Alaska on camera, from snow at Gunsight Mountain to the moon over Korovin
At 04:15 Alaska time this morning the camera at Gunsight Mountain, milepost 117 on the Glenn Highway, was full of snow going sideways. Long white streaks across the whole frame, caught by the camera's own night exposure, with the tops of a few spruce just showing along the bottom edge. That camera belongs to Alaska 511, and the National Weather Service grid point covering that spot had snow overnight, a low near 18F and an east wind around 10 mph, in the forecast I pulled at 13:17 UTC. Forecast and frame agree, which is the pleasant thing about a camera.
Alaska has 1,372 live cameras on the site, spread across 297 towns and places, counted from the Alaska page on 2026-11-04. That page files 1,042 of them as airport cameras, 129 as traffic, 32 as weather and 30 as ski.
Eight hours of light, and when they land
November decides most of what is worth opening up there. The sun rose over Anchorage today at 08:37 and set at 16:49 AKST, eight hours and twelve minutes, taken from the US Naval Observatory's one-day tables for 2026-11-04. Fairbanks ran 08:50 to 16:18, half an hour shorter at each end. Juneau, south and east of both, got 07:21 to 16:01.
Convert that and the planning does itself. Anchorage daylight today was 17:37 to 01:49 UTC, so from Britain the Alaskan afternoon is your evening, and the road cameras are at their best around the time you sit down to eat. From the US east coast it is the middle of your working day.
The volcano cameras, Sitka out to the western Aleutians
Fifty of Alaska's cameras point at volcanoes. All of them are the Alaska Volcano Observatory's, covering about twenty mountains from Edgecumbe above Sitka out to Little Sitkin, and AVO lists them by site code with the raw frame behind each one.
Several are built for the dark, which is what makes them worth opening at an hour when nothing else out there has anything to show. The site at Cleveland, CLNE at 1,076 ft, carries a matched pair: a visible camera and an infrared one looking the same way. Redoubt has a low-light camera at RDJH, 4,639 ft, alongside its ordinary one.
The caption bar is where the detail lives. The Korovin frame I fetched at 13:05 UTC read "Korovin-KOWE-Cam 2026-11-04 03:00:30 HAST Exp. 4 Temp: 27.5 F", and the picture under it was black apart from the moon, a hard white disc a third of the way across the frame. Redoubt's low-light frame from 03:31:03 AKST the same morning gave its exposure and -3.5C. You get the time, the exposure and the air temperature whether or not the mountain is in view.
Patience helps here. The Cleveland infrared frame did not change across nine fetches between 13:14:59 and 13:18:44 UTC, so these reward a second look later rather than a refresh now.
The Alaska Range from the road
The Parks Highway cameras climb with the road, and the mileposts in their names are the whole index. Talkeetna Road at MP 98.7 is the turnoff for the village where every Denali climber is briefed, at the Walter Harper Talkeetna Ranger Station, according to the Park Service. Little Coal Creek at MP 163.2 sits where the road starts to climb into the range proper. Antler Creek at MP 244 sits seven miles north of the park entrance, which the Park Service puts at Mile 237, and Nenana Hills at MP 325.4 is the last high ground before Fairbanks.
The Richardson gives you the other side of the same weather. Tsina River at MP 37 is up in the canyon country inland of Valdez, and Tenderfoot at MP 292.6 is up near Delta. Open these between 18:00 and 01:00 UTC and you are looking at them in daylight.
One oddity worth knowing: the 511 images are generated when you ask for them. The Gunsight frame carried a Last-Modified header matching my request second by second across six fetches, whilst the bytes themselves stayed identical, so the header tells you when you asked rather than when the shutter went.
Denali, and a camera called Sultana1
The camera on the southeast ridge of Mount Foraker looks down the Kahiltna Glacier. Its frames are stamped Sultana1, the Dena'ina name for Foraker, and the Park Service and USGS badges sit in the bottom corners. The frame I pulled this morning was black, taken at 05:45:54 UTC, and the caption still handed over the coordinates, 13.1 volts on the battery and -9.5C.
Downhill from there, the Susitna River near Denali and the Nenana near Windy watch the water through freeze-up, which is the interesting thing to catch on a river camera in November: the shelf ice coming out from the banks a little further each day.
Anchorage, and a bare stake at Skeetawk
Anchorage carries 47 live cameras today, 30 of them traffic, 8 airport and 7 ski. The municipal junction cameras are the quick ones: 5th Avenue and Reeve and International Airport at Jewel Lake both sit on a five second cycle, fast enough to watch traffic actually move rather than teleport.
The ski cameras are the ones changing this month. Alyeska's Glacier Bowl camera posted its last frame of the day at 02:29 UTC, right at dusk. Up at Hatcher Pass, Skeetawk's snow stake was still updating at 13:10 UTC, infrared-lit, and what it showed at 04:10 local was the measuring stake standing on bare ground, grass tufts around it and one grey patch of old snow off to the left. If you have not read one before, we went through how a snow stake works last month.
Juneau's Eaglecrest cameras run on the city's own host rather than a snow-report network, which is why there are four of them pointing at one lift.
That bare stake is the thing I would bookmark. It tells you the night the snow arrives without anyone having to announce it, and it does so at 04:10 in the morning when nobody is watching. I will come back with the date it turns white, and the frame.