While luxury may be one of the last things you might think about regarding a trip to Alaska, it’s what you’ll find if you stay in one of the luxury hotels Alaska can offer travelers bound for colder climates. Whether you’re headed to Juneau or Anchorage, Fairbanks, Sitka, or even Wasilla, you’ll find the right place to meet your needs and enable you to explore the wilderness and cities of America’s largest, most northern state.
In my youth, I spent a lot of time in the Northwest, and my brother once traveled to Alaska with a high school group, touring the glaciers and bays. His description of that trip was one of my first introductions to the state. Years later, one of my friends moved to Fairbanks, working for one of the universities. He talked about the difference there is in living at the top of a planet — how in summer there’s little night, how in winter there’s little daylight. I’ve always wanted to travel to the state in order to properly see the Aurora Borealis, that amazing light show of energetic particles that come from the Earth’s magnetosphere. I’m betting most people might not know about the magnetosphere, but nearly everyone has seen pictures of these fantastic colors shifting in the night sky. The colors are created by collisions with atoms or molecules taking the energy of energetic particles from the magnetosphere above the Earth. All of these things, the extreme natural wilderness of the place, the prolonged days and nights, and the Aurora pull me toward the North and make me want to spend some time in one of the state’s seventeen National Parks, which all have places to stay, from three to four star hotels to inns and self-catering chalets.
The state takes its name from one a word from one of its native tribes, the Aleut. Alaska means “the mainland,” and remains one of the most beautiful places on the planet — from mountaintops, such as the country’s highest peak, Mt. Mckinley, to imposing glaciers to volcanoes and tidal shorelines, the state remains a place for the adventurous and for those looking for something truly different. When the United States bought Alaska from the Russian Empire in 1867 for 7.2 million dollars (at roughly two cents an acre), they clearly made a fantastic deal.
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