2 Best Sights in Kobuk Valley National Park, The Bush

The Kobuk Valley provides a glimpse into what the thousand-mile-wide grassland of Beringia, the land connecting Asia and North America during the last ice age, looked like. The Kobuk River bisects the national park, with dunes to the south and broad wetlands leading to the Baird Mountains to the north. Running hundreds of miles (60 of them in the national park) from the Endicott Mountains to Kotzebue Sound, the generally wide river has been used for transportation for thousands of years. It also sustains a big population of sheefish, a large predatory whitefish in the salmon family that spawns in the river's upper reaches every fall. A portion of the vast Western Arctic caribou herd uses the Kobuk Valley as a winter range, and the boreal forest reaches its northernmost limits here.

South of the Kobuk River, the Great Kobuk (the largest active, high-altitude dune field on Earth), Little Kobuk, and Hunt River Sand Dunes—stabilized by small trees, shrubs, and the lichen that's typical of the tundra—cover much of the southern Kobuk Valley. They formed when glaciers slowly pulverized mountain rock into sand that washed into the valley during the last ice age. Of note, a flowering herb called the Kobuk locoweed is only found on the slopes of the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes. Most outfitters and air taxis that operate in the Arctic will take visitors to the sand dunes.