The Alaska Department of Fish and Game advises that you should avoid shooting a moose if you are more than a mile from your vehicle. The reason for this is that you will have as much as 700lb of meat to lug away with you and that will take many round trips with a full backpack over rough terrain.

Studying these instructions on a trip to Alaska last month, I concluded that killing a moose would be the easy bit. The magnificent beasts showed no apprehension when I stood ten feet away and snapped a picture. If I had taken one of my host's hunting rifles (and he had a great many lying around the place) even I could probably have bagged one of the 7,000 moose that are harvested each year. Butchering the thing and getting it back to the freezer before the meat spoilt or was claimed by a bear would have been a different challenge entirely.

Sarah Palin knows how to do that. The Republican vice-presidential candidate can kill, field-dress, cook and eat a moose. From here in Britain, or on the East and West coasts of America where the media bulls snort and grunt, the idea of someone with an ice chest full of moose burgers being a heartbeat away from the presidency seems alien.

But while there may be legitimate questions to be asked about Palin's experience and her political dealings, her Alaskan background will be attractive to many voters. Millions of Americans can easily relate to her way of life. Even if they don't hunt themselves, they find what she represents appealing. For Palin comes from a long line of tough pioneering women and from a state that inhabits a special place in the American imagination for its spectacular landscapes and the freedom you can find there.

Times Archive, 1886: Alaska

Nowhere in the wide domain of nature is the struggle for existence and the survival of the strongest more strikingly illustrated

• How women won the vote on the Pacific Coast, 1913

The myth of the frontiersman (and woman) is deeply embedded in the American culture. Early school history lessons dwell on Daniel Boone, who blazed a trail beyond the original 13 states into Kentucky. Boone believed that civilisation was closing in if he saw the fire of another settler on a distant mountain behind him. He would immediately move farther into the wilderness.

Eventually the pioneers who followed Boone conquered the whole continent. Compared with a country like Britain the contiguous US states are sparsely populated. But for many they are, nevertheless, suffocating. One Alaskan I met came from rugged Idado. He left for Alaska because his home state was “getting too crowded”.

Alaska was the 47th American state I have visited. It is like nowhere else. The landscape is so vast that you can fly for hours without seeing human civilisation. A population of 700,000 is scattered across territory three times the size of France.

Alaskans play up to the image of wildness. Car licence plates bear the legend “the last frontier”. But in many ways it is true.

Alaska is still a dangerous and hard place to live, even in the relatively clement summer, whether you are a halibut fisherman, an oil man on the North Slope or just someone commuting to work. There are few roads in Alaska and even in summer planes are used like buses. This is a state where the capital city, Juneau, cannot be reached by road from anywhere else.

Nancy, a delightful grandmother who dropped everything in her busy life to take me on a tour of the south east town of Homer, saw her parents killed in a plane crash a few years ago. The tragedy persuaded her it was time to get her own pilot licence.

A young, blonde, pregnant and gung-ho bush pilot explained that she charged £10 for pizza deliveries. As she landed the plane on a bumpy beach the tail hit the ground and the plane nearly tipped over. While I wondered if I had suffered cardiac arrest she whooped: “That's why I love Alaska!”, opened the door and pointed to a set of fresh wolf tracks in the sand.

The security briefing before a flight in a two-seater Super Cub to explore the interior of a volcano involved explaining how to use the radio to send a call for help after a crash and pointing out where the survival kit was. This consisted of a sleeping bag, a rifle and a box of ammunition.

A running story in Anchorage was of the hunt for a bear that had mauled several people on the outskirts of the city. My host recently walked into his kitchen to find a bear entering through the open French windows, drawn by the smell of fresh doughnuts. Man and bear stared at each other for a while before the bear ambled off. My host remained calm throughout, but then again he knows a thing or two about bears. The next day I sat on the bank of a creek with his wife as a half-tonne grizzly consumed a salmon ten feet from us.

Alaska is America's greatest wilderness and Americans dream of the liberation they will find there. They go to hike, hunt, take a cruise or embark on an adventurous new life, free of the constraints of the other America they call “the lower 48”.

The state is notorious for political corruption. Senator Ted Stevens, who has had Anchorage airport named after him during his lifetime, has been indicted on charges relating to gifts he allegedly received. If he is found guilty he will feel unlucky.

“Generally you can do what you like up here,” a fabulously bearded fellow in a National Rifle Association jacket assured me. “The cops don't bother you.”

The epithet “moose-hunting” will no doubt be forever attached to Sarah Palin's name. But to think that she will be regarded by US voters as too much of a hick for high office would be to underestimate the American love affair with its open landscapes and the fresh winds that blow out of them.

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