The land of big

Remarkable as it looks on your desktop, Lamplugh Glacier is just a frosty face in the crowd back in its home neighborhood. Depending on how you count it, Alaska is home to between 27,000 and 100,000 glaciers. If that tally sounds unbelievable, get used to it: Here in the biggest US state by far, enormous numbers are the norm. Covering 571,000 square miles of land—more than Texas, California, and Montana combined—Alaska contains seven of the USA's top 10 largest national parks (including this one, Glacier Bay), 17 of its 20 tallest mountains, over 100 volcanoes, 12,000 rivers, 34,000 miles of coast, and 3 million lakes. The only figure that's small is its population density, well below two people per square mile.