Stunningly beautiful, the park is defined by steep mountain ranges, including the Wrangell, the St. Elias, and the Chugach, and it contains the second-tallest mountain in North America, St. Elias. Want to see glaciers? The park’s Malaspina Glacier is bigger than the state of Rhode Island. There are tidewater glaciers at its southern tip and an active volcano at Mount Wrangell, which still occasionally vents steam. Dall sheep roam the mountainous areas and there are black and brown bears throughout. On the Copper River, wild salmon runs make for some of the best fishing in the United States.
Wrangell-St. Elias was inhabited at different times by the Ahtna, Upper Tanana, Tlingit and Eyak peoples. Populations were small because the region’s terrain did not support large amounts of game, so Indigenous groups tended to live in settlements by rivers where they could fish. Russians were the earliest Europeans to visit the area, drawn first by furs and then following rumors of copper. After the United States purchased Alaska in 1867, the area was further explored by U.S. army expeditions. Gold strikes elsewhere in Alaska brought plenty of hopeful prospectors.
While a few people found gold, the real bonanza was in fact copper. In 1900, prospectors noticed a green rocky outcropping and its assayed ore turned out to be 70% pure copper, making it one of the richest copper veins ever discovered. In such a remote area, transporting it out was the biggest problem. A mining engineer named Stephen Birch formed a consortium with J.P. Morgan and the Guggenheims: It became the Kennecott Mines Co. The group built a railroad, the Copper River & Northwestern Railway, and it took five years to complete despite only being 195 miles long.
Consisting of five mines clustered around the town, Kennecott was in operation from 1908 to 1938. Nearby towns such as McCarthy boomed selling liquor to the miners, and offered amenities unavailable elsewhere in Alaska: The first X-ray machine in the state was at Kennecott’s infirmary. But the geological conditions that created such pure ore also concentrated it in one place, and by the late 1920s the best ore had been exhausted. The mines shut down one by one, and the last train departed Kennecott in 1938, leaving it a ghost town. The only people left were a family of caretakers whose job was to make sure the structures didn’t burn down.