The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960

by Douglas Brinkley

  Clearly, Adams represented an ideal blend of empathy with the outdoors, artistic visualization, mathematical calculation, intense patience, wizardry with a camera, and proficiency in the darkroom. He was a master of nonanimal nature. In Alaska, having hauled his equipment up a steep incline with only his son to help him, he was determined to succeed. Undeterred by the intermittent downpours, he captured the frozen splendor of McKinley at an instant in summer. He had waited for the miraculous moment, with all the elements aligned just right, and clicked. It was a matter of mathematics and heart. Somehow he had captured both the “spectacular” and “quiet still life” of Mount McKinley.27

  II

  From Mount McKinley National Park, Adams and his son headed to Fairbanks and had a plentiful meal. Then they boarded an airplane headed to Juneau and went on to capture the natural essence of Glacier Bay National Monument. Unlike McKinley, where any photographer knew what to aim at, Glacier Bay didn’t have a centerpiece. As a warm-up exercise Adams took minimalist still-life shots: a blade of grass, a veiny leaf, smooth rock faces—the elements of nature at Glacier Bay. Working in black and white, Adams was more interested in geometric shapes than in the wildflowers amid the ice such as yellow paintbrush, blue nootka lupine, or red dwarf firewood. Adams’s image Trailside, for example, a botanical composition of ferns taken outside Juneau in a rain forest, was a work of modern art in its utter simplicity and lack of ornamentation. In its own way, it prefigured the abstract expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko. From Adams’s perspective, kelp beds, besides being a crucial habitat for sea otters, became a work of minimalism to equal examples by Donald Judd or Carl Andre.

  When the weather held up, Adams aimed for the Gustavus Forelands, the monument’s largest glacial outwash plain, located near the entrance of Glacier Bay. He had little success and felt frustrated. When the light wasn’t right, he read books and chatted with the fishermen who worked in Cross Sound. Agents of the National Park Service gladly ferried Adams about the park, enabling him to get close to the brittle surfaces of Margerie Glacier and Johns Hopkins Glacier. But Adams felt that his creative output from Glacier Bay was thin. There was no green fern light to create magic. Somewhat embarrassingly, all Adams had to show from the outings into the whipping fog was a handful of gray negatives. “The weather was so bad that Ansel got very few pictures,” Michael recalled. “It was sort of an abortive trip.”28

  A professional nature photographer in the 1940s was, by definition, also a professional traveler. Every day Adams was being hustled off in planes or motorboats in pursuit of it. A nonstop roamer, he enjoyed this aspect of his vocation. While Carmel was his home, and tides were his timepiece, his spirit was footloose. Creatively, he was never at ease. Constantly worried about the light, in need of a strong assistant to help with the heavy lifting, and with a meteorologist’s understanding of shifting winds and tides, Adams, cameras in hand and dangling around his neck, was a distinctive figure in postwar America. His visual intelligence was probably comparable to that of an eagle or a hawk. But all his comings and goings led to occasional accidents. He had been lucky not to collide with a moose at Mount McKinley, and he had a serious mishap at Glacier Bay. One afternoon while unloading gear from a seaplane, Adams dropped the suitcase holding his shot film into a few feet of cold water. Upon opening the case he found that water had indeed seeped in and damaged his work. He felt ill. All he could do was wait to get to Seattle and send the damaged film to Pirkle Jones in San Francisco, a wizard whose forte was repairing damaged film. “I was naturally quite worried about them,” Adams recalled, “but thanks to Pirkle’s care only a few were irreparably damaged; my prized Mount McKinley negatives were perfect.”29

  Adams wasn’t through with Glacier Bay National Monument. Determined to get a better series of photographs of the mountains, forests, glaciers, and seascapes in the famous Inside Passage, and with the Guggenheim Foundation continuing to pay his expenses, Adams returned to Juneau in the early spring of 1949. He wrapped himself up in a U.S. Army surplus parka to stay dry, but weariness and boredom consumed him. He found himself cursing the bad weather. Determined to shake the rainy-day blues, he visited Muir Inlet on the eastern arm of upper Glacier Bay, where Muir had indeed camped in 1879. Adams took note that the calving glacier had receded seventeen miles since then. Adams himself now practically glowed at seeing the glacier glisten in the effervescent mist, a kaleidoscope of light reflecting off the bluish-green ice. Chunks of ice collapsed into the frigid waters. To Adams, life seemed to thrive in the waters around Glacier Bay. A feeling of creative exuberance swept over him. Catchmen’s basins were filled with mussels and crabs and starfish. “This harsh land,” Adams wrote, “is blessed by the beautiful northern light and the constant, cleansing rain.”

  This time Adams was working with the experts of the U.S. Geological Survey who were studying the territory’s more than 100,000 glaciers. For days Adams traveled with them in planes and helicopters, learning everything possible about glacial systems, from why ice flowed down the valley to the process of firnification. It was impossible for an intelligent man like Adams to inspect a glacier’s terminus and not be overwhelmed by its titanic force. A number of the seventeen tidewater glaciers Adams visited were calving, dropping huge hunks of ice into the waterways with thunderous splashes. Adams found it mind-boggling that the Stikine Icefield blanketed more than 2,900 square miles along the Coastal Mountains that defined the U.S.-Canadian border. “In Alaska,” Adams wrote, “I felt the full force of vast space and wilderness.”30

  The question facing Adams at Glacier Bay was exactly what constituted the essence of the national park. How could he get one perfect shot, a representative glimpse into such a spread-out, diverse ecosystem with thousands of varied natural features? Instead of aiming his camera at Muir Glacier, Adams took his best photographs by shooting a chunk of ice jutting out of a bay like a colossal piece of crystal. He titled the composition Grounded Iceberg; it’s included in the oversize hardback edition of An Autobiography. This is not one of Adams’s great landscape photographs, but it aptly captures the sensation of a water world, of the isolation, frozenness, and summer thaws that are characteristic of Glacier Bay National Monument.

  That summer, Adams once again fell in love with Alaska’s steep mountains and intricate waterways. A connoisseur of rain, because it often scrubbed the sky, he now complained it “RAINS AND RAINS AND RAINS AHHHHHH PLOP!”31 Overall, however, his letters to friends in the Lower Forty-Eight reveal a boisterous enthusiasm for Glacier Bay that almost equals his passion for Yosemite. For example, here is his letter of June 25, 1949, to his friends Beaumont and Nancy Newhall:

  Dear B & N,

  WHAT A FLIGHT TODAY! Was in Grumman Amphibian which was dropping loads of supplies to advance base of Juneau Ice Field Expedition. . . .

  We crossed and re-crossed 600 square miles of glaciers and ice fields, and encircled the most incredible crags and spires I ever imagined. Bearclaw Peak rises sheer 5000 feet above the ice. We flew around it about 1000 feet distant!

  Pictures will help to describe it! The rear door was open to permit dumping loads by parachute. I am full of fresh air, spray on the take-off, noise, but simply unbelievable scenery.

  I am afraid Alaska is the Place for me! I am NUTS about it.

  Best to you and all our friends, Ansel32

  When Adams’s retrospective opened at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art in June 1949, his Alaskan photographs generated considerable excitement. (He himself was in Alaska and missed the opening.) Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake was a standout. Everybody, it seemed, agreed that the shots of McKinley had a rare originality: minimalism meeting romanticism in the forlorn Alaskan Range. Like Muir before him, Adams used his photographs to encourage tourists to visit Alaska with their own cameras in hand. He wanted everyone to experience the national parks. In Alaska many ridges remained unclimbed. A new consultant for the Polaroid Corporation, Adams urged amateurs, the core of the conservation movement, to t
ry to capture Mount McKinley and Glacier Bay in their own photographs. The rewards of Alaska, he would tell students at the Ansel Adams Yosemite Workshop (an intense, short photography program held annually in California’s premier national park beginning in 1955), were life-changing. As the new oracle for the Sierra Club and a true disciple of Muir, Adams knew that only seeing Alaska would lead to saving the last frontier. Echoing Horace Greeley’s “Go west, young man,” Adams said to the postwar generation, “Go to Alaska, folks, and bring a camera.”33

  III

  Two female pilots—Virginia “Ginny” Hill and Celia Hunter—followed Adams’s advice. Because they became lifelong friends during World War II, when they served in the Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASP) corps, Hill and Hunter are almost always written about together in histories of Alaskan conservationism. Both were born and raised in Washington state; they had conservationist values instilled in them when they were girls; they opened Camp Denali together to promote what is now called ecotourism; and in the late 1950s they fought dramatically to save Arctic Alaska as a U.S. National Wildlife Refuge. “Do we really want,” Ginny would ask, “to make Alaska over in the image of Los Angeles?”34

  The WASPs represented those can-do outfits that later led the journalist Tom Brokaw to call the World War II generation the “greatest.” After Pearl Harbor there had been a serious shortage of pilots for small planes. General Hap Arnold, chief of the army air forces, decided to recruit women pilots. The idea was to train women to do all the domestic aviation—transporting cargo from warehouses to bases, for example—while the men engaged in combat missions in the European and Pacific theaters. Both Hunter and Hill entered the program. “We became known as flyer girls,” Hill recalled. “We towed targets for live air-to-air gunnery, testing aircraft . . . whatever we were asked to do.”35

  Luckily for historians, Hill kept a marvelous scrapbook of her experiences in WASP. It was filled with newspaper clippings, postcards from Texas and California, and photos of the women pilots. One document confirms that she got her pilot’s license on March 31, 1943; earned $1,800 annually; and was affiliated with the 319 AAFFTD. There is a Life cover story about women in the sky, and there are lots of letters home. “Something new in army discipline—a girl in our platoon was reprimanded by the C.O. for knitting while she marched,” Hill wrote on February 19, 1943. “She had a ball of yarn stuffed in the leg pocket of her ‘zoot suit’ and was blithely knitting on, purling too, while she marched to and from mess. We are treated and trained just like the Air Corps Cadets but once in a while signs of the feminine gender pop up.”36

  Hill was a cutup, always spoofing the WASPs, doodling for fun, and writing racy (for those days) doggerel. Ginny couldn’t stand to be bored. She liked to joke that she and Celia were “Daring Young Girls” on the “Flying Trapeze.” But the scrapbooks also revealed Hill to be an excellent organizer. Every scrap of paper she saved was pasted in her fat maroon book and perfectly aligned. And she was considered one hell of a pilot. She was a master of the fundamentals of aviation, and cockpit procedure was second nature to her: fasten seat belts . . . unlock controls . . . check gas . . . Hill would usually fly out of Seattle to Portland, Yakima, and Spokane. The Northwest was her official beat. Walt Disney had published a WASP songbook for which he drew the cover cartoon himself: it was a wide-eyed little girl with aviator goggles. Hill knew all of Disney’s tunes by heart, singing her way up and down the Pacific Coast. “Usually there was nothing down below,” she said, “but mountains, forests, or water.”37

  Both Hill and Hunter were annoyed by a weird law that wouldn’t allow women pilots out of Seattle to ferry military planes any farther north than Great Falls, Montana. “We ferried them from factories clear across the U.S.,” Hunter recalled, “but ‘sorry, gals, turn them over to the men here’ and they got to fly them on the Northwest Staging Route through Edmonton, Fort Nelson, Watson Lake, and Whitehorse to Fairbanks.”

  The male pilots, rubbing in the sexist rule, used to tease Hill and Hunter by saying that Alaska was for real pilots, that the fog and sleet were not for the fainthearted female. These taunts stuck in the women’s craw. After the war, Hunter and Hill concocted a scheme to borrow two planes and fly to Fairbanks. They were like mountain climbers wanting to reach the top of Mount McKinley. Alaska . . . all that space below . . . the “great land” from the bird’s-eye view of the cockpit. Even though Hill’s plane was not really airworthy, they named the aircraft Lil’ Igloo and took off for the wild blue yonder. It took them twenty-seven days to fly from Puget Sound to Fairbanks. They landed on January 1, 1947, in a blizzard. The Fairbanks Daily Mirror recorded minus fifty degrees Fahrenheit; what a way to start the new year!

  Hunter and Hill celebrated their successful flight and were greeted in Fairbanks with good cheer. The only problem was that they were snowed in for weeks. “We were two babes in a man’s world,” Hill recalled. “We were bored. We saw a posted sign that read ‘Skiing: Women Wanted.’ Well . . . I grew up in the snow and figured why not.”38

  On a ski mountain, Hill met her future husband, Morton “Woody” Wood. A U.S. Army veteran of the famous Tenth Mountain Division, Wood had seen combat in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war Wood, an expert mountaineer, took classes at the University of Alaska. A forestry major at the University of California and later the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, he would eventually become a park manager at Mount McKinley National Park. “He asked me on a date to a downtown diner and dance,” she recalled. “All the guys around Fairbanks were rough. He was a gentleman. I was hooked. We got married and made Alaska our lives.”39 From the beginning of Ginny’s marriage, her life still included her best friend, Celia Hunter.

  Ginny Hill and Celia Hunter fell head over heels in love with Alaska. Just as Ansel Adams wanted to share his photos of Mount McKinley with the world, Ginny recalled wanting to have all her good friends fly with her over the 20,000-foot peak. For a while Celia worked as a flight attendant on the first trips by Alaska Airlines to Kotzebue and Nome. Meanwhile, the newlywed Woods bought a used Cessna 170, believing that nature tourism would soon become a big business in Alaska. Woody worked for the U.S. Department of the Interior for a while, but the pay wasn’t good. He also earned his pilot’s license, with Ginny acting as instructor. Together they started taking people to Fairbanks on aerial tours of Alaska. “Ansel Adams had opened things up with his photography of Alaska,” Ginny recalled. “Everybody we took just couldn’t believe Denali from the air. There wasn’t anything like it in North America.”40

  Influenced by Adams, American families started planning to spend summers in national parks like Mount McKinley and Glacier Bay. The Woods joined forces with Celia Hunter and opened Camp Denali in 1952, building their own rustic cabins not far from Wonder Lake and shipping in equipment from Fairbanks. Camp Denali was like a rustic Adirondacks village in the heart of frontier Alaska. “The connection with the land was important,” Morton Wood recalled. “It was important to us and important to our guests.”41

  Camp Denali became a hit with tourists. Once Denali Highway opened in 1957, linking Richardson Highway to McKinley Park, a new wave of tourists came by automobile to see America’s tallest peak. The McKinley Park Station Hotel, which had opened in 1939, was more service-oriented, with picture-perfect window views by a communal fireplace. What the Woods and Hunter achieved at Camp Denali was an old-style log camp (right down to the cabin doors, with wood and leather pulls). It was a rustic retreat where Ansel Adams’s Mount McKinley at Wonder Lake could be seen for real. The combination of Adams and the WASPs opened up interior Alaska to tourists as never before; the money was in nature photographs, not the extraction industries.

  Nobody before or since Adams has ever taken such luminous photographs of America’s treasured landscapes. His 1947 composition Moon and Mount McKinley has adorned numerous calendars and greeting cards. There is no such thing as a “dated” photograph of Alaska by Adams—his images are all flawless and eternal. It’s as
if Adams had made himself part of the vast Denali wilderness. If you stayed in a cabin at Camp Denali long enough, you became part of the experience of the place. A new postwar generation was seeking to get away from the suburban doldrums and to discover America’s national parks. “You must be able to touch the living rock, drink the pure water, scan the great vistas, sleep under the stars, and awaken to the cool dawn wind,” Adams wrote. “Such experiences are the heritage of all people.”42

  Chapter Sixteen - Pribilof Seals, Walt Disney, and the Arctic Wolves of Lois Crisler

  I

  Walt Disney, a veteran of World War I, wanted to help the United States strike back against the Japanese following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Patriotically, he put his film company at the disposal of the U.S. War Department. Working with the director Frank Capra, he made films for the Army Signal Corps’s series “Why We Fight,” which explained America’s rationale for going to war.1 When a patrol–torpedo boat squadron asked for a cartoon insignia, Disney gladly obliged without remuneration and quickly produced an image of a mosquito carrying a torpedo on its back. That morale-boosting, comical mosquito became very popular in Alaska, where the actual insect was a menace.

  Other outfits in the armed forces soon wanted their own insignia, and Disney’s studio was inundated with requests. Stationed on Kodiak Island in December 1941, for example, was a forlorn naval base with only seventeen minutes’ worth of ammunition. The base was run by the Western Defense Command in San Francisco under the leadership of General Simon Buckner, tasked with protecting the Aleutians from a Japanese attack. When, in June 1942, the Japanese landed 8,600 troops on Kiska and Attu islands, Buckner’s mission to thwart them became a national security priority. This was the first occupation of U.S. soil by a foreign country since the War of 1812. Over the coming months Allied aircraft dropped more than 7.5 million pounds of bombs on these two Alaskan islands, forcing the Japanese to retreat westward. Alaska was becoming an important theater of war, though that is now widely forgotten. The Western Defense Command, however, didn’t have a logo for its Alaska Defense Command (ADC) as 1943 began.