THE NORTHWEST ARCTIC BOROUGH LAND BRIEF
Land in the
Interior Forested Lowlands and Uplands setting.
Northwest Arctic Borough has 35,671.7 square miles of land in Alaska. 6 mapped landscape regions meet across Northwest Arctic Borough: Interior Forested Lowlands and Uplands, Brooks Range, Arctic Foothills, among others.
Interior Alaska's lowlands and uplands form a varied mosaic of spruce, hardwoods and wet areas. Local relief, surface water and ground conditions create substantial differences across this broad inland region.
Regional context: Interior Forested Lowlands and Uplands ↗ · Regional mapping across the county footprint
Where the landscape changes
Northwest Arctic Borough intersects 6 mapped regional units. The largest mapped shares are:
- Interior Forested Lowlands and Uplands25.6%
- Brooks Range23%
- Arctic Foothills21.2%
- Seward Peninsula15.8%
- Subarctic Coastal Plains12.9%
Brooks Range in Northwest Arctic Borough
Rugged, deeply cut mountains stretch across northern Alaska. Past glaciation shaped the range, with sparse tundra vegetation and remaining ice in some higher areas.
Read the regional source ↗Arctic Foothills in Northwest Arctic Borough
Rolling Arctic hills and plateaus connect the coastal plain with the Brooks Range. Drainage is more defined and lakes less numerous than in the lower coastal landscape.
Read the regional source ↗Finding your parcel within Northwest Arctic Borough
The atlas lists 12 cities, towns, townships, and Census communities associated with Northwest Arctic Borough, including Red Dog Mine, Kotzebue, Noatak. The list includes overlapping geography types and does not divide the county into exclusive service areas.
Northwest Arctic Borough by land and water
The Census records 4,948.1 square miles of water within Northwest Arctic Borough, or 12.2% of its total area. That share is close to Northwest Arctic Borough’s 12.2%. This is geographic context; waterfront status and usable land must be checked at the parcel.
For scale, Northwest Arctic Borough has 189,743.1 times the land area of nearby Kiana city (0.19 square miles). These areas describe boundaries, not comparable property prices.
The Census boundary meets Nome Census Area, North Slope Borough, Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area within Alaska. A tract near one of these lines should be matched to the county identifier on its own records.