US Map / Cities / Anchorage

Anchorage Map

Anchorage holds about two-fifths of everyone in Alaska on a strip of level ground between the Chugach Mountains and the two arms of Cook Inlet.

Where is Anchorage?

Anchorage is in south-central Alaska, at the head of Cook Inlet, where Knik Arm and Turnagain Arm split around the point the city sits on. It is roughly 360 road miles south of Fairbanks and about 570 miles northwest of Juneau, the state capital — and there is no road to Juneau at all, which is one reason Anchorage rather than the capital is the state's practical center. Seattle is about 1,440 air miles southeast, the nearest large city in another state — and well over 2,000 miles by road, because the only route runs through Canada.

Anchorage at a glance

Anchorage in Alaska

Alaska has no counties. It is divided into boroughs and unorganized territory, and Anchorage is a unified home-rule municipality — a single government covering roughly 1,900 square miles of city, suburb, mountain and coastline, which the Alaska borough map shows as one block on the inlet. The municipality is the only Alaskan entry in the national top 100 and is larger than the rest of the state's cities combined; Fairbanks and Juneau are each an order of magnitude smaller. The city began in 1915 as a construction camp for the Alaska Railroad, on a bluff above the tidal flats, and grew through the military build-up of the 1940s and the oil years of the 1970s. The Alaska state page covers the state's scale.

Mountains, tides and the 1964 earthquake

The Chugach Mountains rise directly behind the city, so abruptly that a state park of half a million acres begins within the municipal boundary. In front of it Cook Inlet, the northern end of Alaska's share of the Pacific coast, has one of the largest tidal ranges in North America, close to 30 feet at spring tides, and Turnagain Arm produces a bore tide — a single wave running up the narrowing channel on the incoming flood. The mudflats exposed at low tide are glacial silt and behave like quicksand. Anchorage sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire: the Good Friday earthquake of March 1964, magnitude 9.2 and the largest ever recorded in North America, dropped whole blocks of the Turnagain Heights neighborhood down a landslide scarp and rewrote the region's building rules. The airport is a global air cargo hub for a reason of pure geography — great-circle routes between Asia, Europe and North America pass close overhead.

Cities nearest Anchorage

The closest large cities are Seattle and Portland down the Pacific coast, with Honolulu far out in the ocean to the southwest. Anchorage keeps Alaska Time, an hour behind Pacific Time and used across nearly the whole state.