🇨🇦 Canada · North / Territories
Kluane National Park Reserve protects one of the most extreme and grandiose landscapes in Canada: in southwestern Yukon rise the highest mountains in the country, crowned by Mount Logan (the second highest summit in North America), along with the largest non-polar icefields in the world. It's a land of superlatives, of immense glaciers, frozen peaks and spectacular wildlife which, together with neighboring parks in Canada and Alaska, forms one of the largest protected complexes on the planet, a World Heritage Site.
The most impressive part of Kluane —the high summits and the icefields— sits in its remote core, unreachable by land, reserved for mountaineers and flightseeing trips. But the front range of the park, reachable from the Alaska Highway, offers any visitor trails, lookouts, rivers and lakes of enormous beauty, plus one of the biggest concentrations of grizzly bears in North America and the chance to see Dall sheep, moose and other northern wildlife.
This guide covers Kluane from a practical angle: what to see and do (hiking, flights over the glaciers, wildlife, Kluane Lake), and how to organize the visit from the Alaska Highway, with the towns of Haines Junction and Destruction Bay as gateways. It's a destination for anyone who wants a look at the frozen immensity of the Far North and at one of the most imposing landscapes in Canada.
Kluane's territory is the ancestral home of Yukon First Nations, in particular the Champagne and Aishihik and the Kluane, whose relationship with this land of mountains and rivers goes back thousands of years. In the early 20th century there was some mining activity (gold) in the Kluane creek area. The building of the Alaska Highway during the Second World War opened the region to access. The park was established as a reserve in the 1970s and, together with the adjoining parks of Wrangell-St. Elias (Alaska), Glacier Bay and Tatshenshini-Alsek, it forms part of an enormous cross-border complex declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco for its glaciers, mountains and exceptional ecosystems. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Arctic and subarctic territory of the northwest: land of the Yukon First Nations, setting of the legendary Klondike Gold Rush, of the midnight sun and of the highest mountain in Canada.
Read the history of Yukon →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The vast territory covered today by Kluane National Park Reserve, in southwestern Yukon, is the ancestral home of northern First Nations, in particular the Champagne and Aishihik and the Kluane (Kluane First Nation), whose relationship with this land of mountains, lakes and rivers goes back thousands of years. The name 'Kluane' itself comes from their language and relates to 'lake of many fish', a nod to the richness of the great lake.
For these peoples, the region was a territory of hunting, fishing and seasonal movement. The slopes, the valleys and the lakeshores provided caribou, moose, Dall sheep and fish, while the routes through the mountains connected the interior with the Pacific coast, in trade networks that moved goods such as copper and, later, other products. A deep knowledge of the terrain and its wildlife was essential to life in such an extreme setting.
That millennia-old presence is still central to the park's identity. Kluane's current management recognizes the rights and heritage of the First Nations, and their culture and place names (such as Tachäl Dhäl, the original name of Sheep Mountain) run through the interpretation of the site, a reminder that this is not 'empty' nature but a cultural landscape inhabited since time immemorial.
The arrival of outsiders in the Kluane region intensified in the early 20th century, partly as a late echo of the Klondike gold rush. Around 1903-1904 there was a small gold rush in the Kluane creek area and around the lake, which drew prospectors and gave rise to short-lived camps. Modest compared with the Klondike, this mining activity nonetheless opened up the region and left its mark on its history.
The great change in access, however, came during the Second World War with the building, in 1942, of the Alaska Highway. This enormous project, raised for strategic reasons to connect southern Canada with Alaska, crossed southwestern Yukon skirting what is now the park, beside Kluane Lake. Suddenly a region that had been extremely remote was connected by an overland route.
The highway transformed the territory: it eased travel, fixed settlements such as Haines Junction and Destruction Bay, and, in time, made tourism possible. The strip of the park open to visitors today is precisely the one that runs along that highway, while the glacial heart remains as unreachable as ever, except by air.
The region's natural exceptionality —the highest mountains in Canada, with Mount Logan; the largest non-polar icefields in the world; and ecosystems that sustain spectacular wildlife, including a high density of grizzly bears— drove its protection. In the 1970s the Canadian government established Kluane as a national park reserve, a designation that protects the area while First Nations land claims are being settled.
International recognition sealed its value. Kluane was inscribed by Unesco as a World Heritage Site, forming part of a colossal cross-border complex of protected areas together with Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Glacier Bay, in Alaska (United States), and Tatshenshini-Alsek Park, in British Columbia. This complex makes up one of the largest expanses of protected nature on the planet, celebrated for its glaciers, summits and the diversity of its ecosystems.
Today Kluane is managed in partnership with the First Nations of the territory, combining the conservation of a landscape of superlatives with respect for its cultural heritage. For the visitor it's a unique chance to look out on the frozen immensity of the Far North, whether walking its valleys, watching its wildlife or flying over the sea of ice that hides its heart.
The heart of Kluane is a realm of ice and altitude with no equal in Canada. Mount Logan, at 5,959 meters, is the highest mountain in the country and the second highest in North America, after Denali. Its name honors Sir William Edmund Logan, founder of the Geological Survey of Canada in the 19th century. The first ascent of its summit was made in 1925, after an epic expedition across extremely remote glacial terrain; even today climbing it is an undertaking reserved for experienced mountaineers, who reach the icefields by small plane.
Around Logan stretch the Kluane icefields, the largest non-polar masses of ice on the planet, which feed colossal glaciers such as the Lowell, the Kaskawulsh and the Hubbard. These glaciers have been at the center of remarkable scientific events: in 2016 the retreat of the Kaskawulsh Glacier made its meltwater river change course almost overnight —a process dubbed 'river piracy'— draining Slims Lake and redirecting the water toward the Pacific instead of the Bering Sea, a case cited around the world as an example of the impact of global warming.
For all this, Kluane is a natural laboratory of climate change. Its glaciers retreat year after year and the region is the subject of glaciological research and long-term monitoring. For Parks Canada and the First Nations, conserving this landscape also means documenting and understanding its transformation, in a territory where the frozen immensity that astonishes the visitor is, at the same time, a fragile witness to the planet's climate.
Kluane is not a national park plain and simple, but a national park reserve, and that word holds a key piece of history. When the Canadian government protected these lands in the 1970s, it did so over a territory claimed by the First Nations of the area, who had never ceded it. The 'park reserve' designation is used precisely to protect an area while those land claims are settled, without treating the land question as closed. For decades, creating the park also meant restrictions on hunting and on the traditional uses of those who had always lived there, a frequent tension in the history of northern parks.
The turning point came after more than twenty years of negotiations. On May 29, 1993, the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations signed their Final Agreement and their Self-Government Agreement with the governments of Canada and Yukon (in force from February 1995), which recognized their rights over the Yukon portion of their traditional territory and gave them self-government powers. The neighboring Kluane First Nation signed equivalent agreements years later. These modern treaties transformed the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the park.
Since then, Kluane has been managed collaboratively. The First Nations are co-managers of the natural and cultural resources of their territory: they sit on the Kluane National Park Management Board and on the resource councils that advise on conservation, heritage and use of the park. The original names (such as Tachäl Dhäl, the name of Sheep Mountain) and the interpretation of Champagne and Aishihik and Kluane culture have taken a central place in the visitor experience. Kluane's history, then, does not end with its glaciers and its summits: it also includes a pioneering chapter on the recognition of Indigenous rights and shared management of one of the planet's great natural treasures.