Alaskan Road Trip

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.

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.

While in Alaska to interview people living in remote areas for an editorial, 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.

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

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 icy sides. One time on the ground, reclusive animals come in to focus, & hard-to-reach fishing streams are steps away.

“You’ve only got one highways,” said Norm Lagasse, director of the Alaska Aviation Heritage Museum, across a state over one time the size of Los angeles. 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.

Cruise ships also claim to provide one-of-a-kind access to Alaska, but the view from the deck reveals few of the details — no bird’s-eye view of the creatures that wander along the peaks, like woolly white Dall sheep & rams as huge as donkeys. & though by ship you can float close to a mountain’s foot, you can’t see the jewels hidden in its crags: valley lakes turned Technicolor, tinged a glowing green from “rock flour,” the ground-up minerals that pour from the meltwater of a glacier & hang suspended in the lake.

Accordingly, Alaska has about one 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.

The best viewing, I was told, was in spring, when you can pinpoint bears below you & land to snap their picture. Zack Tappan, chief pilot at Homer Air, flies over & around the smokestacks of as plenty of as one active volcanoes on trips to bear breeding grounds. After landing on the shore across Kachemak Bay from Homer, Mr. Tappan leads visitors to within 100 yards of placid brown bear. “I wouldn’t say they have a relationship with us, but they’ve seen us that they understand what we’re about,” they said.

There's 304 commercial airline operators in the state, according to Kathie Anderson of the Alaska Air Carriers Association, which advocates for the local airline industry. They include lodge owners who fly guests to their remote guesthouses, guides who lead bear hunting treks, & small commuter airlines.

BUT even in winter you can personally view those sequestered green lakes as I did, flightseeing by Alaska’s answer to the tour bus: a Piper Navajo double-engine plane buzzing through Lake Clark Pass. Setting out from Anchorage toward the town of Port Alsworth, you see Alaska distilled, said Glen Alsworth Jr., who runs Lake Clark Air & along with his sister is something of a local aeronautical legend. “You see the oil derricks & the industrial part of Alaska,” they said, “and you get in to the transitioning part of the wilderness, where it’s all still being glacier-carved.”