Southwest Alaska

Southwest Alaska is a region of the U.S. state of Alaska. The area is not exactly defined by any governmental administrative region(s); nor does it always have a clear geographic boundary.

Southwest Alaska includes a huge swath of terrain 500 miles (800 km) from the western Bering Sea coast to Cook Inlet. Although much of the region is coastal, it also includes tens of thousands of square miles of interior boreal forests, swamps, and highlands, and the immense mountain barrier of the southern Alaska/Aleutian Range. The Aleutian Range, part of the Ring of Fire, includes many of Alaska's volcanoes including Mount Katmai, Novarupta and the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, Mount Redoubt, Mount Iliamna, and Augustine Volcano.

Southwest Alaska encompasses, roughly from west to east: the Pribilof Islands, Nunivak Island and other Bering Sea islands lying west of the Alaska coast and east of the Russian coast; the immense combined delta of the Yukon River and Kuskokwim River; hundreds of miles of interior highlands, including the lower and middle Kuskokwim drainages; the entire watersheds of Goodnews Bay and Bristol Bay and other parts of the southern coast, including mountain ranges and great interior lakes including the Wood-Tikchik Lakes, Lake Iliamna, and Lake Clark; the western heights of the Alaska Range, and its continuation southward as the Aleutian Range along the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands. The Kodiak Archipelago, in the Pacific east of the Alaska Peninsula, is the most eastern part of Southwest Alaska.

Southwest Alaska consists roughly of the Aleutians East, Bristol Bay, Kodiak Island, Lake and Peninsula boroughs, plus the portion of the Kenai Peninsula Borough that lies west of Cook Inlet; along with the Aleutians West, Bethel, Dillingham, and Kusilvak census areas. These areas have a combined area of 170,732 square miles (442,190 km²), slightly larger than California.

Volcanic eruptions and mountain-building are active along the Ring of Fire, while in far western Alaska lava fields only a few thousand years old are common. In between lie an incomplete record of rocks from as old as 2.07 Ga years to the Holocene. A sequence of continental fragments, seafloor, and island arcs, torn, rafted, and assembled by plate tectonics, form the Proterozoic, Paleozoic and Mesozoic basement for more recent Mesozoic and Cenozoic rocks deposited on top of, and intruded into, them.

Southwest Alaska had a population of 53,349 as of the 2000 census, less than one-tenth of Alaska's inhabitants. The population is in large part Alaska Native, with 58.1% identifying as entirely or partly "Native American" in the 2000 census. About 121 towns and villages, generally far apart and with populations in the hundreds, exist in the region.

Southwest Alaska can be considered to be the areas assigned to 4 of the 12 land-holding Alaska Native Corporations in 1971 for selection of land and for corporate organization of villages under ANCSA.

The Calista Corporation region is in the Yukon/Kuskokwim delta, the lower and middle reaches of the Kuskokwim River drainage, and the Bering Sea coast from the Yukon to Cape Newenham. It contains 56 villages with a total population of about 23,000 people; Bethel (5,471), is the largest and is the commercial hub for the Kuskokwim region. The Calista region is outlined by the combined Kusilvak and Bethel Census Areas. Calista owns 4,997,263 acres (20,223 km²) of the 41,713,612 acres (168,809 km²) in the region, almost all the rest is owned by the state or federal government.