Regions of Alaska

Anchorage lives in the rain shadow of its own mountains. The Chugach and the Kenai range wring out the Gulf moisture before it reaches the Bowl, so the city takes about sixteen inches of precipitation a year while Whittier, sixty miles away across the Sound, takes close to two hundred. The Hillside is a different forecast from downtown — twice the snow, and the Turnagain Arm gap wind runs underneath both.

The Valley opens north of Knik Arm and pays for the view with wind. The Matanuska comes down its own valley at Palmer hard enough to roll a trailer, the Knik does the same a few miles west, and either can blow while Wasilla sits still. Away from the gaps the Valley runs colder and clearer than Anchorage in winter and warmer in summer — it is the inland side of the same mountains.

One peninsula, two climates, and the Kenai Mountains between them. Seward on the east side takes about sixty-seven inches of precipitation a year straight off the Gulf; Kenai on the west, in the lee, takes nineteen — drier than most of the lower 48. Homer sits in between with Kachemak Bay for a moderator, and the Turnagain and Portage gaps funnel wind into all of it.

Thompson Pass, twenty-six miles up the Richardson from tidewater, is the snowiest place in Alaska — better than forty feet in an average winter and 974 inches the winter of 1952-53. The Chugach stands the Gulf moisture straight up and it falls out on the way over. Behind the wall the Copper River basin is the opposite country: dry, deeply cold, and the source of the gap wind that blows back down the river to the Sound.

Kodiak sits directly under the Gulf of Alaska storm track, and the mountains that make it green take the brunt of it: better than six feet of rain a year, fog most of the summer, and williwaws coming off the ridges hard enough to move an aircraft on the ramp. Shelikof Strait funnels the gap winds between the island and the Alaska Peninsula, and none of it arrives by road — there isn't one off the island.

The Aleutian Low is not a season here, it is the address. The chain sits under the North Pacific storm track year round: gales on a third of winter days, fog through most of the summer, and williwaws off the volcanoes strong enough to move an aircraft on the ramp. Snow rarely lies long — it is the wind and the sea state that decide whether the fleet sails.

The Interior is the most continental climate in the United States: 90 °F in July and 50 below in January, in the same river valley. Fairbanks sits in a bowl that fills with cold air and holds it, so the inversion can put twenty degrees between the valley floor and the hills at Ester Dome, and ice fog closes in whenever it drops past 40 below.

Southeast is a temperate rainforest hung on the side of a mountain range, and it is the wettest ground in the country: Ketchikan averages over 140 inches a year and parts of Baranof Island take more than 200. The wind is the other half of the story — the Taku comes off the icefield at hurricane force in winter, and the channels funnel every gale that crosses the Gulf.

There is no road here and no shelter from the Bering Sea. Autumn storms cross a thousand miles of open water and drive the surge straight onto low, unarmored coast — ex-Typhoon Merbok flooded a thousand miles of it in September 2022 — and the later the sea ice forms, the longer that window stays open. Freeze-up and breakup, not the calendar, set the year.

One borough larger than Minnesota, all of it north of the Brooks Range and all of it above the Arctic Circle. The sun sets at Utqiagvik in mid-November and does not rise again until late January, then stays up from May into August. This is the fastest-warming ground in the United States, and the retreat of the sea ice off the Beaufort and Chukchi coasts is what is doing it.