Sometime in the distant future, I’d like to buy a large portion of very remote land in Alaska. Is all of the remote area of AK owned by private citizens or companies?
I was thinking that I would need a fairly big plot of land. Is it possible to buy remote land in AK that’s something like 25 sq miles? How about 100 square miles?
How much would that cost, or is that even possible? 
The vast majority of Alaskan land is owned by the state, the federal government, and Native (Indian, Aleut, and Eskimo) corporations. IIRC, only about one or two percent of the land is privately owned. You can buy remote parcels of privately owned land, but they are not as cheap as you might expect. Online I have seen remote land going for $200-$400 an acre in the Yukon drainage basin, which is more expensive than some remote tracts I’ve seen (firsthand) in Minnesota and Maine. I suspect you’d have a lot of trouble finding a tract as large as you want.
You can search for properties for sale here: http://www.alaskarealestate.com/ The largest parcel I could find was 1227 acres for $6 million, http://www.alaskarealestate.com/scripts/LandDetail.idc?ln=2500922
1227 acres, by the way, is less than two square miles. 1 sq. mi. =640 acres.
1 sq. mi. =640 acres and a mule
Yes, everything in Alaska is spoken for, one way or another. Either a private citizen owns it, or a corporation owns it, or a Native American tribe owns it, or the people of the United States of America own it, in the form of various parks and wilderness reserves.
How are you defining “remote”? If you mean as in “wilderness”, then that mainly belongs either to organizations like the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, or to various Native American tribes.
Here is a website discussing who’s in charge of what, more or less.
http://www.wilderness.net/nwps/legis/nwps_laws.cfm
May I suggest that if you’re looking for land to buy in Alaska, you simply Google things like “buy land alaska real estate”? 
May I also suggest that if you don’t find anything you like in Alaska proper (and I seriously doubt that you’ll find anything like a spare 100 square miles in the middle of Gates of the Arctic National Park that nobody seems to be claiming), that you consider places like the western Canadian provinces, the northernmost reaches of which should provide more than enough “remote-ness” to satisfy anybody.
The Canadian provinces that might interest you are:
Alberta (8117)
British Columbia (20804)
Manitoba (2910)
Northwest Territories (274)
Nunavut (313)
Saskatchewan (2602)
Yukon (350)
Alaska planned to move their capital to a new city built north of Anchorage. When word of this got out people ran out and bought the land near the proposed site so they could make a quick buck. Of course they decided to keep the capital in Juneau so the people were stuck with worthless land.
In our elections this fall, one of the hottest propositions is a vote to move the capitol. I think it will happen this time.
Federal government: 222 million acres, 60% of the total area of Alaska.
State government: Currently the state has received patent to approximately 90 million acres of the 105 million acres granted at statehood. This represents roughly 25% of the total area of Alaska.
Native lands: These are private lands held by regional and village Native corporations. 44 million acres are owned by Native corporations.
Private lands: Other than Native land, land in private ownership accounts for less than 1% of land in Alaska.
You can still homestead federal land in Alaska. But you have to live there, “improve” it, etc. The trouble with buying land for cheap is that very little is in private hands. You can’t just pick up thousands of acres for a few bucks, because there is no one to buy it from except the government, and they typically aren’t selling.
Land in private hands is generally land that someone wants already. If it is connected to the road system it is going to be much more expensive.
But the question becomes…what do you want the land for? If you just want to live in the wilderness, well, just head out. Who’s going to know? Of course, when you die of starvation next winter no one’s going to care either. If you want to own land so you can hike and camp and hunt and fish, well, you can do that on public lands. No need to own it yourself, and owning the land yourself doesn’t exempt you from hunting and fishing regulations. If you want it just for “bragging rights”, you can just get a small lot somewhere outside of Nome or something. It doesn’t have to be vast. Unless the whole point is “vastness”. If that’s the case, you’re going to have to pay vast sums of money, just like in the lower 48.
Heck, it’s probably easier to buy land for cheap in Montana or Wyoming, where more land is in private hands. There are plenty of farmers who are losing their shirts there who might be willing to sell. Alaska never had that period of small farmers, and so most of the land never got transfered to private hands.
You have been misinformed, Lemur866. The Federal Homestead Act of 1862 was repealed in 1976. The only way to obtain land in Alaska is to buy it at market value from private owners. The Bureau of Land Management, the largest holder of federal lands in Alaska, does sell land, but only very infrequently, due to congressional mandate in 1976 to retain public lands. There is no plan to sell BLM lands in Alaska in the near future.
Ooops, I grew up in Alaska and I guess I just remembered people talking about homesteading when I was a kid…and I must not have been paying attention in school when it was repealed. That’s what happens when you get your information from your personal memories…
Ah well. The main point though is that it might be much easier to buy vast tracts of land in Montana or North Dakota rather than Alaska.
To get the amount of land you’re talking about, you’ll need a ton of cash, or have to get a huge mortgage - for 25 full sections you’re definately talking millions of dollars. Mortgage payments plus property taxes and such of those proportions would be very difficult to pay off by working the land with anything less than a full workcrew and/or outside funding from some company (like selling 1/2 the timber or letting someone mine the hell out of it - picking berries for the local market or a 1 man saw mill won’t cut it)
What would you need such a huge tract of land for? Try walking around just one section of treed land, and you’ll quickly see that you can’t enjoy more than a tiney percent of even that at any given time. It’d probably take a lifetime to just explore 100 sq miles of Alaskan wilderness. But, the land is there and it can be bought; so if you’ve got everything figured out there’s not much stopping ya!
Lemur, perhaps you are remembering Alaska’s own homesteading program, which allowed Alaskan residents to claim state-owned land (but only 5 acres per person). This program was still active in the early 1980s, but it was discontinued at some time since then.
You need to define “remote,” as well. Someone might sell you a lovely piece of land that is inaccessible. Parts of Alaska can only be reached by plane, and the plane can only land when the earth is frozen. And if the land is THAT remote, someone paid huge sums of money to a surveyor to LAY OUT that piece of land!
Want something you can DRIVE to? Make sure you’ve got either dedicated roads, or nice, clear easements to access the land. It won’t do you much good if you have to stand on a mountain peak with a pair of binoculars to only LOOK at what you bought!
What about water? Remember, it’s COLD in Alaska. Drilling through frozen ground to reach water may not be the most pleasant outcome in the world! If you want to MELT ice and snow, then you’ll need some kind of FUEL.
And if you are drinking and eating on this hunk of land you own, you will have to deal with <ahem> body wastes. I don’t know what protocol serves when the land is too frozen to accept a septic system, but I’m willing to bet it’s NOT PRETTY.
Are you SURE about this?
~VOW
You need to define “remote,” as well. Someone might sell you a lovely piece of land that is inaccessible. Parts of Alaska can only be reached by plane, and the plane can only land when the earth is frozen. And if the land is THAT remote, someone paid huge sums of money to a surveyor to LAY OUT that piece of land!
Want something you can DRIVE to? Make sure you’ve got either dedicated roads, or nice, clear easements to access the land. It won’t do you much good if you have to stand on a mountain peak with a pair of binoculars to only LOOK at what you bought!
What about water? Remember, it’s COLD in Alaska. Drilling through frozen ground to reach water may not be the most pleasant outcome in the world! If you want to MELT ice and snow, then you’ll need some kind of FUEL.
And if you are drinking and eating on this hunk of land you own, you will have to deal with <ahem> body wastes. I don’t know what protocol serves when the land is too frozen to accept a septic system, but I’m willing to bet it’s NOT PRETTY.
Are you SURE about this?
~VOW
Pretty much concur with everyone here.
In the old days, you could indeed “homestead” a section, which I believe was 144 acres. But “homesteading” meant you had to put up a permanent dwelling (no tarp lean-tos) and actually live on the properlty for six to nine months of the year. You also had to “develop” either a quarter or a half, and “developing” meant putting up other buildings (subdividing) or clearing it for farming or raising livestock.
All the “local” or easily accessible homesteads pretty much statewide were long since snatched up by the late sixties, though increasingly remote lots were still available, as I recall, into the eighties.
Today, as already noted, if you want square miles of land, you’ll need cubic yards of money.
And as Lemur mentioned, just owning the land doesn’t exempt you from Fish & Wildlife regulations. Depending on where your estate ends up, you’ll still need permits or tags for moose or caribou, you’ll still be limited to X number of salmon from the streams (presuming you’re close enough to the coast) and bear will only be legal if it’s “in defense of life and property”.
There’s timber regulations that cover most of the state, including Native and private land, meaning there’s every chance you couldn’t log it anyway, even if it was close enough to run a road out tyo deliver the wood.
However, if you have a puddle-jumper and a pilot’s license (as something like one in twenty Alaskans do) if you can buy a mere dozen acres near a small lake somewhere remote but within a Supercub’s fuel limits of Anchorage, Fairbanks, or the Peninsula, you can plunk down a small cabin site. Who cares if you actually own it or not, you could easily be the only human and/or habitation in a sixty or seventy mile radius.
I’d still like to hear why FatDave wants that much land, that remote… Planning on studying wide-area beetle-kill progression? 