An Unforgettable Flightseeing Tour in Denali National Park

There are many ways to see Denali, and the surrounding mountains of the Alaskan Range, but in our opinion, the best way is through a flightseeing tour. For the both of us, this was our first time in a float-plane, or really any plane that is smaller than a regional jet, with 3 seats on each row of the plane. It was a bit nerve-wrecking to step in the plane, but our trip was one of our best memories from our 2-month Alaska trip.

About Flightseeing in Denali

Denali National Park & Preserve is home to numerous wildlife, absolutely beautiful scenery, and the tallest peak in North America at 20,310 feet. While visiting the park itself and doing activities such as hiking or the bus tours, there are more limited options to explore the park than other national parks.

Therefore, a popular option is taking a flightseeing tour and seeing the mountains up close! Especially with typical Alaska weather, you’re never guaranteed to see the mountains, so hiking to viewpoints can be a hit or miss. There’s only a 30% chance of viewing the entire mountains since oftentimes the very peak of Denali is hidden by clouds. That’s why they have the 30 percent club!

Know Before You Go

What company should you choose to take the tour with?

The main decision you have to make when deciding what flight-seeing tour to go on (as well as if you want to go on one at all) is your budget, as well as which company to go on the tour with. Personally, we went on our tour with N2 Aviation, which is a newer, relatively small flight-seeing tour operator based out of Talkeetna, Alaska. We decided to choose N2 Aviation based on the reputation of the sole pilot that is operating the business, David, who has been flying in the Alaskan backcountry, including thousands of flights in the Denali area, over the past 30 years. However other companies such as Denali Air, Talkeetna Air Taxi, and K2 Aviation, are very reputable and reliable as well.

Where do tours take off from?

The vast majority of Denali flight-seeing tours are based out of Talkeetna, which is a great town to visit on its own. Unfortunately for those (such as us) who were camping, or staying in a hotel near the park itself, Talkeetna is over a 2 hour drive from the main Denali Visitor Center. Talkeetna is even closer to Anchorage than the park road itself. We had some slight regrets not realizing this until we already were at our campsite at Riley Creek Campground near the entrance to the Denali Park road, so we recommend trying to set up your flight-seeing tour for the day that you are heading to the park, versus the a day past that point.

Will weather impact your tour?

Even with all this planning, it can be difficult to ensure anything when it comes to the flightseeing tour! This certainly added some stress as we approached our flightseeing date: consistently checking the weather from multiple stations around the area, precipitation percentages, cloud cover, etc., in order to see how our chances were for a clear day on our tour or even for our tour to be held at all! With the variable weather conditions that the Alaska Range—and the fact that Denali itself is tall enough (at 21,030 feet!) to have different weather than the areas around it—it can be difficult to ensure that any flightseeing tour will have perfect. This doesn’t even include “okay” weather in order to have proper visibility of Denali and other main peaks such as Mt. Foraker (17,400 feet—3rd highest in the US) and Mt. Hunter (14,573 feet—10th highest in the US).

However, one great aspect of the company that we had our tour with is that the pilots will try their best to work around their schedule in order for you to have the best tour possible based on the weather forecasts. This may depend on the situation, weather, and tour schedules, but in our case, we originally had our tour at 12:30 PM, but due to weather improving later in the day, our pilot called us to reschedule our tour to 3:00 PM.

We already were on the way to the tour, but due to the variability of Denali weather and the fact that most visitors to the park don’t even see the mountain, we wanted to do what we could to get the best odds of seeing the mountain clearly up close.

What are your tour options?

Like all Alaska tours, you have a variety of tour companies you can choose to go with. There are the bigger companies like and then the smaller, local companies like N2 Alaska. We decided to splurge a little and go with a smaller company for a more personalized tour and support local!

What is the cost?

As you may expect, a flightseeing tour of Denali—the tallest mountain in North America—is not an inexpensive trip. The prices typically range from $225 per person at the lower end for the shortest tour (typically around 1 hour) to $350 for the longest tour (typically around 1.5 hours). While it may not be easy to be a “budget” traveler in Alaska, we typically try our best to save money, and this is a high price tag for a single experience. After comparing tours and experiences, we determined that we thought it was worth the steep price tag.

When booking your tour, it is important to consider your group size, how many (if any) people you want on the plane besides you, as well as which parts of the Alaska Range you would like to view during the tour. Some tour operators, such as N2 Alaska, offer the ability to book out the entire plane for 2 people (which is what we did) at a slight premium. However, this is not necessary and likely should not impact your experience too heavily since everyone on the plane has a window seat, so it’s impossible not to have amazing views from any angle.

The routes flown by each company are relatively similar and are completely up to you as far as budget. We personally selected the “Denali Basecamp” tour from N2 Alaska, due to the middle-tier price-point and the fact that we get closer to Denali itself than the lower-priced tour. However, we highly recommend any of the flightseeing tours from any of the companies hosting these flights since it will be an incredible experience no matter how long you are up in the air.

What is the tour like?

One thing to keep in mind is that you are never guaranteed to see Denali as part of any specific flight-seeing tour. However, it is hard to not have a worthwhile experience, and your pilot will do the best to ensure that you have a beautiful flight: either related to the route you take or the time of take-off in order to have the best weather that day.

It is hard to describe the flight-seeing experience in words, but this is our best attempt! The 1.5 hour flight felt like 10 minutes. At first, it was nerve-wracking to enter into the small floatplane, knowing that we were about to fly near some of the tallest peaks in the world, but the professionalism, experience, and humor of our pilot helped us focus on the beautiful scenery surrounding us from the second we took off.

We were lucky to be able to see Denali itself through the cloud and the vast range, and we had a relatively smooth weather day which we were grateful for.

What to bring?

Since you’re not doing much except sitting and staring out the window at the breathtaking views, the list of things to bring isn’t extensive. One main thing is to have sunglasses. With the sun reflecting off the snow, it can be very bright and hard to see, so the overall viewing experience is helped by sunglasses. Other than that, dressing in layers helps with the temperature changes with the altitude and bringing a camera for capturing your memories!

Is it worth it?

If you have the money to spend, 100%!! As you will likely see around Talkeetna and the park area, there are many gift shops who sell souvenirs that say “30% Club Member“. This is due to the fact that about 30% of the days of the year, Denali is visible and not covered by clouds. Further, due to the current Pretty Rocks landslide, that is expected to impact the park road until 2025-2026, the closest you can get to the Denali (or Talkeetna) is over 50 miles, it is hard to truly feel the really expanse of the mountain, and area surrounding it without a flight-seeing tour.

Your pilot or company will also help you ensure that you are safe, and have a tour at a time that is best for your chance of viewing the mountain. The price may be higher than most Alaskan tours, but we think that it was completely worth the experience to be within a few miles of the tallest peak in North America!

Picking a Company

There are endless options for seeing Denali by plane. As previously mentioned, we were debating between a bigger company in a larger plane or a more family-owned company in a smaller plane but a little pricier.

After researching for a bit, we ultimately decided on N2 Alaska for a more personalized experience with David in the Cessna 185. He has flown for 13 seasons commercially on Denali for any type of situation: flying in mountain climbers, dropping off glacier landings, and giving scenic tours. He has been living in Alaska since the 80s in a log home he built himself, so he had all the answers for all of our curious questions about life in Alaska and Denali. If you decide to go with N2, you absolutely won’t regret it!

Picking the Tour

With N2, there are a few route options: Ruth Amphitheater, Denali Base Camp, and the full Denali Experience tour. Ruth Ampitheater takes you through the Ruth Gorge (the deepest gorge in the world) and allows views of the amphitheater. However, where the tour for Ruth Ampitheater turns back for Talkeetna, the Denali Base Camp tour continues on toward Mount Hunter and Mount Foraker. Lastly, you can increase your time with Denali with the Denali Experience tour that flies you completely around the circumference of Mount Denali to see all the faces of the largest mountain in North America. Flight times vary from 1 to 1.5 hours, depending on which tour you pick. We decided on meeting in the middle (for our budget-conscious minds) and selected the Denali Base Camp tour for best attempts of seeing the peak of Denali for $395 USD (as of writing this in 2025).

With other companies, some tours offer Glacier Landing, which is usually at least about $100 extra. You’ll get to stand on a glacier in the middle of Denali National Park, which would definitely be a once in a lifetime experience, since there’s no other way to get into these areas. While having the birds-eye view from the plane gives you the chance to understand the expanse of the park and mountains, seeing it from the stillness within the range is a whole other level. Although we would have loved to experience this, it just wasn’t in our budget this time!

Our Experience

We were spending our weekend car camping within Denali National Park for hiking, but we had booked our flightseeing tour for noon on one of our days. It was a 2 and a half hour drive from the park entrance to Talkeetna, which we were prepared to drive in the morning and had crossed our fingers for good weather.

The morning of our tour, we got a call from David who is consistently monitoring the weather that the weather looked better at 4 PM. As we were already on our way to Talkeetna, we decided we would use our extra time to wander and explore the town.

Talkeetna

About 2.5 hours from Anchorage and located at the base of Denali, Talkeetna is a small town, started from the gold miners in the 1890s and within ten years, became a riverboat steamer station for supplies.

We spent our time strolling the Main Street filled with historic buildings, cute souvenir shops, coffee places, restaurants, and a brewery.

One main building to note is a general store called Nagley’s Store, which is from the 1920s.

At the edge of the town sits the Talkeetna Riverfront Park, where we stopped to view Denali. You can juuust see the mountains in the distance but seemed to have good visibility so our hopes were high!

As we waited for our flight seeing tour, we grabbed a snack at and also ran into some baby bunnies to hold! (I think it was promotion for a religious organization but I didn’t mind letting them ramble to me because look at their faces!!)

We also made a reservation for a brewery tour, but then our pilot called us to come immediately instead at 2 PM because the clouds cleared up! Time to see the mountains!!

Flightseeing

I’m going to be honest—I’m trying my best to remember everything I saw and everything Dave told us, but I literally feel like I blacked out from the adrenaline.

We met Dave directly at his floatplane on Christiansen Lake. After a brief safety instruction, we were given headsets to block out the noise of the plane and hear our pilot’s commentary better. Once we took off across the water, we were above the forest where we scanned the tree lines for any wildlife like bears or moose (unfortunately, didn’t see any).

As we approached the amphitheater, we could see the full range in the distance. The glacial valleys became more and more visible as we flew closer to the mountains.

Once you’re within the mountains, we entered what is nicknamed “Little Switzerland.” Just south of the Denali range, this subrange is a cluster of granite spires that is great for climbing lovers. They kind of look like broken teeth.

Flying so close to the mountains and being able to see the glaciers and crevasses from above really gives you another perspective of how extremely massive they are. I feel like it’s hard not to get messed up by depth perception when you’re viewing the mountains on the ground from a distance versus above.

We flew towards the peaks of Mount Hunter and Mount Foraker before rounding our way around to Denali Base Camp. This is where climbers are dropped off by flightseeing companies like N2 to began their journey up to the peak of Mount Denali.

Finally, during most of our time in the air, there were clouds surrounding the very peak of Mount Denali but suddenly, our luck turned around and the skies cleared! We officially became members of the 30% club. 🙂

The peak of Mt. Denali is on the left!

Still shook, we made our way back to Christiansen Lake. En route, we flew over a large glacial valley which allowed us to see the giant crevasses the glaciers. After another session of attempting to spot land wildlife through the tree, we finally landed back on the water and had an unforgettable experience.

Gallery

Hopefully, these are a few images to inspire you to take your own flightseeing tour to Denali! It’s so hard to go through the best photos because they’re all stunning.

What’s Next?

After an exhilarating day, we drove back to Denali National Park to continue our exploration of the area and start doing some hiking! Fingers crossed we don’t run into a bear! (I mean, I want to run into a bear but not on a hike up close).

Thanks for reading my little blog! 🙂 Have you been flightseeing or planning a tour? Send me your thoughts about what you loved the most or are most excited about! If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

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