Bering Sea Wilderness

The Bering Sea Wilderness encompasses St. Matthew Island, Hall Island, and Pinnacle Island, and is part of the larger Bering Sea unit of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. One of the largest seabird concentrations in the North Pacific — 3.5 million birds — can be found here in summer, dominated by auklets, common eiders, old-squaws, gulls, murres, and puffins. On Saint Matthew you'll find one of the few colonies of northern fulmars on Earth, and almost the entire world's population of McKay's buntings nests here. Northern sea lions and seals haul out at several places, and walruses climb ashore at one spot on Saint Matthew. Reindeer, once introduced here, have disappeared. Arctic foxes den here, and polar bears, practically wiped out by hunting, wander over from the mainland occasionally on the winter ice pack. Gray whales are often seen offshore, and sometimes an endangered bowhead whale swims by in winter. Geographically, this Wilderness is the most isolated in all of America. It is a beautiful land carpeted with grasses, sedges, mosses, lichens, and heath, formed by volcanic activity, rising more than 1,500 feet above the sea with sheer cliffs and waterfalls dropping dramatically into icy water. The annual average for visiting ships is fewer than one. Summer temperatures average in the low 50s and 60s Fahrenheit, and in the low 20s and 30s in winter. The area receives 73.5 inches of precipitation annually. It is managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service and was designated in 1970.