It doesn't take long to find the essence of Alaska. Just get off the plane at Anchorage - if you're lucky it'll be above freezing - and the first person you bump into will more likely than not be called Brad, wear a lumberjack shirt, work in oil, have a pick-up truck with twin gun racks and ask you: 'Did you know Alaska is a third the size of the lower 48 states and it's only got 600,000 people, 300,000 of them are in Anchorage?' The second question they ask is: 'Have you come for the fishing?'
Alaskans are rightly proud of their state's size. It oozes bigness. It is wild and it is empty. It has north America's highest mountain, and its last true wilderness. It has the world's most dramatic fjords with glaciers crashing into them. Before I walked from the suburbs of Anchorage up the sharp 4,500ft Wolverine Peak, the taxi driver warned me to be careful of bears. Like yeah, right by the city I thought.
'Yeah!', said the few walkers I met, all with their bear-bells tinkling away, before regaling me with stories of bear attacks in the suburbs.
Not that bears are the only problem. Last year, a man got trampled to death by a moose outside his son's school in Anchorage. It was caught on video, and, of course, it was shown repeatedly on the news. 'I thought that was a bit tasteless,' said an Alaskan called Brad on top of Wolverine Peak, Anchorage stretching out to the sea below, and endless wilderness behind.
Everything about Alaska has bigness, including the people (they have to make their bar stools especially wide). Everyone has a car but they also have two-, four-, six-seater planes. With very few roads, and such vast distances, it is the only real way to get about once you leave the cities. As you drive into Anchorage, you find a lake which is a boatplane equivalent of a car park.
Both main airports have vast areas set aside for private aircraft. That's the poor people's private planes. Anyone who is even middle income appears to have their own landing strip in their backyard. As you circle above the suburbs of Fairbanks, Alaska's second city, each house has a car on the drive and a plane on the landing strip.
Alaska is the last frontier. On the north coast, you can visit the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This, too, is vast, home to teeming caribou, the nearly extinct pre-historically shaggy musk ox, grizzly bears, golden eagles, moose, polar bears and snow geese.
It has been dubbed 'America's Serengeti' but, unlike the Tanzanian park, it has no roads, not even any human trails, huts, or landing strips. It is pure wilderness, as wild as it was before the advent of man. The only way you can visit it is by chartering a plane. As you weave in and out of the mountains and foothills, the pilot will find a gravel bank of a river to land on, drop you, and agree to pick you up at the same time, same place the following week.
In between, it's just you, your guide, and Mother Nature.
Alaska is famous for being cold, and rightly so. In the little village of Barrow on the north coast last year, it plunged to minus 77C (-107F). It's so cold, the tyres on cars freeze solid. The flat part in contact with the road when you park stays frozen flat as you drive off, giving a bumpy ride and a noise like 'ker-klunk, ker-klunk, ker-klunk' for 10 miles until the rubber warms up.
One Alaskan told me he didn't mind the cold: 'I look upon it as population control.' In the spring, people from the rest of the US come to Alaska, fall in love 'but by December, they're usually aching to get back,' he said.
And while it's cold, it's dark. In winter you get little or no light - but there is some compensation. Fairbanks declares itself the 'Northern Lights capital of the world', with stunning red, green, blue curtains of light dancing across the sky 220 nights a year. In the newspapers, they carry not just weather forecasts, but aurora forecasts. The dark winter also means a light summer, when days literally never end and merge one into another at the midnight sun.
I bumped into the Bishop of Alaska - he said it's the Anglican church's biggest diocese - while he commuted from church to church by plane. As the Right Rev Mark McDonald gave me a lift to the airport in his pick-up, he announced with delight that his wife had got buffalo for dinner: it made a nice change to caribou, which was their usual meat. 'How did she get that?' I asked. 'In the supermarket?' 'Possibly, though she might have shot it,' said the bishop. The Alaskans are big on hunting, but they do it for food. 'The one thing that unites the whites and the natives is disgust at the trophy hunters who come up here from Texas and shoot a moose just to cut its head off and stuff it,' said McDonald, 'It's just such a waste.'
Many of the native Americans still subsist off wild animals. The Gwich'in tribe of Athabascan Indians live off the caribou that migrate through their remote land in the far north of Alaska, as they have for the last 10,000 years.
In the community of Arctic Village, a hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, and 100 miles from any other human habitation, the young men spend months dividing their time between hunting caribou and playing computer games. It's a haunting land of stunted trees and moss-clad tundra, encircled by hulking mountains.
Two feet down the soil is frozen all year round, forming an impenetrable layer that forces water to coalesce into endless pools, lakes, and meandering, directionless, lazy riverlets.
The log cabins of Arctic Village, its store with just a few tins in it, its wooden church, and gravel roads with no cars, have a cosy, friendly atmosphere. You can chat with the locals, whose mother tongue is now English, or walk up to the mountain. I went in surprisingly warm summer days, but a guide told me it was better to visit in winter: it's more unusual, haunting, and you have the staggering, almost endless displays of Northern Lights.
The only trouble is that with temperatures so low, your plane may get 'weathered in' and you'll spend more days in there than you planned.
Getting there
Flights from London to Anchorage start at about £450, They usually require two changes
Internal flights are available from Alaskan Airlines 00 1 800 252 7522 and also Frontier Flying Service 00 1 907 474 0014
Tours of Arctic Village are organised by Arctic Village Tours 00 1 907 479 46 48, www.arcticvillagetours.com or email the company on alaska@arcticvillagetours.com.
Trips to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are organised by Alaska Wilderness Journeys 00 1 907 733 4444.
Other tours are organised by Northern Alaskan Tour Company 00 1 907 474 8600 and North Star Adventures 00 1 570 297 4015 441552.
