At more than four million acres, nearly twice the size of Yellowstone, Lake Clark National Park and Preserve is big. It encompasses tremendous diversity, form two 10,000-foot volcanoes to a coastline dotted with seabirds to dense spruce forests, where wolves and bears roam, to 40-mile-long Lake Clark to white-water rivers to an Arctic tundra like plateau favoured by caribou.

Port Alsworth, the little settlement on Lake Clark, is home to the Park Service’s field headquarters. Form here, the easy and maintained Tanalian Falls Trail passes through a forest of birch and spruce, skirts ponds and bogs, paces the frothy Tanalian River to Kontrashibuna Lake, and ends 4 kilometres later at the waterfall.

Many visitors navigate the park via water, most often in inflatable kayaks and canoes, which must be brought in. Paddling any of the long, large, unspoiled lakes is a quintessential Alaska experience.