and other infrastructure. For people in these communities, ice cellars may no longer keep food cold and safe, and thawing permafrost can lead to erosion, impacting sources of water. Other times, tundra lakes can disappear altogether as the surface water percolates down into the thawing soils.

This dramatically sculpted landscape demonstrates the power of volcanic eruptions and their effect on geology, plants and animals. The impact of the Novarupta eruption on the park's ecosystems can be both obvious and subtle, so it's helpful to have a guide. The park concessionaire offers a tour ($110 including lunch, or $96 without) that departs from Brooks Camp on a 46-mile (round-trip) bus ride to the valley, with an optional 3.4-mile hike to the valley floor and back. This is also the bus ($55 each way) to take for multiday backpacking trips up the valley to Mt. Katmai or the foot of Novarupta itself.