Experience the best of McCarthy

McCarthy sits at the end of an unpaved road deep inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, the largest national park in the United States, among glaciers and ice-covered peaks. The settlement began in the early 1900s as a supply town for the copper mines at Kennecott and has only a small year-round population, a handful of wooden buildings, a bar and a footbridge over the Kennicott River.

About eight kilometres up the valley, the red-painted buildings of the Kennecott mill town, a National Historic Landmark, climb a hillside beneath the Kennicott Glacier. The mines closed in 1938, leaving the mill and its bunkhouses standing as a record of the copper boom. Hikers walk out onto the Root Glacier, small planes fly over the ice fields, and Mount Blackburn rises to almost five thousand metres.

Meals here are plain frontier cooking in lodges and a few cafés, with sourdough bread, salmon and berry pie. Summer light lasts nearly all night, and winters are long, dark and very cold.