Three miles in length, Long Lake feels like a peaceful summer camp pond, ringed with snug cottages, leafy trees, and sunny wildflowers. Nothing about the idyllic scene reveals the perilous hardships of one man’s odyssey to reach gold-rush Alaska.

Wood Buffalo National Park is Canada's largest national park at 44,807 square kilometres, straddling the border of the Northwest Territories and Alberta. It’s smaller than the U.S.’s largest park, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, but bigger than Switzerland. The park is the world’s largest Dark Sky Preserve and it has a beaver dam so large it’s visible from space.

Retreat of the tidewater rivers of ice at Glacier Bay National and Preserve is a clear and easily viewed sign of climate change. Not as visually apparent is what is transpiring beneath the shimmering surface bay waters in this 3.3-million-acre swath of mountain and marine wilderness.

An Alaska man hunting in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve apparently drowned when trying to cross a river, according to the National Park Service.