AKAlaska Fun Facts

Alaska is the northernmost state, the westernmost state and the easternmost state at the same time. The Aleutian chain runs so far out that it crosses the 180th meridian into the Eastern Hemisphere, which puts American soil on both sides of the line. Everything else about Alaska's size follows from that same problem of scale, and most of the numbers people repeat about it are either understated or plain wrong.

Facts most people get wrong

• Seward's Folly was not a national joke. A few editors mocked the 1867 purchase, and the phrase stuck because it is catchy. The Senate ratified the treaty 37 votes to 2, and most of the press backed it. The price was $7.2 million, about two cents an acre.
• Alaska is not dark for six months. Only the far north gets true polar night, and even Utqiagvik, the northernmost town, loses the sun for roughly 65 days. Anchorage still gets about five and a half hours of daylight on the winter solstice.
• Anchorage is not the capital. Juneau is, and no road reaches it. You arrive by ferry or by plane. Voters have rejected moving the capital more than once, largely over the cost of building a new one.
• Everest is taller, but Denali is the bigger climb. Denali rises about 18,000 feet from its base to its 20,310 foot summit. Everest rises roughly 12,000 feet above the Tibetan plateau it sits on.
• Russia is not far away. Little Diomede, American, and Big Diomede, Russian, sit 2.4 miles apart in the Bering Strait with the International Date Line between them. Locals call them Yesterday Island and Tomorrow Island.
• Alaska is not twice the size of Texas, it is closer to two and a half times. At 665,384 square miles it is larger than Texas, California and Montana added together.

Records and firsts

• The Good Friday earthquake of March 27, 1964 measured magnitude 9.2, the strongest ever recorded in North America and the second strongest anywhere.
• Alaska has about 6,640 miles of general coastline, more than every other state combined, and roughly 34,000 miles of tidal shoreline.
• Seventeen of the twenty highest peaks in the United States stand in Alaska, including Denali, the continent's high point.
• Since 1982 the Permanent Fund Dividend has paid every qualifying resident an annual check out of oil revenue, the only program of its kind in the country.
• Roughly 100,000 glaciers cover about five percent of the state, more ice than the rest of the United States holds.
• Alaska charges neither a statewide sales tax nor a personal income tax. Municipalities set their own sales taxes instead.

Geography that surprises

• Alaska once ran on four time zones. In 1983 the state consolidated to two, Alaska Time and Hawaii-Aleutian Time, so that business hours would line up.
• Its border with Canada runs 1,538 miles, the longest international boundary of any state.
• Laid over the Lower 48, Alaska would stretch from the California coast to Florida and from Canada well into Mexico.
• Point Barrow, near Utqiagvik, is the northernmost point of the United States, and Pochnoi Point on Semisopochnoi Island in the Aleutians is technically the easternmost.
• Most of Alaska has no road at all. Small aircraft do the work of highways, and the state has more pilots per capita than any other.

Where the name comes from

Alaska comes from the Aleut word alaxsxaq, used by the Unangax people of the Aleutian Islands. It means the mainland, and more literally the object toward which the action of the sea is directed. Standing on an island chain and looking back at the continent, that is a precise description rather than a poetic one.

Russian traders borrowed the word as Alyaska and applied it first to the Alaska Peninsula, then gradually to the whole territory. When the United States bought the region in 1867, Senator Charles Sumner argued for keeping the Indigenous name instead of inventing a new one, and the name carried through to statehood on January 3, 1959, when Alaska became the 49th state.

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