This year’s tour, Hearth & Homestead: Matriarchs of the Midnight Sun, honors the women who built Alaska from the inside out — raising families, feeding strangers, and holding households together under the midnight sun. Visitors will hear the living histories of 12 remarkable matriarchs, brought to life by local presenters among the headstones.

Among those featured are two women who each lived to 102, embodying Alaskan endurance and fortitude. One raised six children alone on a subsistence homestead, hunting, gardening, and sewing to keep her family fed through long winters. The other opened her home and heart to generations of Palmer travelers, offering a warm meal, a clean bed, and the kind of hospitality that defined frontier Alaska.