And then there are the buffalo. The herd the government released in the 1920s never left — it roams free on the Delta Bison Range to this day, a few hundred animals strong, and it's the reason the town was once called Buffalo Center and why a bison silhouette still feels like the truest emblem of the place. Between the highway's end, the free-roaming herd, the old roadhouses, and the valley farms, Delta Junction has a stack of genuinely Alaskan identities most towns its size could never claim — earned at the end of the longest road on the continent.
This has always been a crossroads. The Tanana River Valley is Athabascan homeland, and the route through it became the Valdez-to-Fairbanks Trail in the early 1900s, carrying gold-seekers and freight between the coast and the Interior. A telegraph station went up in 1904; roadhouses followed to feed and shelter the travelers, including Sullivan Roadhouse in 1905 and Rika's Roadhouse around 1909, the latter run for decades by the Swedish immigrant Rika Wallen and now the centerpiece of Big Delta State Historical Park. In the 1920s the government chose the Delta country for a buffalo-importation experiment, trucking plains bison up from Montana — and the free-roaming herd stuck, giving the place its first name: Buffalo Center.
Why People Visit Delta Junction Alaska
- Get your photo and certificate at the End of the Alaska Highway, Milepost 1422, at the Triangle.
- Visit Big Delta State Historical Park and Rika's Roadhouse (1909) on the Tanana River.
- Tour Sullivan Roadhouse, among the oldest in Interior Alaska, by the visitor center.
- Watch for the free-roaming Delta bison herd on the Delta Bison Range.
- Fish and camp at Quartz Lake, and catch the Deltana Fair in late July.
