Alaska is a wild place inhabited by grizzly bears, moose, and wolves; a dramatic landscape of raw-boned mountains, misty forests, windswept tundra, and glaciers that march in the sea; a realm of snow and ice and perpetual cold; a place peopled by Eskimos and pioneers living off the land.

Alaska also has espresso stands, farms, Air Force bases, art galleries, suburbs, four start restaurants, 27C summer days, college basketball tournaments, Internet cafes, bureaucrats, and sand dunes.

Alaska is home to 656,000 people and more people live in metropolitan Albuquerque. More than 275,000 people live in Anchorage, in a cityscape familiar to most Americans: it features skyscrapers, traffic jams, hip clubs, suburban sprawl, fine museums, and many of the other amenities and problems of a city.

Many subsistence hunters and gatherers are Alaska Natives. These indigenous inhabitants constitute about 19 per cent of the state’s population.

Oil production is perhaps the state’s most famous business, and it puts a lot of money into state coffers. It employs several thousand Alaskans and outsiders, and the oil support industries are some of the biggest companies in the state.