The Captain's Platter / Fish and Surf in Alaska

You can’t drive to Yakutat. The town, about 200 miles northwest of Juneau, is walled in by the dramatic Wrangell and St. Elias mountains, which soar some 18,000 feet straight out of the Pacific, so you can get there only by boat or plane. But while Yakutat may be remote, with only 700 people, it has a massive airport — a relic of its days as a staging area for the Pacific fleet during World War II — that is served by daily flights from Anchorage, Juneau, and Seattle. It just may be the most accessible faraway place in North America.

Spend a week fishing salmon-stuffed rivers, surfing the region’s surprisingly good waves, and generally getting as far away as you can. Yakutat is surrounded by inlets, islands, and fjords that beg to be explored, with miles of untouched beaches that are home to tons of bald eagles, otters, sea lions, and grizzly bears that can reach 8 feet tall — who, we're always pleased to discover, seem perfectly fine with sharing all those fish.