Solitude seems as tangible as the mountains in immense Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. This first in a series on American Landscapes surveys a wilderness of unyielding harshness and unbridled majesty.

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Some people like their landscapes tamed and tidy. Some folks don't. Some like them wild, remote, large, and lonely—say, like Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in southeast Alaska. Here is a landscape that could swallow all of Switzerland. It could swallow you too, if you'd let it.

At the park's headquarters near Copper Center—four hours by car from Anchorage, five if you take some time with the roadside views—a new visitor center had just opened when I dropped by. It was empty. So was the parking lot. Over at the administration building, Gary Candelaria, the superintendent, said an accurate head count of visitors was impossible because Wrangell-St. Elias has no toll booths or entrance fee. "We're not about numbers of visitors," he said. "We're about the preservation of natural ecosystems." Still, his best guess, for visitors, was between 30,000 and 60,000 a year. That top figure is what Great Smoky Mountains National Park might expect on a summer weekend. Moreover, a visitor can't really experience this park the way one might driving through Yellowstone or Yosemite. There is no through here, only over. "It's a flyover sort of park," Candelaria was saying. "It's so spread out. To get any real sense of the place, you have to go up in the air."

At Glennallen, just up the road from Copper Center, charter pilot Lynn Ellis talked for a while about the scale of the place. "Once in a while," Ellis said, "we get someone who thinks you can see the whole park in a couple of hours. 'Well,' I say, 'I've got a plane that can do 140 miles (230 kilometers) an hour for four-and-a-half hours before refueling. And even then, you won't see the half of it.'"

No wonder. At 13.2 million acres (5.3 million hectares), Wrangell-St. Elias is far and away the largest unit in the entire National Park System, nearly six times the size of Yellowstone. With Canada's Kluane National Park and Tatshenshini-Alsek Park next door, and the United States' Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve just around the corner, Wrangell-St.Elias and its neighbors embrace a United Nations World Heritage site that is the largest internationally protected wildland on Earth. 

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The first successful ascent of Mount St. Elias, at 18,008 feet (5,498 meters) the fourth highest peak in North America, was accomplished on July 31, 1897 by an Italian nobleman, Luigi Amadeo of Savoy, Duke of Abruzzi, and a team of nine Italian alpinists. Following a route across the Malaspina and Seward Glaciers largely pioneered by a National Geographic Society expedition seven years earlier, the duke's party planted its nation's flag on the summit after an arduous trek through rain, fog, and snow. Described as a brooding, enigmatic individual, the duke on later expeditions made a close, but unsuccessful, run for the North Pole and then topped the heights of the Ruwenzori Range in central Africa in 1906.

—Abigail Tipton