Alaska, wild and immense, is one of the planet's treasures - a vast landscape of cloud-swept peaks, deep blue lakes and mammoth glaciers. Between its mountain ranges stretch endless forests and tundra plains, where wolves howl from their lookouts and herds of migrating caribou flow like dark waves across countryside.

Inland from Anchorage is yet another great mountain wall, the Alaska Range, with Mount McKinley and Denali National Park as its centerpiece. Mount McKinley floats over the landscape like a cloud catching the sun. Called Denali ("the great one") by Athabaskan Indians, the mountain was renamed in 1986. Its south summit, the highest point in North America, was first reached by climbers in 1913.

Alaska's immense interior stretches off to the north, extending to the icebound Brooks Range.

The interior climate is marked by extraordinary extremes. In midwinter, when the sun appears for only few hours a day, temperatures seldom rise above rise above zero. In midsummer, the days last more than 20 hours, temperatures often reach the 70s and residents cool off by waterskiing on the lakes and rivers.

This is a land of clear skies and vast horizons, of rambling mountains, wide valleys and sinuous rivers. Mightiest of the rivers is the Yukon, which flows nearly 2,000 miles from northern Canada to the Bering Sea. The mountains here are clothed in a dense, temperate rain forest of hemlock, cedar and spruce. Many of the trees are destined for pulp mills in Ketchikan and Sitka, but those that left uncut in the deep valleys reach heights of 200 feet and live a thousand years or more. The forest provides a sheltered home for bears, mountain goats and black-tailed deer. Bald eagles nest in ancient snags overlooking bays prowled by seals and humpback whales. And each summer millions of salmon swarm into the streams to spawn.

Jack London described the Yukon in the "Call of the Wild", when it was peopled with hermit-like hunters, trappers and prospectors. Even today, you can find the same rugged types living in remote cabins and riverbank villages. But the days are gone when hordes of gold seekers followed the Yukon northward - an odyssey that left some men rich, some poor and some buried under snow.

Most of today's adventurers come looking for wilderness rather than gold. Even residents of Fairbanks, the interior's largest city, get a taste of frontier life - when the thermometer reads - 50º F and the brilliant curtains of aurora borealis dance across the night sky; when downtown streets are closed for dog sled races; and when moose drop in to browse the shrubbery in suburban backyards.

Beyond Fairbanks lie limitless tracts of forest, swampy peat bogs and a good number of Alaska's 3 million lakes. For millennia, Athabaskan Indians have inhabited this wild land, trapping game for subsistence. Nowadays they hunt with rifles, ride snowmobiles and travel in motorboats. Times may have changed, but not all of the older ways are forgotten. In isolated trapline cabins along the timberline, elders can be found telling children how to catch a fish by snaring its tail or how to transport a fresh-killed moose in a boat made from its own hide.