Top 10 Things You Didn't Know About National Parks
Be Alone with Nature. Really Alone
The National Park Service boasted about 275 million visitors last year; virtually none of them went to Aniakchak. The national monument and preserve in rural Alaska recorded just 10 visitors in 2008, mainly on account of the park's remote location in the Aleutian Islands, 450 miles southwest of Anchorage, and its abysmal weather. (The most visited park site, by contrast — the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina and Virginia — drew more than 16 million people.) Aniakchak is accessible only by boat and seaplane, which often can't land because of fog and wind (the gusts can lead to hypothermia even in summer, the Park Service warns). If you make it, don't expect much in the way of luxury or even a gift shop: the government has no public facilities on the 600,000-acre site.