Alaska runs on a different idea of “remote.”
Most of the state has no roads at all, so secluded here often means a place you can only reach by floatplane, by boat, or by a ferry that shows up once a month if the weather agrees.
These aren’t quaint backroads towns. They’re fishing villages on boardwalks over the water, gold-rush outposts on snowbound dead-end highways, and Native communities clinging to islands far out in the Bering Sea.
I’ve pulled together 25 of the most secluded towns in Alaska, counting down to a village on a Bering Strait island where you can stand on American soil and look across at Russia!
Some you could drive to (barely). Most you can’t.
If your idea of getting away means all the way off the grid, no chain stores, no cell bars, maybe no road at all, this is your list.
25. Seldovia: Across the Bay, a World Away
Seldovia sits just across Kachemak Bay from Homer, close enough to see and yet a real effort to reach, because there’s no road.
You get there by small plane or by water taxi and ferry across the bay, and the moment you step onto its historic boardwalk along Seldovia Slough, the pace drops by half.
Around 235 people live here now.
It was a busy fishing and cannery town of more than 2,000 before the 1964 Good Friday earthquake dropped the land and the waterfront with it.
What remains is a quieter, prettier place: an old Russian Orthodox church on the hill, a working harbor, berry-picking and sea-otter watching, and the easy feeling of somewhere the rush never reached.
Where is Seldovia?
On the south shore of Kachemak Bay in the Kenai Peninsula Borough, across the water from Homer, reachable only by boat or plane. Spruce, beach, and bay on every side.
So close to Homer, and yet a world away.
24. Whittier: The Town Under One Roof
Whittier has one of the strangest setups of any town in America: nearly everybody lives in the same building.
Begich Towers is a 14-story former army barracks from 1957, and most of Whittier’s roughly 270 residents have their apartments, the post office, the store, and the clinic all under that one roof.
Step outside into the rain (and it rains a lot) and you’re in a deep fjord ringed by glaciers.
Getting in is almost as odd.
The only road access is the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel, a one-lane, 2.5-mile bore the cars share with the train, running one direction at a time on a schedule and closing overnight.
Miss the last opening and you wait until morning. For a place 60 miles from Anchorage, it feels impossibly cut off.
Where is Whittier?
On Prince William Sound in the Chugach Census Area, about 60 miles southeast of Anchorage, reached by the single timed tunnel or by boat. Steep glaciated mountains drop straight to the water.
One building, one tunnel, one very small town.
23. Gustavus: Gateway to Glacier Bay
Gustavus is the front door to Glacier Bay National Park, and like a lot of Alaska’s best, it has no road to anywhere.
You fly in (there’s a small airport that even gets a summer jet) or take the ferry, and then you’re in a flat green pocket of meadow and forest with the park and the ocean wrapped around it.
About 655 people live here, spread out on big rural lots.
Most visitors come for Glacier Bay itself: tidewater glaciers calving into the sea, humpbacks, sea otters, and the kind of scenery that empties your camera battery by lunch.
But Gustavus has its own slow charm, with bikes, gardens, and beaches, and an unhurried, end-of-the-world calm once the day boats leave.
Where is Gustavus?
In the Hoonah-Angoon Census Area at the mouth of Glacier Bay, about 50 miles northwest of Juneau by air or sea, with no road connection.
National park on one side, open ocean on the other. Remote, green, and wide open.
22. Cordova: No Road In, Just Salmon
Cordova is bigger than most places here, around 2,600 people, but it makes the list on a technicality it wears with pride: there’s no road to the outside world.
You arrive by ferry or by plane, and that isolation has kept it a real, working Alaskan fishing town rather than a cruise-ship stop.
The name to know is Copper River salmon, some of the most prized fish in the country, and Cordova is its home port.
The Copper River Highway runs out of town along the bed of the old Copper River and Northwestern Railway, but it dead-ends where the river washed out the road around mile 36, near the spectacular Million Dollar Bridge and the Childs Glacier.
A road that goes nowhere is a fitting symbol for a town happily off the grid.
Where is Cordova?
On the east side of Prince William Sound in the Chugach Census Area, reachable only by ferry or air. Mountains, glaciers, and the vast Copper River Delta surround it.
A working fishing port with no way to drive in or out.
21. Hyder: Reach Alaska Through Canada
Hyder pulls off a neat trick: it’s an Alaska town you can drive to, but only by going through Canada.
There’s no road linking it to the rest of Alaska, so you come in from Stewart, British Columbia, right next door.
That makes it the southernmost Alaskan town reachable by car, and locals cheerfully call it the friendliest ghost town in Alaska. Around 50 people live here.
The big draws sit just over the line: the enormous Salmon Glacier, one of the largest road-accessible glaciers anywhere, reached by driving up through Hyder, and the bear-viewing platform at Fish Creek, where grizzlies and black bears fish for salmon in late summer.
It’s a quirky, half-abandoned border oddity with scenery far bigger than the town.
Where is Hyder?
At the head of the Portland Canal in far southeastern Alaska, attached by road only to Stewart, British Columbia. Steep coastal mountains and glaciers crowd in close.
The only Alaska town you reach by driving through another country.
20. Yakutat: Alaska’s Surf Town
Yakutat might be the most surprising entry here: it’s a surf town.
Cold-water breaks roll into its beaches off the Gulf of Alaska, and a small, dedicated crew rides them in full wetsuits with the Saint Elias mountains as a backdrop.
About 660 people live in this huge, roadless stretch of coast between Glacier Bay and Prince William Sound, reached by Alaska Airlines jet or by boat.
The other headliner is Hubbard Glacier, a giant, very active tidewater glacier about 30 miles away that twice surged enough to dam Russell Fjord in the 1980s.
Add world-class fishing and some of the emptiest beaches in North America, and Yakutat is a lot of wild country for one tiny town.
Where is Yakutat?
Its own borough on the Gulf of Alaska coast, between Glacier Bay and Prince William Sound, off the road system and reached by jet or boat. Rainforest, glacier, and surf beach all at once.
One of the least-populated boroughs in the whole state.
19. Angoon: The Only Town on the Island of Bears
Angoon is the lone permanent community on Admiralty Island, a place the Tlingit call Kootznoowoo, the “Fortress of the Bears.”
That name is earned: the island holds something like 1,600 brown bears, one of the densest populations on the planet, far more bears than people across the whole area.
Around 357 people live in this Tlingit village, reached by twice-weekly ferry or floatplane.
It’s a place with deep roots and a hard history; the U.S. Navy shelled and burned the village in 1882, a wound the community still remembers.
Today it’s quiet, traditional, and surrounded by the Kootznoowoo Wilderness, with world-class sea kayaking through Mitchell Bay and a strong sense of Tlingit culture.
Where is Angoon?
On the west coast of Admiralty Island in the Hoonah-Angoon Census Area, about 55 miles southwest of Juneau, reached only by ferry or air. Old-growth rainforest and protected wilderness all around.
The single town on an island ruled by bears.
18. Tenakee Springs: Hot Springs and No Cars
Tenakee Springs is built along a single footpath, and that’s the whole town: no road, no cars to speak of, just a line of cabins and a few buildings strung along the shore of Tenakee Inlet on Chichagof Island.
People get around on foot and by four-wheeler. You arrive by ferry or floatplane, and around 100 people call it home, more in summer.
The heart of the village is the free communal bathhouse, fed by a natural hot spring, with posted hours for men and women, where locals soak and catch up on the news.
Add a tiny store, good fishing, and a deep, dripping rainforest at the back door, and Tenakee is about as gentle and unplugged as Alaska living gets.
Where is Tenakee Springs?
On Tenakee Inlet on the east side of Chichagof Island in the Hoonah-Angoon Census Area, reachable only by ferry or floatplane from Juneau. Rainforest and saltwater on either side of one footpath.
A car-free hot-springs village in the Inside Passage.
17. Pelican: Closest to the Fish
Pelican’s town motto is “Closest to the Fish,” and it’s not kidding: the whole village is built on a wooden boardwalk over the water on the northwest side of Chichagof Island, raised on pilings above the tideline.
It was founded as a fish-processing town, and that’s still the pulse of the place. Around 90 people live here year-round, swelling toward 200 when the summer fishing fleet is in.
There’s no road, of course. The ferry comes only about once a month, so most people arrive by floatplane from Juneau.
Walk the boardwalk past the cold-storage plant and the handful of homes and you’ve seen the town, with steep green mountains rising straight out of the inlet behind it.
Hard to reach, easy to love.
Where is Pelican?
On Lisianski Inlet, northwest Chichagof Island, in the Hoonah-Angoon Census Area, reached by floatplane or the roughly monthly ferry from Juneau. Forest, water, and a boardwalk on stilts.
A fishing village that floats above the tide.
16. Elfin Cove: Twenty People on a Boardwalk
Elfin Cove is so small it barely registers, around 20 year-round residents wrapped around a tiny, near-perfect natural harbor on the outer coast of Chichagof Island.
Like Pelican, it’s a boardwalk town with no roads at all; the wooden walkway is the only street, looping around the cove past fishing lodges and weathered cabins.
In summer it fills with sport anglers chasing halibut and salmon in the rich waters nearby, and then in winter it nearly empties out, down to a tiny handful of hardy souls.
There’s no road and no real ferry service, just floatplanes and boats. For sheer smallness and storybook setting, few places anywhere match it.
Where is Elfin Cove?
On the northwest tip of Chichagof Island in the Hoonah-Angoon Census Area, reachable only by boat or floatplane. A sheltered cove ringed by rainforest with open ocean beyond.
A couple dozen people, one boardwalk, no roads.
15. Port Alexander: The End of Baranof
Port Alexander sits at the very bottom tip of Baranof Island in Southeast Alaska, a roadless cove reachable only by boat or floatplane.
Back in the 1920s and ’30s it was a roaring salmon-trolling boomtown, one of the busiest fishing ports on the coast, with the cash and saloons to match.
The boom passed, and now around 78 people live in the quiet that followed.
It’s about 65 miles south of Sitka, tucked into a protected harbor with the wild outer coast just beyond.
People here fish, garden, and live with the weather, which rolls in hard off the Gulf of Alaska. For a place that once buzzed with hundreds of boats, the stillness now is striking.
Where is Port Alexander?
At the southern tip of Baranof Island in Southeast Alaska, about 65 miles south of Sitka, reached only by floatplane or boat. Sheltered harbor in front, stormy open coast behind.
A faded fishing boomtown gone peaceful.
14. Tatitlek: In the Shadow of Bligh Reef
Tatitlek is a small Alutiiq village on the mainland shore of Prince William Sound, somewhere around 50 to 90 people depending on the season, reached only by plane, boat, or a weekly ferry.
It sits tucked in a narrows with the snow-capped peaks of the Chugach behind it, the kind of postcard setting that masks how hard it is to get to.
The village looks out toward Bligh Island and Bligh Reef, the spot where the Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989 and fouled the Sound.
Tatitlek was on the front line of that disaster and the cleanup that followed. Today it’s a quiet subsistence community, living off the fish, seals, and shellfish of the surrounding waters.
Where is Tatitlek?
On the northeast shore of Prince William Sound in the Chugach Census Area, about 22 nautical miles from Valdez, reached by air, boat, or weekly ferry. Steep mountains and cold saltwater all around.
A tiny Native village beside one of America’s most infamous oil-spill sites.
13. Chenega Bay: Rebuilt on Higher Ground
Chenega Bay carries one of the most heartbreaking stories in Alaska.
The original village of Chenega was wiped out by the tsunami from the 1964 Good Friday earthquake, which killed 26 people, roughly a third of everyone who lived there.
Survivors were scattered for two decades until a new village, Chenega Bay, was built on higher ground on Evans Island and settled in 1984.
Today around 50 to 60 people live in this Alutiiq community in western Prince William Sound, reached by plane, boat, or a weekly whistle-stop ferry.
It’s a place defined by resilience, set among islands, glaciers, and rich fishing grounds, a long way from anywhere on a map most people never look at.
Where is Chenega Bay?
On Evans Island in western Prince William Sound, in the Chugach Census Area, about 67 nautical miles from Whittier, reached by air, boat, or the weekly ferry.
Forested islands and cold channels in every direction. A village rebuilt from tragedy in deep isolation.
12. Akhiok: The Far South of Kodiak
Akhiok is the southernmost village on Kodiak Island, a small Alutiiq community of around 63 people on Alitak Bay, about 80 miles from the town of Kodiak with no road between them.
You get there by small plane onto a gravel strip, or by boat across some serious water.
It’s fishing and subsistence country: salmon, halibut, seals, and the famous Kodiak brown bears roaming the hills nearby.
Life here runs on the seasons and the sea. The village is tiny and tight-knit, the surrounding land is huge and empty, and the weather off the Gulf of Alaska does what it likes.
Few outsiders ever make it down to this corner of Kodiak, which is exactly how remote it is.
Where is Akhiok?
At the south end of Kodiak Island in the Kodiak Island Borough, on Alitak Bay, about 80 miles southwest of Kodiak by air or boat. Treeless green hills, big bays, and bigger bears.
A fly-in Alutiiq village at the bottom of the island.
11. King Cove: Storms and a Cannery
King Cove is a hard-working Aleutian fishing town of around 770, built around one of Alaska’s largest seafood plants (a Peter Pan Seafoods cannery that processes salmon, cod, and crab).
It clings to a narrow spit on the stormy Alaska Peninsula, where fog and wind ground the planes something like a third of the time.
When the weather closes in, the town is simply cut off.
That isolation isn’t just inconvenient, it’s dangerous, and King Cove has spent decades fighting for a road to the all-weather airport at nearby Cold Bay so the sick and injured can be flown out in emergencies.
The battle over that short stretch of gravel has gone all the way to Washington. It’s a vivid reminder of what “remote” really costs out here.
Where is King Cove?
On the south side of the Alaska Peninsula in the Aleutians East Borough, about 20 miles from Cold Bay, reached by small plane, boat, or summer ferry.
Treeless volcanic mountains and violent weather surround it. A cannery town the fog routinely seals off.
10. False Pass: The Start of the Aleutians
False Pass sits on Unimak Island at the very beginning of the Aleutian chain, where the mainland frays into a thousand miles of islands.
It takes its name from the Isanotski Strait beside it, a narrow channel that looks like a shortcut between the Bering Sea and the Pacific but is too shallow and treacherous to be a true “pass.”
Only about 40 people live here year-round, though a salmon plant swells the count in summer.
It’s the last Unangan (Aleut) village on Unimak, reached only by boat or small plane, with the smoking volcanoes of the island looming behind it.
This is raw, weather-hammered country at the edge of the map, and False Pass is the small human foothold where the Aleutians begin.
Where is False Pass?
On the east end of Unimak Island in the Aleutians East Borough, at the head of the Aleutian chain, reached only by plane or boat.
Volcanoes, tundra, and two great seas meeting in a narrow strait. The doorway to the Aleutians, and barely a town.
Coldfoot is a truck stop, a small lodge, and not a lot else, sitting at Mile 175 of the Dalton Highway, the lonely gravel “Haul Road” that runs to the oil fields at Prudhoe Bay.
About 34 people live here, and the place exists mainly to fuel trucks and travelers, because once you leave heading north there are no services for around 240 miles. None.
It’s the northernmost truck stop in the United States.
It started as a gold-rush camp called Slate Creek in the early 1900s, and now it’s a key gateway to Gates of the Arctic National Park, with a ranger station and a jumping-off point for the Brooks Range.
Above the Arctic Circle, under the northern lights in winter, it’s about as far out as a road in America goes.
Where is Coldfoot?
At Mile 175 of the Dalton Highway in the Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area, about 260 miles north of Fairbanks and well above the Arctic Circle.
Boreal forest giving way to the bare peaks of the Brooks Range. A fuel stop in the middle of the Arctic nowhere.
8. Wiseman: A Dozen People in Log Cabins
Just up the Haul Road from Coldfoot, a short spur leads to Wiseman, a cluster of old log cabins on the Middle Fork of the Koyukuk River where around a dozen people live.
It’s a survivor from the early-1900s gold rush, and unlike most camps of that era it never quite died, carrying on as a tiny subsistence community deep in the Brooks Range.
Life here is the real off-grid article: hunting, trapping, gardening in the brief subarctic summer, and long, dark, brutally cold winters lit by the aurora.
A few residents host visitors and tell stories of the old days. For a glimpse of how people actually live in the far north, with no pretense, Wiseman is hard to beat.
Where is Wiseman?
On a spur off the Dalton Highway near Mile 188 in the Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area, about 13 miles north of Coldfoot and some 280 miles from Fairbanks.
The Brooks Range rises all around above the Koyukuk River. A dozen people, a handful of cabins, and a lot of wilderness.
7. Chicken: They Couldn’t Spell Ptarmigan
Chicken is a surviving gold-rush town with one of the best origin stories in Alaska.
When the miners went to name their settlement, they wanted to call it Ptarmigan after the local game bird, couldn’t agree on how to spell the wretched word, and settled on “Chicken” instead.
Gold mining still goes on around here, and you can pan for color or tour the old dredge.
The population is tiny and seasonal: maybe a dozen people in census terms, dropping to around four in the deep of winter and swelling toward 50 in summer.
It sits on the Taylor Highway, which the state stops maintaining from mid-October to mid-March, so for half the year Chicken is effectively snowed in. A gravel airstrip is the winter lifeline.
Where is Chicken?
At Mile 66 of the Taylor Highway in the Southeast Fairbanks Census Area, about 80 miles from Tok near the Canadian border. Rolling subarctic hills and old gold creeks.
A near-empty mining town that the highway abandons every winter.
6. Eagle: The End of the Road on the Yukon
Eagle sits where the Taylor Highway dead-ends on the bank of the Yukon River, close to the Canadian border, and it’s a town that takes isolation seriously. Around 85 people live here.
From mid-October to mid-March the state stops maintaining the road, so for the long winter Eagle is reachable only by plane or by the frozen river, with snowmachines doing the work cars can’t.
History runs deep here.
Fort Egbert, a U.S. Army post built in 1899 and 1900, still stands at the edge of town, and Eagle was an important hub in the gold-rush days when the Yukon was the highway.
It’s also the gateway to the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, a vast roadless wilderness along the great river.
Where is Eagle?
At the northern end of the Taylor Highway in the Southeast Fairbanks Census Area, on the Yukon River about 160 miles north of Tok. Boreal hills and the wide river define it.
Literally the end of the road, and cut off by it half the year.
5. Anaktuvuk Pass: The Last of the Nunamiut
Anaktuvuk Pass lies in a high valley smack in the middle of Gates of the Arctic National Park, with no road for hundreds of miles in any direction.
The only year-round way in is a bush plane onto a gravel strip.
Around 425 people live here, and the village holds a unique place in Alaska: it’s the last permanent settlement of the Nunamiut, the inland Inupiat who followed the caribou herds across the Brooks Range for generations.
The name means roughly “place of caribou droppings,” which tells you what life has always revolved around. The herds still pass through, and the village is known for its handmade caribou-skin masks.
Ringed by treeless arctic peaks, it’s one of the most isolated inhabited spots in North America.
Where is Anaktuvuk Pass?
In the Brooks Range in the North Slope Borough, inside Gates of the Arctic National Park, about 250 miles northwest of Fairbanks and reachable only by plane.
Bare arctic mountains and migrating caribou all around. A fly-in village in the heart of the wilderness.
4. Atka: The Westernmost Village
Atka is the westernmost Native community in the United States, a tiny Unangan (Aleut) village of maybe 50 to 60 people far out on the Aleutian chain.
There’s no scheduled jet here; you reach it by small bush plane, often routed through Adak, and the fog and wind frequently say no.
When weather can ground you for days, you understand how remote a place really is.
Atka’s history is heavy.
During World War II, as Japanese forces advanced into the Aleutians, the U.S. Navy evacuated the villagers and burned Atka to the ground in 1942 to keep it from the enemy.
The people were interned far away and returned to rebuild from nothing. Today it endures as a fishing and subsistence community at the far western edge of America.
Where is Atka?
On Atka Island in the Aleutians West Census Area, far out the Aleutian chain, reachable only by small plane, often via Adak. Treeless volcanic ridges and endless gray sea.
The most westerly village in the country, and one of the foggiest.
3. Adak: A Half-Empty City at the Edge of America
Adak is the westernmost and southernmost city in the United States, way out in the Aleutians, around 1,200 miles from Anchorage by air.
A twice-weekly Alaska Airlines jet is the lifeline, when the weather lets it land, making this the most far-flung commercial jet destination in the country.
Around 170 people live here now, in a town built for nearly 6,000.
That’s the eerie part.
Adak was a massive military base through World War II and the Cold War, and much of that base still stands: rows of empty housing, an outsized airport, abandoned buildings being reclaimed by the tundra and the wind.
Bald eagles perch on derelict structures, caribou wander the old roads. It’s a haunting, unforgettable place, more ghost city than town.
Where is Adak?
On Adak Island in the Aleutians West Census Area, far down the Aleutian chain about 1,200 miles southwest of Anchorage, reached by the twice-weekly jet. Treeless, windswept, and ringed by volcanoes and ocean.
The end of America, in every direction that matters.
2. McCarthy: Park and Walk In
McCarthy sits deep inside Wrangell-St. Elias, the largest national park in the United States, and getting there is a commitment.
You drive 59 miles of rough gravel, the old railbed of the McCarthy Road, to a footbridge over the Kennicott River, then you park and walk into town. There’s no driving the last stretch.
In winter the road isn’t maintained at all, and the year-round population drops to a couple dozen hardy souls (summer brings it up near a hundred).
Right next door stands Kennecott, the spectacular red-painted copper mill that ran from 1911 to 1938 and pulled some $200 million in copper out of these mountains before it shut almost overnight.
Now it’s a preserved ghost town beneath enormous glaciers and peaks. Between the mill, the wilderness, and the walk-in approach, McCarthy is the quintessential end-of-the-road Alaska adventure.
Where is McCarthy?
In the Chugach Census Area, deep inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, about 60 miles east of Chitina at the end of the seasonal McCarthy Road, with a footbridge for the final approach.
Glaciers, 16,000-foot peaks, and the old copper mill all around. You drive to the river, then you walk.
1. Diomede: Where America Looks at Tomorrow
There’s nowhere in the country more cut off than Diomede.
The village of Inalik clings to the steep western face of Little Diomede Island, a rock in the middle of the Bering Strait, and just 2.4 miles across the water sits Big Diomede, which belongs to Russia.
The International Date Line runs between them, so when you look across at the Russian island you are quite literally looking at tomorrow. Around 80 Inupiat people live here.
The island has no airstrip. In winter, when the sea ice and weather cooperate, a helicopter brings mail and passengers; in the old days the community even carved a runway into the sea ice.
In summer it’s boats through open, frigid water. Houses are stacked up the cliff because there’s no flat ground to build on.
For sheer, jaw-dropping isolation, perched between two continents within sight of another country, nothing else in America comes close. A worthy number one.
Where is Diomede?
On Little Diomede Island in the Bering Strait, in the Nome Census Area, reached mainly by helicopter (or boat in summer), with no airstrip at all.
Russia’s Big Diomede looms 2.4 miles across the water, on the far side of the International Date Line. The most isolated community in the United States, and the closest to another world.
So there’s my 25.
If you’re actually planning a trip rather than just dreaming, McCarthy and Kennecott are the most doable big-adventure pick, Seldovia or Gustavus give you remote without the epic logistics, and the Aleutian and Bering Strait villages are for the seriously determined.
Check the weather, build in buffer days (planes don’t fly when the fog wins), and let Alaska show you what “far away” really means.