10 Best Sights in The Kenai Peninsula and Southcentral Alaska, Alaska

The mountains surrounding Portage Glacier are covered with smaller glaciers. A 1-mile hike off Byron Glacier Road—the trail begins about a mile south of Begich-Boggs Visitor Center—leads to the Byron Glacier overlook. The glacier is notable for its accessibility—this is one of the few places where you can hike onto a glacier from the road system. In summer, naturalists lead free weekly treks in search of microscopic ice worms.

In addition to fishing, clam digging is popular at Clam Gulch, 24 miles south of Soldotna on the Sterling Highway. This is a favorite of local children, who love any excuse to dig in the muddy, sloppy goo. Ask locals on the beach how to find the giant razor clams (recognized by their dimples in the sand). Ask also for advice on how to clean the clams—cleaning is pretty labor-intensive, and it's easy to get into a clam-digging frenzy when the conditions are favorable, only to regret your efforts when cleaning time arrives. The clam digging is best when tides are minus 4 or 5 feet. A sportfishing license, available at grocery stores, sporting-goods shops, and drugstores, is required for clam diggers 16 years old and older.

A visit to Columbia Glacier, which flows from the surrounding Chugach Mountains, should definitely be on your Valdez agenda. Its deep aquamarine face is 5 miles across, and it calves icebergs with resounding cannonades. This glacier is one of the largest and most readily accessible of Alaska's coastal glaciers. The state ferry travels past its face, and scheduled tours of the glaciers and the rest of the sound are available by boat and aircraft from Valdez, Cordova, and Whittier.

A mass of ice that caps the Kenai Mountains, the Harding Icefield covers more than 1,100 square miles, and oozes more than 40 glaciers from its edges and down the mountainsides; Exit Glacier is the most accessible part of the ice field. Just outside Seward, if you hike a mile up the paved trail that starts at the parking lot, you'll find yourself at the terminal moraine of Exit Glacier. Look for the marked turnoff at Mile 3.7 as you enter town, or you can take the hourly shuttle from downtown ($15 round-trip). There's a small walk-in campground here, a ranger station, and access to the glacier. The hike to the ice field from the parking lot is a 9-mile round-trip that gains 3,000 feet in elevation, so it's not for the timid or out of shape. But if you're feeling up to the task, the hike and views are breathtaking. Local wildlife includes mountain goats and bears both black and brown, so keep a sharp eye out for them. Due to recent ice fall at the toe of the glacier, the entire toe is currently off-limits.

One of the few accessible valley glaciers in the state, Exit is the only destination in the park accessible by car. Named for being a mountaineering expedition's exit from the first recorded successful crossing of the Harding Icefield in 1968, this glacier is the park's most popular destination.

This is the largest ice field located entirely in the United States. It began forming during the Pleistocene Epoch, about 23,000 years ago, and is now comprised of a number of interconnected glaciers. As it's not possible to see through the ice, it's hard to gauge the depth of it, but radio wave studies have indicated that it's at least 1,500 feet deep in a ridge above Exit Glacier. The surface area is relatively easy to study, however, and research shows that over the past 10 years, the ice field's melt has increased, dropping it 10–12 feet in elevation every year.

The Kenai Fjords explode with glaciers, rain forests, and wildlife sights. The marine mammals you'll likely see are the Dall's porpoises, sea lions, otters, seals, dolphins, and whales (orca, humpback, gray, minke, sei, and fin). In the air, on the water, and populating the many islands and outcroppings along the way are almost 200 species of birds that call this region home, including falcons, eagles, and puffins.

Wrangell–St. Elias's coastal mountains are frequently wreathed in snow-filled clouds, their massive height making a giant wall that contains the great storms brewed in the Gulf of Alaska. As a consequence, they bear some of the continent's largest ice fields, with more than 100 glaciers radiating from them. One of these, Malaspina Glacier, includes 1,500 square miles—larger than the state of Rhode Island. This tidewater glacier has an incredible pattern of black-and-white stripes made by the other glaciers that coalesced to form it. If you fly between Juneau and Anchorage, look for Malaspina Glacier on the coast north of Yakutat.

The glacier is one of Alaska's most frequently visited tourist destinations. A 6-mile side road off the Seward Highway leads to Begich-Boggs Visitor Center on the shore of Portage Lake, named after two U.S. congressmen who disappeared on a small-plane journey out of Anchorage in 1972. The center is staffed by Forest Service personnel, who can help plan your trip and explain the natural history of the area. A film on glaciers is shown hourly, and icebergs sometimes drift down to the center from Portage Glacier. Due to global climate change, Portage, like most of the glaciers in Alaska, has receded from view in recent years.

Most of the park's glaciers are found in the Chigmit Mountains. The longest is 19-mile Tuxedni Glacier, which is one of 10 that radiates from the Mt. Iliamna volcano.