Know Before You Go: Alaska Adventures

Where Will I Stay on an Alaska Adventure?

Accommodations in Alaska range from exclusive wilderness lodges to tent sites deep in the backcountry. Whether you’re wildlife watching in Katmai or exploring Denali’s trails, where you stay shapes your adventure. Options vary by destination, accessibility and travel style—from remote luxury to rustic and rugged.

Exclusive Wilderness Lodges

Alaska wilderness lodges offer rare access to some of the state’s most pristine and untamed landscapes. These remote all-inclusive retreats are often reached only by bush plane, placing guests in the heart of wild Alaska far from crowds, roads and modern distractions. Many are located in prime wildlife viewing areas, including Nat Hab’s Alaska Bear Camp in Lake Clark National Park.

What sets Alaska’s exclusive wilderness lodges apart is their total immersion in the wild. Surrounded by tundra, glaciers or coastal meadows, they offer front-row views of brown bears, moose, whales and caribou, sometimes right outside your cabin window. With no road access, the only sounds are wind through the spruce, waves on the shoreline or loons calling across a still lake. For travelers seeking solitude, scenic beauty and a deep connection to the land, Alaska’s wilderness lodges offer an unmatched off-the-grid experience.

Alaska Wilderness Lodge Highlights:

Secluded locations far from crowds
On-site naturalist guides and wildlife tours
Gourmet meals and comfortable accommodations

These lodges cater to travelers seeking immersive Alaska nature and wildlife adventures, often with fly-in-only access and small guest numbers.

Rustic and Mid-Range Accommodations

Across gateway towns and park entrances, travelers can find simple lodges, family-run inns and mid-range hotels. These provide comfort and convenience without the cost or logistics of remote lodges. Rustic and mid-range Alaska accommodations offer easy access to parks and wildlife tours without sacrificing amenities. While they may not offer the seclusion of fly-in wilderness camps, many feature locally inspired decor, hearty meals and knowledgeable staff with deep regional roots. Rooms are typically cozy and practical, and some properties include on-site tour operators or shuttle services to nearby attractions. These stays are ideal for travelers who prefer a road-accessible base from which to explore Alaska’s landscapes. You’ll find these options in:

Denali’s park entrance area
Kenai Peninsula towns like Seward and Homer
Wrangell-St. Elias gateway communities

They’re ideal for road trips and guided Alaska wildlife tours based in more developed regions.

City Stays – Anchorage, Juneau and Fairbanks

Alaska’s cities serve as essential hubs for flights, gear rental and trip preparation. While many travelers use them for a night before or after wilderness travel, each city offers its own mix of culture, access to nature and practical convenience, including a wide range of accommodations.

Anchorage
Alaska’s largest city and the state’s primary air gateway, Anchorage is a common launch point for adventures into Denali, Katmai and Lake Clark. Set between the Chugach Mountains and Cook Inlet, it also offers access to local hiking, biking and wildlife viewing along the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail.

Juneau
The state capital and a major Inside Passage cruise port, Juneau blends dramatic scenery with cultural stops like the Alaska State Museum. A jumping-off point for Glacier Bay and Tracy Arm Fjord, it’s only accessible by boat or plane.

Fairbanks
This interior city is popular for northern lights trips, Arctic expeditions and river-based wildlife tours. Visitors can explore gold rush history, soak in nearby hot springs or venture north toward the Dalton Highway and Brooks Range.

Camping in Alaska – What to Know

Camping offers access to Alaska’s wild places with the freedom to explore on your own terms. Options include public campgrounds, private sites and backcountry camping, all requiring preparation for remote and rugged conditions.

Bear Safety and Regulations

Camping in bear country demands strict safety practices. Store scented items in bear-proof containers, keep food away from tents and use bear lockers when available. Carry bear spray and follow regulations from agencies like the National Park Service, Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.

Frontcountry vs Backcountry

Frontcountry camping usually provides pads, fire rings, pit toilets and sometimes bear lockers, though many sites remain remote. Dispersed camping offers no services and requires minimal impact techniques. Backcountry camping typically requires permits, route planning and additional precautions for wildlife and isolation.

Leave No Trace

Follow Leave No Trace principles to protect Alaska’s wilderness. Minimize campsite impact, pack out all trash and respect wildlife habitats and waterways.

Essential Alaska Camping Gear

Four-season tent with ground tarp
Insulated sleeping bag rated to 20°F or lower
Waterproof layers, wool socks, gloves and warm hat
Bear-safe food storage (canister or locker)
Cooking stove and fuel (open fires may be prohibited)

Stay alert, camp only in designated zones and always follow bear-aware protocols to keep both people and wildlife safe.

How to Choose the Right Option for Your Alaska Wildlife Trip

Your accommodations in Alaska should match your goals, comfort level and destination. Wilderness lodges are ideal for intimate wildlife viewing with expert guidance. Mid-range hotels and inns work well for travelers using road access or Alaska Railroad routes. Camping suits the self-reliant.

Ask yourself:

Do I want expert-guided wildlife encounters?
Am I comfortable flying on a bush plane?
Am I prepared for unpredictable weather and rustic settings?

When in doubt, guided tours with included accommodations can simplify planning while enhancing your Alaska national parks experience.

Nat Hab's Alaska Accommodations

Nat Hab’s Alaska Bear Camp

M/V Natural Habitat Ursus

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best wilderness lodge in Alaska?

The best wilderness lodges in Alaska are fly-in retreats in places like Katmai and Lake Clark, where remote settings offer exclusive wildlife access and solitude.

These lodges place you far from the road system, in some of the most pristine landscapes in North America. While many are exceptional, Nat Hab’s fly-in properties offer small group intimacy, expert guides and unparalleled proximity to bears, moose, caribou and more. Whether you’re waking up to the sound of salmon splashing in a wild river or photographing bears from your front porch, these lodges are designed for immersive nature experiences.

Top wilderness lodges offer:

Fly-in access to remote national parks
Exclusive bear-viewing opportunities
Small guest capacity for a personal feel
Expert naturalist guides
Cozy, off-grid cabins or lodges

Does Natural Habitat Adventures own any lodging in Alaska?

Yes—Nat Hab owns and operates Alaska Bear Camp, a private fly-in lodge bordering Lake Clark National Park.

This eco-conscious camp, perched above the beach where coastal brown bears forage for clams and salmon, offers unmatched wildlife access. It’s built for low-impact travel and high-impact memories, combining comfort, sustainability and expert-led exploration.

Alaska Bear Camp Highlights:

Private location accessible only by bush plane
Coastal brown bear encounters right outside your door
Heated cabins with beds, ensuite toilets and wood stoves
Naturalist guides and small group sizes
Walk-in bear viewing from camp boardwalks

Are hotels in Alaska expensive?

Alaska hotel prices vary widely, with remote lodges costing more than in-town accommodations due to their location and logistics. When you travel with Nat Hab, all accommodations are inclusive.

Can I stay inside Denali or Katmai national parks?

Yes—select lodges and camps offer rare overnight stays inside Denali and Katmai, including Nat Hab’s private properties.

Nat Hab guests stay at a remote backcountry lodge in Denali with helicopter access, surrounded by vast tundra and prime wildlife habitat. In Katmai, travelers enjoy coveted fly-in lodging at Brooks Falls or stay aboard the M/V Natural Habitat Ursus, a private expedition ship stationed near bear-rich coastal meadows. These exclusive accommodations offer a deeper immersion in Alaska’s wildest parks, with the rare opportunity to bypass daytime crowds and experience nighttime solitude in otherwise restricted areas.

Lodging options inside Denali and Katmai include:

Helicopter-access lodge in Denali’s backcountry
M/V Ursus—private ship for coastal bear viewing in Katmai
Cabins near Brooks Falls in Katmai

I always try to be as we're approaching, be conscientious of which way it's gonna go if something goes like it doesn't expect. The other thing that could happen is if there's all this stuff going on over here with could be other bears, could be people, could be anything that's on that bear's radar. And it sees us as the most predictable thing in that scenario. First thing it's gonna do is gonna come right here. I'd been out on the East Coast going to college and it just wasn't for me. I just knew that I needed to be not there. And Alaska was as far away from Washington, D. C. As I could get. I remember feelings that I felt that first day that I went out and saw bears. And I am, in a lot of ways, still chasing that feeling. There's a big swath of land on the north end of the Alaska Peninsula. Katmai Coast, Lake Clark Coast, and McNeil, if you combine those three, it's definitely the Bear Coast. The best bear habitat in the world. It's a stunning landscape. It's really beautiful. Rugged and pretty much untouched. You know, it's a remarkable place and it's got an amazing cast of characters in terms of wildlife and cultures and landscapes. Some of the rivers are silt laden and so you get this incredible turquoise blue if they're being fed from glaciers. The chocolate of a brand new moose baby. The really rich wetlands with More shades of green than anywhere else I've ever seen. You're gonna see mountains behind you. Maybe in the distance you'll see some glaciers. You get the alpine glow on them and you really understand now why people sometimes, you know, color mountains pink. The valley bottoms, coastlines, the high mountain areas. A remarkably diverse variety of habitats. And things are growing before your eyes. You can literally watch things growing. If you blink, you're gonna miss something, especially this time of year in the summer. There's no way that anything could be mundane here. You cannot drive there. There's no airport to fly into. This is the ultimate recreation. Everything you could want to do in Alaska is right here in this area. It's a really vibrant and maybe sometimes violent coast in storms. It's a tough environment. It's an extreme. The bears roam completely wild and they rule the coast. I would put the Bear Coast and that part of Alaska in terms of value to humanity on par with places like the Amazon. The last pockets of biodiversity in this world are around indigenous communities. And our children and their children and our great grandchildren, they have an inherent right to our lands and waters. So it has to be such a priority to protect and preserve what we've got intact. We definitely have the potential to mess up that ecology. You know, the biggest conservation threats for the system are going to be those that are global. Climate change is going to have an impact. We know that. We don't know exactly what it'll be yet. But we're starting to see some things. Just four years ago, we were in a severe drought, which was the first time that's ever been documented up here. There will also likely be continued pressure for development of some resources in the area. The Pebble Mine and the Johnson River Mine, they're looking at maybe twenty to thirty year windows of time for ore extraction. Short term gain, but the ill effects of possible toxic spills and damage to the river systems can easily, in a short window of time, destroy something that otherwise can be sustained indefinitely. This mining district would be located at the headwaters of the most productive rivers of the Bristol Bay watershed. And our watershed supplies fifty percent of the last wild sockeye salmon run on the entire planet. It's the most hydrologically complex area they've ever considered permitting a mine in the world. You've got this habitat that is intact and they might say, oh, well, it'd be no big deal to put some infrastructure over in this corner. It might start with a road. It might start with a well. It might start with a mine. Each of those things, if you looked at it as a single thing, it it might not be that big a deal. But nobody looks at it cumulatively. Suddenly, what you're left with is unrecognizable from where you started. Doug Chadwick's line was, what most people know about bears has more to do with the nature of stories than the nature of bears. Lewis and Clark put the name grizzly bear Ursus Arctos Horibilis. To what we actually call a brown bear. And they have a horrible reputation as being these bloodthirsty killers. Definitely something that is played up in movies. That scary wilderness creature that could attack you. It's always trying to kill something or attack something. They're thought of as man eaters or man killers. But most of the bears really aren't a threat to human. Treat them with respect, give them the distance they want, don't surprise them, and they're very predictable. When I was young, I actually was a hunting guide. Initially it was exciting you know being a real man and out you know man against a bear but that faded pretty quickly And then after a while I just got to where I started rooting for the bears instead of my clients. I didn't really want to see any more bears die. I just I couldn't do it anymore. I sold the hunting operation off and, started getting back into photography. Then being able to share that with other people. The look I get on people's face that have thought these bears were gonna be terrifying and they didn't really want to be near the bears. After a day or two with the bears, just seeing them realize that these are just an incredible animal and amazing to watch. We're so similar. We're opportunistic omnivores. We share a lot of food habits. We have the same habitat preferences. There's mutual curiosity. And that's maybe one of the things that makes it very easy for people to connect. To watch the interaction between moms and cubs and then moms protecting those cubs, that's a deep down emotional thing. And each bear has an individual personality. We'll always get somebody who by the end of the day, they're like, Holy cow, I really didn't realize how playful they were or how lazy they are or this one's grumpy and this one's happy and they actually have personalities or even moods. I get excited every time I see a bear because it is that sentinel of a wild place. I know I'm in a wild place when I see a bear on its own doing its own thing. Know, top predators are extremely important and kind of the bellwether of a healthy system. When you have large carnivores roaming across a wide landscape, it's telling you that there's a great deal of productivity, that those large carnivores are able to find food, and that they're able to move throughout that corridor throughout the summer season to find different salmon in different rivers. This chunk of land has all of the things that a bear needs to be successful, and it all comes back to the salmon. From the bears to the seagulls to the native indigenous people and their lifestyle, everybody in the spring is waiting for the salmon to arrive. I grew up here in Alaska. I was born up in Barrow. It's nice to be an American who still has a heritage. And the sense of heritage that I've got is the sense of place that is home. We've got a big place and big opportunity. It's the last, you know, of the intact salmon ecosystems in North America certainly and providing now half of the sockeye salmon for the world. It's impossible to overstate how important salmon are to the whole system and the people living in these traditional communities. The word for food in Yupik is niqa, which is the same word for fish. And we're called the last intact salmon cultures of the world. In ecological systems, it always comes down to energy transfer and energy flow. The rivers are the lifeblood of Alaska, and the salmon are the energy and the product that that blood delivers. The salmon start in the rivers, they go out into the North Pacific, they gather up all this abundance. When we have our salmon come back in the summer, each of those salmon has nitrogen and other nutrients that it's picked up from the ocean. And they bring all of that back up into the streams. And after they've laid their eggs, they die and you find them all along the riverbank. And not only are they feeding all of the animals that eat them, they're also really feeding the landscape. The bear's carrying those nutrients in and dropping salmon and poop. They're the can openers that are opening up these salmon, so everything else downstream is benefiting from the nutrients that are going back into the system. Those nutrients are then part of the soil and can help different types of vegetation grow. When you get into the forest and look at the trees, those trees have marine derived nitrogen in them. It's a fabulous cycle, and I think of these rivers as living their full potential, thriving for all of the things from the insects in the water on up to the bears that roam the coast looking for food. The beauty of the Bear Coast area is that we don't have to restore anything. It's here. We just have to protect it. Storytelling is an important piece of natural history travel. The more people come and see a wild place and see an intact place, the more advocates we have for protecting these places. Before you can care for something, you have to care about it. Those of us that live here know just how special it is. And it is a place we love and a place to protect for now and into the future. I have an overwhelming sense of gratefulness that I found this place, that I found the opportunity, and I just don't know how to express that more except for to share it with other people. In a couple of generations, I would like to think if there's some kid in a city like I was who decides he really wants to learn as much as he can about bears so that he can have some of the same opportunities that I had. I get this sense when I'm watching bears do their thing as they have forever that there's something right with the world. Like I feel things being removed from my shoulders. And the only thing I'm focused on is that bear that's napping ten feet away. I became a dad two and a half months ago. Like, I do want to take my daughter to see these things so that she can have the same context to the world that I've had. I want everybody to be able to feel that. This place has something for everyone, whether it's food on the table, whether it's dollars in your pocket, whether it's just making you feel better that there's a place like that on earth. When you look at all the things that that place does for bears, does for people, does for everything, You recognize that value and that's how it gets saved. We have an incredible power, whether we recognize it or not. In order to have a world where bears exist, we need to make a conscious decision to have bears in the world.

The Bear Coast

An Alaska Conservation Story

Alaska Tours

Ultimate Alaska Wildlife Safari

See more of wild Alaska on this wide-ranging, small-group adventure including Alaskan brown bears, a fly-in backcountry lodge in Denali National Park, marine life of Kenai Fjords, and the scenic Alaska Railroad to Seward.

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Nat Hab's Alaska Bear Camp

A secluded immersion with brown bears in the wilderness of Lake Clark National Park—enjoy total privacy and comfort at our deluxe fly-in wilderness camp accessed via chartered bush plane from Homer.

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Alaska's Grizzly Ship: Kodiak to Katmai

An exclusive small-ship adventure to view giant brown bears—the world's largest "coastal grizzlies"—up close! Walk the shores as bears dig for clams, forage for sedges and pursue salmon in season in tidal streams.

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Ultimate Alaska Photo Expedition

A truly epic photography adventure! Alongside expert guides, get aerial shots of Denali from a helicopter; capture brown bear portraits at close range, and shoot glaciers, whales, puffins and more in Kenai Fjords.

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Grizzly Ship Photo Expedition: Kodiak to Katmai

Based aboard our private small ship, just eight guests photograph brown bears in the roadless Katmai wilderness, going ashore with an expert bear naturalist and photography pro who knows these animals intimately.

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Alaska Bear Camp Photo Expedition

A secluded immersion with brown bears in the wilderness of Lake Clark National Park. Enjoy total privacy and comfort at our deluxe fly-in wilderness camp accessed via chartered bush plane from Homer.

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Alaska’s Inside Passage

A small-ship voyage through the narrow channels and fjords of Southeast Alaska's storied Inside Passage—meet wildlife up close in the company of top naturalists.

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Know Before You Go: Alaska Adventures