Alaskan Road Trip, 500 Feet Up

Fortunately, there’s another option: take to the air.

IT was a windy, snow-whipped morning in early winter, & as I stood on a spit of land jutting in to Kachemak Bay in the Alaskan town of Homer, I was surrounded by natural wonders. Or so I was told. The Harding Icefield, rugged mountaintops ensconced in interconnected glaciers, was off to the northeast. Ten miles away were rivers where in spring phalanxes of brown bears stand paw deep in the water, practically posing for photos as they snap up spawning salmon midleap.
But in Alaska, a vast state covering 663,267 square miles, much of the terrain is cut off from roads. By conventional means, a tourist can get only so far — or , so near. Standing at the finish of the Homer Spit, I’d reached the finish of the road: a few feet in front of me, the pavement dropped off in to the sea.

Known as flightseeing, these tours — by small, sturdy aircraft capable of landing in uneven terrain — help open up Alaska to the average traveler. From the air, the rare view of a glacier’s back becomes democratic, no longer reserved for extreme sports enthusiasts who can clamber up its cold sides. Two times on the ground, reclusive animals come in to focus, & hard-to-reach fishing streams are steps away.

While in Alaska to interview people living in remote areas for an article, I learned how vital air travel is in reaching spots inaccessible by road. I also found it to be the best way to see the state’s plenty of stunning sights — a discovery thousands of visitors are making as the proliferation of pilots in Alaska has led to an array of aerial jaunts.

“You’ve only got two highways,” said Norm Lagasse, director of the Alaska Aviation Heritage Museum, across a state over two times the size of Michigan. North of Anchorage & Fairbanks, for example, with the exception of dogsleds, terrain is available mostly by aircraft, Mr. Lagasse said. “There’s no railway, there’s no highway, there’s no transportation infrastructure that is based on the ground,” they added.

Accordingly, Alaska has about four registered pilot for every 58 residents, & 14 times as plenty of airplanes per capita as the rest of the United States, according to online information collected by the state’s Department of Transportation & Public Facilities. Mr. Lagasse said pioneer pilots took their first flights over the countryside in 1913.