THE NAME ALASKA COMES FROM THE ALEUT word alyeska, meaning "great land," and the greatness of Southeast Alaska lies in the treasures of its vast wilderness. The Inside Passage is a land of ancient forests and awe-inspiring glaciers--a land where bears feast on berries and salmon while orcas surface off rocky beaches and bald eagles circle high overhead.

A long, narrow strip of mainland and thousands of islands and fjords make up the Inside Passage, also known as the Alaskan Panhandle. Most of the Inside Passage is encompassed by the Tongass National Forest, one of the few rain forests in the Northern Hemisphere. For amateur photographers and wildlife watchers, a camera with a long lens and a pair of binoculars are essential to fully appreciate the greatness of the Inside Passage.

Animals that are rare or endangered in the Lower 48 states thrive here. Both the black bear and the brown bear, also known as the grizzly, tramp through the undergrowth. The bears feed on the Pacific salmon that inhabit the waterways and love the region's plentiful blueberries and salmonberries. Moose, mountain goats, gray wolves, and Sitka black-tailed deer also inhabit the mountains and forests. Wolf sightings are extremely rare, but look for deer foraging on leaves and shrubs along the rocky beaches and for mountain goats high in rocky outcrops.

Of all the animals that dwell along the Inside Passage, you'll be most likely to see the marine mammals. Numerous species of whale can be spotted throughout the summer. Humpback whales surface close to shore when feeding and make a strong sound as they expel air and water vapor from their blowholes. Beautiful orcas, or killer whales, have distinctive black and white markings.

The coastal forest is carpeted primarily by western hemlock and Sitka spruce, with red cedar, Alaska cedar, and mountain hemlock also found at varying elevations. In summer, wild-flowers bloom throughout the forest. Look for the magenta-colored fireweed, the bright blue-violet lupine, the yellow buttercup, and the small blue forget-me-not, Alaska's state flower. The Inside Passage is also a land of glaciers. The towering mountain ranges you see today were uplifted by ancient faults and continue to be shaped by the advance and retreat of the glaciers. Thousands of years ago, glaciers carved the deep U-shaped fjords, which were later flooded by the sea. Glaciers start as an accumulation of snow in the higher elevations. New snowfall compacts the bottom layers, forming a hard-packed ice field. Gravity forces the ice to move down the mountains with its grinding rocks and sediment. As the glaciers reach the sea, the ice breaks, or calves, off the face of the glaciers to form icebergs. Southeast Alaska is one of the few places in the world where such tidewater glaciers are found. One of the most fascinating aspects of Alaska's glaciers concerns their color. The glacial ice absorbs all the colors of the spectrum except blue, which is reflected outward to give the glaciers their luminous blue appearance.

Throughout Alaska, the landscape looks much the same as when the first human inhabitants settled here. Wildlife abounds along the pristine forests and waterways, against a backdrop of towering snow-capped mountain peaks. When you spot your first whale, watch a bear catch salmon in mid-stream, and thrill to a bald eagle soaring overhead, you're sure to agree that along Alaska's Inside Passage, the spectacular is commonplace.