Spa Vacation - Alaska in Jack London Eyes

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

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

Extending to the icebound Brooks Range, alaska's immense interior stretches off to the north.

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

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

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

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

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, in isolated trapline cabins along the timberline. But not all of the older ways are forgotten, times may have changed. Ride snowmobiles and travel in motorboats, nowadays they hunt with rifles. Trapping game for subsistence, athabaskan Indians have inhabited this wild land, for millennia. Swampy peat bogs and a good number of Alaska's 3 million lakes, beyond Fairbanks lie limitless tracts of forest.