Alaska Helicopter Tours
Helicopter Tours of the Last Frontier
Soar above Alaska’s wild beauty on our helicopter tours and witness its stunning landscapes and vibrant wildlife up close.
The last great American frontier is the Alaskan Wilderness. Stunning glaciers, majestic volcanoes, incredible mountain meadows, and intense colored lakes. Within all of that beautiful scenery, you have a pretty good chance of witnessing the wildlife in their natural habitat. Whales, moose, bears fishing in the rivers or birds of prey soaring along while sheep and goats stand precariously on cliffsides. Our Alaska helicopter tours provide these views and excursions so you can really get immersed in it all.
Our flights include wonderful narration provided by your pilot as you tour the scenery below. On our tours with landing, your pilot may serve as your guide while you explore the wilderness in safety. Choose to dog sled, hike, land on glaciers or relax by a lake. We have all the tours for exploring Alaska by air.
When embarking on an Alaskan helicopter tour, here are some highlights you definitely don’t want to miss:
About an hour’s drive northeast of Anchorage, up the beautiful Knik Arm and river, at the end of the road, will get you to a beautiful Alaska Glacier Lodge. From this location, you canʻt get closer to the Knik Glacier by car. Helicopter flights from this Knik River Lodge are the best option.
This charming seaside town is a great place to explore the bay and the surrounding scenery during a flight. Situated at the top of Kachemak Bay, an adventure can include whale watching, landing on a glacier, viewing spectacular waterfalls and rivers, as well as an iceberg or two.
The Chugach Mountain Range is situated along the southern coast of the state at the head of Prince William Sound. It feeds the glaciers, lakes, and rivers that we tour on most of the helicopter flights in Alaska we offer. Land on the Knik Glacier or stop beside Lake George, a glacial lake.
This 25-mile-long glacier coming out of the Chugach Mountains has a 3-mile face and daily calving of ice. This is a site to behold as you may see a new iceberg being created from its 400ʻ cliffs, landing and moving in the lake below. This glacier in Matanuska Valley is popular for helicopter landings.
Knik River is fed entirely by the glacier. With its movements, the ice would dam, creating Lake George behind it, then in summer, the damn would break. It would release a flood of water that would inundate the Matanuska-Susitna Valley below. Since 1967, the glacier has receded back so this no longer occurs. The river now follows a narrow channel through a maze of other channels, that rise and fall each winter season.
Bordering the Chugach Mountains to the north, the Kenai Mountains follow the coast for about 120 miles, forming its own Kenai Peninsula, and range from 3000 to 5000 feet in height. They are home to several small glaciers, mountain lakes, and plenty of beautiful waterfalls. This area is home to Kenai Fjords National Park, where over 40 glaciers flow from the Harding Icefield.
Lake George is a glacier-fed lake high in the Chugach Range. Until 1967, its outlet was blocked by the Knik Glacier, so the build-up of melt and water was held back by the season’s snowpack, until a summer day when it was released all at once. This happened yearly for almost 5 decades. Today the glacier no longer blocks the entrance and water is released in a more measured way.
This 8-mile-long glacier in the Chugach Mountains has been the subject of an intense search every summer since 2012 after the wreckage of a crash was spotted. It was the remains of a US Air Force plane from 1952 that went down with 52 souls on board. The military has committed to retrieving all remains. There have been 44 recovered and reunited with their families for burial with full military honors.
An area to explore if you love birds and birdwatching, this area protected by a large park is home to tides that average 30 feet. This creates large tidal zones that attract huge numbers of ocean birds. Along with the rich marine life and plenty of land animals, this is a great area to explore with a guide by foot, on a boat, from a float plane or in a helicopter.
The Matanuska-Susitna Valley in south-central Alaska is home to farms that produce a lot of wonderfully sweet vegetables and hundreds of lakes where millions of salmon spawn. This valley is fast becoming a bedroom community to Anchorage due to its beauty and accessibility to areas like Talkeetna, a tourist hotspot near Denali.
Mount St. Augustine is an active volcano in the Cook Inlet. It is an island of its own and is only accessible by boat or helicopter flight. Named by Captain Cook, due to seeing it on St. Augustineʻs Day in 1778. It last erupted in January 2006. It has an almost perfect cone appearance and is quite dramatic rising above the ocean to 4134 feet.
The highest peak in the Chugach Range, Mount Marcus Baker is close to the tidewater and the calving Harvard Glacier. It tops out at 13176 feet and towers over the surrounding landscape by over 10,000 feet. Its inaccessibility makes it a serious climb and being so remote makes it more difficult than the taller mountains nearby.
A popular cross-country skiing location, Whiteout Glacier, is accessible from the far end of Eklutna Lake or Crow Creek Road. It is home to Hanʻs Hut, a place that gets frequent visitors who have been stranded due to changing weather conditions. Up here, visitors can look in every direction and see nothing but ice and rocks, similar to what you would expect if you were down in Antarctica but with Anchorage only 30 miles away.
This high mountain lake attracts kayakers and stand-up paddle boarders, looking to spend the day in the alpine. Eklutna Lake is surrounded by snow-capped peaks and drains into the Knik Arm, of Cook Inlet. Like most lakes in the area, is fed by the Eklutna Glacier, which when it receded left deposits that created a natural dam at one end. It was supplemented by a man-made dam to help control water flows. The depth of the lake changes as much as 60ʻ throughout the year.