Experience
The Great St. Elias Station is crafted with care to be a place of refuge and wild
The wild exposes you, and the right kind of shelter restores you. Together they create an experience that neither could alone.
While simply being here is a luxury for those who understand the value of wild places, being within it—without sacrificing creature comforts—is the ultimate adventure travel experience.
Adapt the pace of nature
As the great poet Ralph Wald Emerson says: “her secret is patience."
Your schedule is as peaceful or packed full as you wish it to be. Guests are free to shape their own days, moving between time at the lodge and exploring the surrounding wilderness. Guided activities are available with local guide services and packages can be tailored for your stay.
Mornings usually begin in the Hall with coffee and breakfast.
Many guests use this time to look over the day ahead. If you have pre-planned adventures, your guides and transportation will arrive at the lodge to collect you directly, making it easy to head out into the wilderness.
Activities include:
Glacier exploration
Ice climbing
Alpine hiking
Rafting
Signature air safaris throughout the National Park
Experiences are curated and tailored to each guest, offered as both group and private adventures. These activities can be arranged before your arrival or during your stay, depending on availability. See the Activities section below for full details.
Some guests prefer a slower pace. The town of McCarthy is a short walk across the footbridge and offers a few small shops, trails, and historic buildings to explore. Others spend time walking nearby paths, visiting Kennecott, or simply enjoying the views from the lodge.
By afternoon, guests often return from their adventures and settle back in.
You might gather in the Hall for a drink, sit outside on the deck, or head back to your cabin to rest and take in the mountain views.
Dinner is served in the evening in the Hall, where guests come together over a relaxed meal and share stories from the day before the night winds down.
Every day looks a little different depending on how you choose to spend it.
Some guests fill their time with guided adventures, while others enjoy the freedom to explore the valley at their own pace.
Activities
Activities in the McCarthy–Kennecott valley are operated by a number of independent local guide services.
The lodge does not run off-site guided trips directly, but we are happy to help arrange and coordinate experiences with trusted operators in the area.
Adventures range from glacier hikes and river trips to historic tours and bush plane flights into the surrounding wilderness. Because availability can be limited, especially during the peak summer season, we strongly recommend booking private tours and flight-seeing trips in advance of your stay.
Most guide services will pick guests up directly at the lodge and return them at the end of the day’s adventure, making it easy to head out into the landscape and come back to a warm place to land afterward.
Part of the luxury of a place like this is the ability to slow down.
Not every day needs to be filled with a structured adventure. The landscape invites a different rhythm, where time outside, unhurried exploration, and moments of stillness can become some of the most memorable parts of a visit.
A Few Favorite Ways to Experience the Valley
Classic Kennicott Day
Root Glacier exploration followed by the Kennecott Mill Tour.
The Grand Overview
Jewels of the Wrangells flight-seeing paired with a valley photography walk.
Water and Ice
Kennecott River rafting combined with a glacier hike.
Slow Exploration
Photography walk through the valley, followed by a historic McCarthy walking tour.
Experiencing Wrangell–St. Elias
The following adventures are some of the most rewarding ways to explore the valley. These experiences can be arranged as add-ons during your stay at Faraway Station, and our team is happy to coordinate them ahead of your arrival, based on availability.
Most experiences here follow the natural pathways of this remote setting: from the air, across the land, and along the water.
In addition to guided excursions, the area also offers many opportunities to explore on your own. The National Park Service maintains interpretive displays and presentations in Kennecott that tell the story of the historic mining town and the people who once lived and worked here. Walking through the old mill buildings and learning about the history of the valley can be just as compelling as heading deep into the backcountry.
There are also a number of local trails that begin near McCarthy and Kennecott, offering access to glaciers, alpine views, and quiet corners of the valley. Some guests spend their days simply walking, wandering through town, or sitting beside the river watching the light move across the mountains.
However you choose to explore the valley—by air, along the rivers, or across the glaciers—the day ends back at LARRU.
Warm cabins. Good food. And the quiet rhythm of this place.
The Land
The lodge sits inside Wrangell–St. Elias National Park, surrounded by millions of acres of protected wilderness.
This valley, where two glaciers meet, is a place of immense scale and untamed forces. Rivers rush fast and cold, wind cuts through mountain passes, and glaciers groan and shift over decades. In this environment, wilderness doesn’t soften—it sharpens.
Yet within that vastness there is refuge: a cabin light glowing at the edge of the valley, a hearth where boots thaw and stories are shared after long days in the wild.
We are a tiny dot on a map surrounded by true wilderness.
Set within the immense wildlands of Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve, our valley lies at the edge of one of the largest protected landscapes on Earth. When combined with neighboring parks across the border in Canada—including Kluane National Park and Reserve, Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Park, and Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve—this vast, connected wilderness forms a protected region spanning nearly 24 million acres. It is a place where glaciers still carve the mountains, salmon rivers run unbroken to the sea, and entire ecosystems remain intact from coastal rainforest to high alpine icefields. Here, the scale of the land is difficult to comprehend and even harder to forget.
The landscape just around the lodge offers a remarkable window into the vast wilderness beyond. The park holds nine of the sixteen highest peaks in the United States, including Mount Blackburn, a massive volcanic summit that rises prominently above the surrounding icefields and can be seen from the lodge. From the valley floor, forests climb toward open bands of alpine tundra before giving way to glaciers and high mountain ice. At the head of the valley, the dramatic Stairway Icefall spills down the mountainside in a fractured cascade of blue ice, constantly shifting as the glacier slowly moves downhill. Right outside the doors, forests, tundra, braided rivers, glaciers, and major peaks all converge. It is a small pocket of land that quietly reflects the same ecosystems that stretch across the park on a vast scale—an intimate glimpse into one of the largest protected wilderness landscapes on Earth.
Our presence here is guided by a simple philosophy of stewardship.
This is already protected land, and our role is not to tame it or reshape it, but to help people encounter it on a small and intimate scale. By welcoming guests into this landscape thoughtfully and with great care, we hope to create a deeper understanding of why places like this matter. Wilderness at this scale can be difficult to comprehend from afar. But when someone walks across the tundra, hears the ice moving on a glacier, or simply sits quietly in the presence of mountains that feel older than memory, something shifts.
As David Attenborough once observed, no one will protect what they don’t care about, and no one will care about what they have never experienced. Our aim is to offer that experience—so that the value of wild places becomes something people carry with them long after they leave.
The wildlife here reflects the scale and freedom of nature. Guests may encounter moose moving quietly through the willows, mountain goats high on the cliffs, Dall sheep along distant ridgelines, or the occasional bear crossing a river bar. Trumpeter swans pass through the valley as well as eagles, and other migratory birds that follow ancient seasonal routes across the continent. Wolves, wolverines, and lynx live here too, though they are rarely seen. What makes these encounters different is the space. In a wilderness this large, animals are not gathered or accustomed to people. They are not on display. They move through their own vast ranges, largely untouched by the press of humanity. Here, wildlife remains exactly what it should be, truly wild, living its own life in a landscape big enough to hold it. And when you do catch a glimpse of one, it feels less like a sighting and more like a brief privilege you were lucky enough to witness.
