Travelers' Tales Alaska

by Bill Sherwonit

  Since we hadn’t seen any caribou on the way up from Galbraith Lake, Tony chartered a bush plane in Deadhorse. “No guarantees on seeing caribou,” an insouciant flyboy named Rick told him. “Those animals were born under a wandering star.”

  Marc, Jeannie, and I got an unofficial tour of the oil fields from twenty-year-old Teddy Westlake, who knew his ethnic makeup down to the fraction: 13/16 Eskimo, the rest white. My friends in the eco corps would have drummed me out: I liked the oil fields. I liked seeing caribou trails and even bear tracks within sight of the wellheads; I liked seeing eiders, tundra swans, and red-throated loons nesting in thaw lakes below drilling rigs. Most of all, I liked being in a place where real people worked at real jobs.

  The tour finished, Teddy drove us to the northern limit of North America. We got out of the truck and dipped our toes in the Arctic Ocean.

  In 1969, I came home from high school in Anchorage to join my mother in watching the first big North Slope oil lease sale on TV. She said, “Alaska will never be the same.” Twenty-nine years later, Mom and I drove up the pipeline haul road, a.k.a. the Dalton Highway, so she could see Prudhoe Bay. Now she stares grimly at the scarred gravel landscape, with its construction camp structures and industry logos, marching off into the fog. “So, Mom,” I ask, “what do you think about drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?” She peers into the distance towards the Arctic Ocean, then beyond. “Well…I think that if we keep destroying places, there won’t be any left. But I won’t see it…you will. And your kids will have to deal with it.”

  —Ellen Bielawski

  M.M. 188, WISEMAN—JULY 4-8. Three miles off the Dalton down a gravel track, Wiseman is a helter-skelter collection of mud-chinked log cabins, sled dogs barking in kennels, rutted dirt lanes, and a general store. It was founded in 1907 as a supply depot for miners. Robert Marshall used it as a base for his explorations, and described it as a village “Two hundred miles away from the twentieth century.” The opening of the Dalton has brought it closer: In a few cabin yards, amid the huskies’ cages and oil drums and battered pickup trucks, satellite dishes point skyward, seeking the signals of Oprah and Monday Night Football.

  Eleven miles from Wiseman was the Silverado Mine. It would be our jumping-off point for a four-day hike into the Brooks Range and Gates of the Arctic. Despite its name, the Silverado is a gold mine, and it is a big outfit: thirty miners and Cat skinners whose huge bulldozers had removed half a hillside.

  We backpacked into the bush, following a dogsled trail westward toward the Glacier River, ten miles away. About two miles in, we crossed into Gates of the Arctic. Around us, mountains soared, patched with dark-green spruce and the lighter greens of alder and willow swales. After five miles, we took a break beside a lake where a wigeon hen swam with her ducklings in tow.

  “Howdy!”

  The voice startled us. Up the trail came a man of about thirty, with a blond goatee. He wore a floppy hat, and an old Stevens side-by-side shotgun was in a scabbard strapped to his backpack. A gold pan shone from underneath the pack’s top flap. Beside him trotted a mongrel carrying a saddlebag of dog food.

  We invited him to join us for lunch. He declined food but sat down. His name was Doug, and he was a body-and-fender man from Homer, Alaska. He was camped near Wiseman, on the Koyukuk, where he was waiting for his partner to arrive from California.

  “We got a little gold claim we work up at Wild Lake,” he explained, gesturing vaguely at 100,000 acres of wilderness. “Summer’s my slow season, so I take some time off to work it. My partner’s late, and I got restless, thought I’d wander for a bit.”

  He noticed me eyeing the shotgun. “Only a twenty-gauge, but with rifle slugs, it’ll penetrate a bear’s skull.” He patted his cartridge belt. “Birdshot in case I run out of food. I wouldn’t shoot one of those wigeons, unless I got real hungry.”

  We chatted for a while, then Doug shouldered his pack, saying, “Be seeing you around.” Off he went with his dog, his gun, and his gold pan, as free as anyone can expect to be.

  It was 10:30 P.M. when we crested a 600-foot ridge, from which we looked down on the Glacier River, shimmering in the soft Arctic glow. We pitched camp on a bluff across the water from an abandoned cabin and built a crackling fire. There were wolf tracks in the river bank below, and the rocks in the riverbed were coral-hued and laid like the tiles in a terrazzo floor.

  We explored the Glacier River Valley the following day. If we hadn’t seen Doug, we would have thought ourselves the only people within fifty miles. He visited again, telling Marc that he had spotted a grizzly. Marc asked him what he liked most about Alaska. “The greatest thing,” he replied, “is that you only have to dig down a foot to keep your beer cold.”

  For me, it was the country that went on and on, the absence of marked trails and fences, and the presence of bears and wolves. It was the bald eagle on the Jim River, the golden eagles soaring above the high, windy Atigun Pass, and the Dall sheep in the Atigun’s meadows. It was the lone caribou bull whose rack rose like a king’s crown as he trotted across the tundra while we were heading back south from Deadhorse. It was the beautiful yellow blossom that’s called the tundra rose, and the fireweed that blazed on the mountainsides with a violet flame. It was nameless mountains and lakes.

  And it was watching Marc hike out of the wilderness on his own. He had grown impatient with our plodding, middle-aged pace and declared he would push on ahead, out of Gates of the Arctic. Still a bit shaken by the accident, I was reluctant. I thought about the grizzly Doug had seen, the fresh tracks we had spotted by a nearby creek, and the ten miles of Alaskan bush that lay ahead. But he was twenty-two. Robert Marshall had been in his twenties when he mapped the Brooks Range. Time to let go. Past time.

  “Well, take off, then,” I said and watched him stride across a broad tundra valley, his figure growing smaller until it was gone.

  Philip Caputo is a contributing editor for National Geographic Adventure magazine, and the author of numerous books, including A Rumor of War, Horn of Africa, and Means of Escape.

  MIKE STEERE

  Everything’s Oishi

  Who needs the Love Boat when you’ve got the sushi boat?

  THE GREEKS HAD HELEN OF TROY, WE HAD TETSUYA Sato, Ted to his friends. His was the face that launched our ship, the thirty-two-foot diesel cruiser Spring Song, chartered bareboat out of Juneau, Alaska, for a one-week cruise.

  The face did it a year earlier, when I was prospecting for boatmates. Up in Ted’s office in a Japanese commercial agency in Chicago, on business that had nothing to do with the trip, I knew he was the one. He looked susceptible to beauties as mighty as Alaska’s, and he looked like he wouldn’t be a pain in the ass. His wife, Reiko, when my wife, Sue, and I met her, looked the same way, but less pumpkinish and more like a classical-period woodcut. If Ted is folk art, Reiko is fine art.

  And there, at Spring Song’s table, was the face—round and boyish and lightly purpled from postprandial Chivas Regal. Ted ho-ho-hoed like a Ginza department-store Santa. Reiko smiled upon her husband’s hilarity. Sue and I enjoyed the aftershock from Reiko’s medium-spicy pork curry, served with rice made in a Panasonic computerized electric rice-cooker, part of Reiko and Ted’s field kitchen. Japanese cooking was their end of the deal we’d struck back in Chicago, where we all lived. I would be the skipper, splitting with Sue the general responsibilities of keeping Spring Song afloat and everybody alive, comfortable, and entertained.

  “Mike, this is great!” Ted said, waving his arms around the boat. “This is our dream!”

  You had to love his attitude. All the four of us had done so far was shop and haul supplies in cold rain heavy enough to melt the paper bags. We were free to shove off by late afternoon, but thirty-knot southeasterlies meant the trip down Stephens Passage would be frightful. The marine weather forecast said the next day would be better, but still probably seasick-making. So we stayed where we were, in Juneau, tied up to F-Float in Aurora Harbor, across a four-lane fr
om the high school. Lesser boatmates would have been bitching already. I’d heard them do it, having twice before chartered cruisers out of Juneau, where Sue and I used to live. On both trips, toxic group chemistry had fogged up what should have been a transforming look at Alaska.

  Veteran boaters know all about hell cruises. Nonboaters should imagine a bad date that lasts a week or more and costs in four figures, and on which you can drown. By the time I got to Juneau for Alaska Cruise III with the Satos, I feared tension and ill will more than submerged rocks, icebergs, early autumn gales, tides, hypothermia, drowning, marooning and the claws and teeth of grizzly bears—all of which were, to varying extents, real hazards. Fear reduced me to looking for omens. Send me, O Lord, a sign that this trip will be better than the last one, and the one before that. Send me a sign that I wasn’t the jerk.

  The signs that had been showing all day were good—so good that I tried not to credit them, for fear of a jinx. Maybe Sue and I had finally found the right people to take cruising in the bays and coves at the south end of Admiralty Island, our own elysian wilderness. We’d been to Admiralty many times, but we had yet to get there in a happy sleep-aboard boat.

  Million-acre Admiralty Island is by far the least logging-disfigured of Southeast Alaska’s large islands. You can cruise all day, alone in what John Muir, who coasted Admiralty in a canoe, called “this foodful, kindly wilderness.” Our plan, if you could call it a plan, followed Muir’s words. We wanted to eat whatever the island’s streams and tidewater provided and generally let it be as kind to us as it was in the mood to be. We wanted to deepen our old friendship with Admiralty Island.

  From the first night on, we’d be where we wanted to be, in flawless maritime wilderness. We had a full day’s travel to Gambier Bay on the south side of Admiralty, our first anchorage. Then we had five days to poke around Gambier and neighboring coasts and bays. We’d move as often as we felt the need, taking time for hikes and tide-pool-poking, fishing, and whatever else came up. On the way back to Juneau we planned to stop in Tracy Arm, a deep mainland fjord with a tidewater glacier. We weren’t cruising so much as sauntering around the continent’s grandest wild coast.

  Rain pattered like mice in the ceiling. While we slept, the tide lifted us nineteen feet and then dropped us thirteen. The rain was still falling when Ted and Sue threw off the lines and Spring Song burbled away from the dock. Reiko doing her molecular post-breakfast cleanup, missed the commotion of casting off. “Oh,” she said, “we are moving.”

  Moving was the least of it. We were undergoing a change a state, ascending from pavement-plodders to beings glorious and free. The pitch of idiot glory went up with the howl of the 170-horse Yanmar diesel. Spring Song passed downtown Juneau eye-to-eye with fishing boats, tugs and barges, and work crews’ floats. Vessels that earn their livings dominated the waterfront, and their company made everything saltier and more real. The cruise ships were another cause for self-congratulation. We were nobody’s passengers—we were captain and crew, with sovereign privilege to screw things up and sink. If something horrible happened, it would be our fault. No, it would probably be my fault. That knowledge gave tremendous comfort. Ted and Reiko, who had never been boating before, swaggered around like Gregory Peck on the Pequod. “This is great,” everybody shouted. “Isn’t this great?”

  A small private boat may be more luxurious, but the state ferry can get you to Admiralty Island more cheaply than either yacht or cruise ship. The Marine Highway system connects Bellingham, Washington, and Prince Rupert, British Columbia, with the southeastern ports of Hyder/Stewart, Ketchikan, Metlakatla, Hollis, Petersburg, Wrangell, Kake, Sitka, Angoon, Pelican, Hoonah, Tenakee Springs, Juneau, Haines, and Skagway. Vessels carry from 210 to 625 passengers. Some have overnight cabins and room for vehicles, but you can save even more money by leaving your car at home and pitching a tent on the deck.

  —Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Juneau’s saltwater egress is Gastineau Channel, a ten-mile-long glacier-dug ditch banked by mountains. That morning clouds wrapped and unwrapped the summits, and scraps of cloud littered the mountainsides. The bigger ones plumed like smoke from cold, wet forest fires; the smallest floated like the ectoplasms in Madame Blavatsky’s séances. It was, of course, still raining, but the rain didn’t matter. Once we passed town and the end of the road system, the vile weather became a Wagnerian atmospheric, so gloomy it was sort of fun.

  The channel took us to the junction of Taku Inlet, a big mainland fjord, and Stephens Passage, which wraps around the eastern and northern sides of Admiralty Island. This was our crossing into the huge hell-and-gone. The wind rose and pushed up steep little rollers, the tops of which bucketed against the pilothouse windows. The boat started a hoglike rooting in the wave tops. Comfort and morale, not to mention our breakfasts, were in imminent danger, witness Ted and Reiko’s verdigris skin tone. My own stomach and balance organs opened disturbing lines of communication. “I think,” I said, studying the sky and whitecaps and trying to sound captainly, “it’s going to get really rough.” If the wind and seas got up to the high end of the marine weather forecast, we’d be taking five- and six-foot chops right on the nose, and Spring Song would be bucking like a Brahman bull. The boat, I knew, would do fine, but we’d be over our limits. It was time to ease over to the mainland side of the passage so we could duck into a bay if the ride got too rough.

  But then, almost instantaneously, the wind dropped, and Stephens Passage smoothed and shone like polished pewter. Spring Song eased into a motherly rise and fall. “Oh, we are very lucky,” Ted sing-songed, as he would every now and again for the rest of the trip. He was right. This was the first of September, which in some years is already deep into Southeast Alaska’s season of wet, wind, and gloom. The weather could go down the tubes for weeks, even months. Every clear hour was a gift.

  The spasm of foul weather put another mental barrier between us and Juneau, which itself was retreating toward Chicago. The only thing close now was Admiralty Island. From its northeastern corner, about a dozen miles from Juneau, we followed the eastern shore southward. The island looked dark and implosive, intent on its own comings and goings.

  Admiralty’s Tlingit natives have always recognized a non-human suzerainty over their island. They called it Kootznoowoo, Fortress of the Bears. The Russians named it Ostrov Kutsnoi, Island of Fear. Their fear probably had more to do with the bellicose Tlingit, whose village of Angoon, which is still the island’s only year-round settlement, was later flattened by American gunboats. The least relevant island name, and the one that stuck—Admiralty—is owed to political logrolling. In 1794 Captain George Vancouver surveyed the island and named it after his employer, the British Admiralty.

  For 180 years white people did little damage to Admiralty. The British just looked. The Russians wiped out the sea otters, then made a halfhearted try at coal mining. Yankees made their bid with whaling stations, mineral prospecting, salmon canneries, fox farms, and some spotty logging. Only logging became a threat to the wild entirety. When it did, the island became again Kootznoowoo, Fortress of the Bears.

  A bear-killing human and a human-killing bear first made Admiralty a wilderness cause célèbre. In 1927 professional hunter John Holzworth publicized threats to Admiralty’s huge population of grizzlies from overhunting and development. Two years later a bear killed a forest ranger on the island. One newspaper in Juneau called for the extermination of grizzlies, to make Southeast more logger-friendly

  Thus began the bear-flavored logging argument over Admiralty that lasted half a century. The island was finally saved in 1978 with the creation of Admiralty Island National Monument, to be managed by the Forest Service, which had been about to welcome industrial-scale logging with, among other things, lavish outlays of federal money. There is a handful of unwild enclaves—the village of Angoon, a native-owned parcel that’s being clear-cut, a mining operation at the island’s northern end, a peninsula outside the national monument boundary that may yet be logged
—but these are lost in the million acres. Admiralty, which falls within the Tongass National Forest, is by far the greatest intact tract of the Northwest’s ancient coastal rainforest.

  Bears are a chief reason that Admiralty was spared from the Forest Service’s War on Trees. The island has one of the densest populations of grizzlies on earth—almost a bear per square mile for 1,709 square miles. This is more than ten times the grizzly population density of Yellowstone National Park, eight times that of Glacier. Still, unless you’re around salmon streams when the fish are running or are otherwise seeking them out, you probably won’t see bears. When you do, the island makes them small. In giant old growth, an adult grizzly can look like a raccoon. Of course you, the looker, are more like a ground squirrel. The only colossus is Kootznoowoo, the Fortress.

  Late on our first day out we got a look at what could have happened to Admiralty Island. The forest near Hobart Bay showed enormous off-color patches, as if badly woven and faded synthetic had been sewn onto the dark natural fabric of old growth. Stumps and old downed tree trunks shone in the cheap green. Sue and I could see that the land was being spectacularly “nuked,” as they say in Southeast. The locals, who also call logged-over country “hammered,” still seem to be searching for the right word for such wreckage, which spreads 100 to 200 acres a day in logging season in Tongass National Forest, half again as much in native-owned forest.