Saint Elias Mountains

The 200-mile Saint Elias Range is the highest coastal range in the world, located in Southeastern Alaska and Southwestern Yukon Territory. The Saint Elias exceed the Himalayas in vertical relief, with hundreds of sharp ice-clad peaks rising dramatically above sea-level glaciers. They are extended in the north by the Wrangell Mountains, and together the two ranges occupy 20-million acres, which are encapsulated within two national parks, the Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park and Preserve on the United States side, and the Kluane National Park on the Canadian side. The dominant mountain of the Saint Elias Range is Mount Logan (19,550-ft.), the highest mountain in Canada and the second highest in North America. Its ten-mile summit is the world's most massive, and from it stream great crevassed glaciers which stretch for miles over the surrounding valleys.

Mount Saint Elias (18,008 ft.) is the second highest mountain in the range. It is appreciably smaller than Logan in both height and mass, but is nonetheless an impressive mountain, towering in awesome isolation, and producing the largest single icefield in Alaska, called the Malaspina. Ice spreads from the mountain over 1,500 square miles on its seaward base, and spills 50 miles away into the Gulf of Alaska.