Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now

by C. B. Bernard

  Some people chose to live there, outside town, and the houses along the road, more private and more remote, were also more expensive, requiring wells, septic tanks, and generators. Today about 1,300 people live “out the road,” as it’s called locally, where NOAA statistics say it’s rainier than downtown Juneau itself, which gets 91 inches of rain and 94 inches of snow each year.

  The end of the road also isolated Juneau from the rest of the world. If the road didn’t end, you could reach the capital by car from Haines to the north. Over the years, discussions have taken place about punching the road through to Haines or Skagway. Proponents say it would open Juneau to opportunity. Critics say it would open Juneau to everything else. A study by the state estimated an increase of 3,400 additional RV visits the first year, and as many as 80,000 drive-in visitors. In 2008 the Army Corps of Engineers approved a permit to begin an extension along Lynn Canal to connect the road to a new ferry terminal north, a few miles outside Haines at the mouth of the Katzahin River. Ferries would shuttle cars the remaining distance, connecting Juneau not only to Haines, a neat little town of around 1,100, but with the rest of the world—Haines lies on the highway system. Federal money was earmarked for the project. The Environmental Protection Agency approved it. Public sentiment remained lukewarm at best.

  The idea wasn’t new, nor was the opposition. If Alaskans do one thing well, it’s oppose things. A survey of Juneau, Haines, and Skagway residents five years earlier found that they strongly supported improved access, but each community differed over how to improve it. Juneau residents split fairly evenly between extending the road and not, but in the ensuing years the “No Road” folks have become better organized and taken their challenge to the court system, itself a congested legal road with low speed limits. They argue in favor of channeling the huge cost of extending the road into existing infrastructure, like the Alaska Marine Highway System ferries. They say construction of the nearly 51-mile extension would create an environmental threat, that it’s too difficult to engineer, that avalanches would close the road for more than a month each year, that it would ruin Juneau, that it would ruin Alaska.

  Six plaintiffs filed a complaint alleging that the state and the Federal Highway Administration failed to comply with the National Forest Management Act, National Environmental Policy Act, Bald Eagle Protection Act, Endangered Species Act, and Administrative Procedures Act. The court ruled against the project and a subsequent appeal in 2011, and planners went back to the drawing board.

  In the meantime, the road still ends 40-something miles outside town, just as it did when I first visited Juneau. I want to show Kim the Here Be Dragons sign, so we fold into our tiny rental car and head out. Once you clear downtown and the valley sprawl, there’s only one road—the road—but it has two names. It was once called the Old Glacier Highway, and the root portion of it still is, but at some point the State of Alaska named the last portion, from the ferry terminal at Auke Bay to the end at Echo Cove, the Veterans Memorial Highway. Our maps all refer to it as the Glacier Highway, as do materials published by the City and Borough of Juneau, but Google Maps alternates between that name and Veterans Memorial Highway. Even navigating just that one road, I get lost.

  “There’s only one road,” says a woman in a parking lot whom we ask for directions. “Go left at those lights, and get on it. Then don’t get off it until it ends.”

  As we drive, the scenery around us becomes more dramatic, the houses and development thinning. I tell Kim about the sign, how the road is unpaved beyond it, but it’s still safe to drive in the summer, scenic and beautiful all the way to Echo Cove, where we can turn around and come back.

  But I’ve been away a long time. In the interim, the road has been paved all the way to Echo Cove, now ending in a large, paved parking lot and boat ramp. Just beyond the parking lot, the road ends at a fence. There’s a sign there. It says: END.

  “You want a picture of that?” Kim asks.

  On the way back to town, we stop at Auke Lake, billed as “one of the most photographed spots in Alaska.” While Kim wanders around, I read that Auke derives from a name for a group of Tlingit who occupied the area, the Auk-Kwaan, and means “lake.” Which makes the translation: Lake Lake. We stop at the Wal-Mart, boxy and indistinguishable as the others in the Lower 48, except for the ridiculously beautiful glacier hanging in the mountains behind it. Even the box stores here have a view.

  Then we stop at the Mendenhall Glacier, a high spot of Juneau tourism and one of Alaska’s most accessible glaciers, where the US Forest Service built the nation’s first visitor center. It contains educational exhibits, hosts guest speakers, and offers a viewing window for rainy days and an ample parking lot, with turnarounds for the cruise line buses that wait impatiently, engines idling.

  Wide, paved trails follow the curves of Mendenhall Lake to Nugget Falls, the five-story waterfall near the face of the glacier, offering impressive views of both the glacier and its overhanging icefield. In the winter the lake becomes a popular ice-skating platform, the calved icebergs immobile obstacles, the glacier itself a testing ground for hard-core rock climbers. Today, another hot, sunny day in Southeast Alaska, kayakers paddle among the icebergs as crowds of tourists snap pictures.

  Along Steep Creek, which runs through the parking lot, the Forest Service built an elevated walkway for visitors to watch both returning salmon and the bears that come to feed on them. Signs warn against straying off trail. We don’t see any bears, but someone in the crowd says several were there earlier. Just last week, a twenty-four-year-old radio-collared black bear named No. 1, who has returned to the creek for years, made an appearance, quashing fears that she had died of old age. No. 1 is something of a local phenomenon. Affectionately called Naa Tláa, Tlingit for “clan mother,” because she’s a likely relative to a number of area bears, she has long been a reliable presence at Steep Creek.

  But she’s not the only one. A few years ago, a black wolf became a regular fixture around the glacier, often seen playing on the frozen lake with local dogs. His affection for the domestic animals earned him the name “Romeo.” Orphaned around the time of his birth, Romeo remained in the area without a pack, becoming something of an Internet celebrity as photos and YouTube videos of him playing with dogs made their way around the world. He grew increasingly accustomed to humans, and vice versa, and sometimes followed skiers back to their cars, chased tennis balls, or appeared in the yards of dogs he liked. One man claimed that the wolf stood beside him and his dog and growled away an approaching brown bear. Fame comes with a price, though. When Romeo failed to return in 2009, a community group posted a reward, and glacier visitors kept a watchful eye. The following year, officials arrested two Pennsylvania men and charged them with the unlawful taking of big game. Troopers found a black wolf hide in their possession that they unofficially identified as Romeo’s. The city mourned him with a memorial service at the glacier, and someone played a recording of his howls—according to newspaper reports, all the dogs in attendance joined in.

  Today the Steep Creek viewing platform supports a gauntlet of tourists with oversize camera gear. They jostle and shove one another for a spot at the railing amid buzzing voices, ringing cell phones, screaming children. When we get our turn at the front, we peek down at the creek to see three lonely sockeye salmon in their spawning finery, brilliant red bodies humped like aerodynamic tomatoes. The shutter clicks of a hundred cameras echo from the trees. It’s hard to imagine bears, wolves, or any other wild animal walking willingly into this circus.

  In 2007 Juneau mayor Bruce Botelho convened a panel of experts to study the local impacts of climate change. The first paragraphs of the panel’s findings are ominous.

  Temperatures in Juneau have increased as much as 3.6˚F during the 20th century, with the largest increase occurring during the winter months. . . .

  Rates of warming were higher in the later part of the 20th century, and Ju
neau’s average winter time temperature rose by 1.5–3˚F in the past 60 years. . . . The average winter snowfall at sea level in the City and Borough of Juneau decreased from 109 inches to 93 inches in the past 60 years. The average winter precipitation including rain and snow (reported as inches of liquid water), however, increased by 2.6 inches or more.

  The report concludes that, though global sea levels may rise by as much as 3 feet over the next century, the relative sea level in Juneau will decrease by as much as 3.6 feet. Average air temperatures will increase by 10 degrees before the end of the century. Shrubs and trees will colonize alpine or tundra elevations. Increasing precipitation—which hardly seems possible—will affect trees, salmon, shoreline, everything. “Changes in climate may outpace the capacity of some plants and animals to adapt, resulting in local or global extinctions,” the report says, and “rapid changes in the ecology of terrestrial and marine environments will alter commercial, subsistence, and recreational harvesting in ways that cannot be readily predicted.”

  Such changes are already taking place in Gastineau Channel. As recently as the 1970s, large boats could sail the channel as far north as Auke Bay, but now navigation buoys sit high and dry at low tide. Douglas Island eventually will join mainland Juneau, according to Eran Hood, the Juneau hydrologist who authored the Botelho report. The wetlands along Egan Drive north of town will no longer be wet.

  Between 2009 and 2010 the Mendenhall Glacier lost 540 feet, more than twice the yearly average ice loss from the dozen prior years. Scientists say the glacier’s terminus will retreat out of the lake entirely, but nobody knows when. Across the state, as its 100,00-plus glaciers retreat, the great weight of ice lifts, the land springs back into shape like a cushion, and Alaska grows bigger each year. That isostatic rebound, faster than the rising seas can keep up, will cause the relative sea level to drop. A paradox? Sure. But so is denying climate change in the face of so much evidence. Wherever you stand politically about the environmental shifts probably responsible for the glaciers’ retreat, their retreat itself is nonnegotiable, as is the rise of the seas. We can argue about what’s causing it while the earth dies around us.

  For Morgan DeBoer, who lives northwest of Juneau in Gustavus, the small town on the flat land at the mouth of Glacier Bay, these changes aren’t just affecting his state, they’re affecting his wallet. Glacial ice entirely covered Glacier Bay when George Vancouver first sailed past it in the late 1700s—not the thin ice you find on your car on a cold morning, but a 400-foot-thick wall some 20 miles wide and 100 miles long. Even then it had begun to recede, and it never stopped. By the time John Muir visited the area less than a century later, the ice had retreated about 50 miles. By the end of Joe’s first Arctic expedition, it had lost another 15 miles. DeBoer’s family homestead there gains about an acre of land, 43,560 square feet, every year—in 2010 the average American homeowner’s lot size measured just under 12,000 square feet.

  DeBoer has so much new land that his property taxes have increased significantly. To pay them, he needed to raise money, and after considering agriculture and development, he built a nine-hole golf course. The 2,800-yard links-style course sits on 150 acres across from the town dock, with views of the Chilkats, and some of the holes border Icy Strait. It features 460-yard par fives, Kentucky bluegrass greens bastardized for Alaska, and a 285-yard driving range that would have been completely underwater just a few years ago.

  DeBoer opened the course in 1998. He’s still gaining land—as much as 3 inches a year, making it the fastest-rising land on the continent—and is considering adding a back nine. Golfers face all the typical challenges and then some. The “sand” traps are woodchips. Ravens dig grubs from the grass with their beaks, leaving divots that send rolling balls off course, and occasionally birds steal balls, though what they do with them is anybody’s guess. Wildlife wanders the course. Since his family settled the area a half century ago, the high tide line has moved nearly a mile out to sea, but especially high tides still flood the edges of some of the fairways. Still, it’s not a bad round of golf, considering that nine holes costs just $15 and reservations are never necessary.

  The Mendenhall Glacier has been in the news all week because of a rare event called a jökulhlaup (YO-ka-lip), an Icelandic term for when an ice dam atop a glacier bursts. The flooding it created caused Mendenhall Lake to jump across the road, threatening nearby homes. The jökulhlaup turned the 6-mile Mendenhall River—normally a quick-moving, nonthreatening stream—into a frothing, violent current, and residents lined up along its banks to watch it thrash its way toward Gastineau Channel. Most days, tour companies float cruise passengers on rafts down the lazy creek, but today it’s Class V whitewater. Police evacuated glacier-adjacent neighborhoods, and the town wondered just how high the water would go. Without knowing how much water had built up behind the natural dam, even experts could do little more than guess, cross their fingers, and hope for the best.

  We drive to one of the flooding neighborhoods behind the lake, park at the police roadblock, then walk back to see where the water has washed across the road. Neighborhood residents seem more annoyed with the gawkers parked in front of their homes than they are with the possibility of losing them.

  The glacier itself gets its name from Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, a meteorologist and superintendent of the US Coast and Geodetic Survey that first mapped the Alaska-Canada border. Like many Alaska landmarks, its current name was not its first. John Muir named it Auke Glacier for the local Tlingit people, but the Tlingit themselves called it Sitaantaagu, “the Glacier behind the Town,” or Aak’wtaaksit, “the Glacier behind the Little Lake.”

  According to the Juneau Icefield Research Program, which monitors the outlet glaciers, the 12-mile-long Mendenhall Glacier has receded almost 2 miles since 1958. The program’s website compares current aerial and satellite photos with historical maps for a stark visual demonstration of glacial retreat. Compared to a 1964 map, the Mendenhall photo reveals an impressive amount of new real estate. Glaciers in Denali National Park, north of Anchorage, average a 66-foot retreat annually. Repeat glacier altimetry, a technique for measuring the height of a glacier, shows that the rate of thinning for sixty-seven Alaska glaciers between 1995 and 2001 increased by more than a factor of 2 over the rate from 1950 to 1995. Decreases in height or thickness speed up the retreat, which means that, like my hair, the glaciers are both thinning and receding.

  Across Juneau, creeks are drying out as land rises. Nautical charts become obsolete as new shoals and landmasses appear. In two centuries the land has risen relative to the sea as much as 10 feet, and as climate change accelerates the shift, Alaska may gain as much as 3 more feet by the end of this century.

  The sign at the end of the road may be gone, but other signs across the state are growing increasingly numerous, and they’re only getting clearer.

  13

  Homecoming

  By 6:30 p.m. we were abreast of Lady Richardson Bay where John and I were forced to spend the winter of 1913–1914. We had been frozen in by September 1. I can see the pile of rocks I had put on top of the hill by the entrance of the bay as a marker.

  On our last night in Juneau, we stop for drinks at the Viking Lounge. There’s a row of license plates mounted on the wall next to the bar, the one next to my head from Prince Edward Island. “Weird,” Kim says. Housed in a building that dates back to 1915, the Viking Lounge, a locals’ hangout known for billiards, bar fights, and pull tabs, is something of a Juneau institution. It’s actually three bars in one. On busy nights the back room is a dance club; upstairs you can play pool, darts, or the jukebox; and downstairs in the main lounge are giant televisions and pull tabs, Alaska’s version of scratch tickets. Neon beer signs, taxidermists’ best offerings, license plates from all over the world clutter the main bar. The back room features an old stripper pole.

  Today three fishermen at the bar drink Mickey’s malt liquor out of widemout
hed grenade bottles and play pull tabs, the tear-offs piling at their feet. A man at another table shares a pitcher of beer with himself, his back to the wall of TVs, the pitcher his total focus. When he empties it, the bartender refills it. Neither says a word. Or maybe they do, and I can’t hear them over the Santana album playing loud enough to transport us all through time to a 1971 college dorm room.

  We watch a couple innings of the Red Sox beating the Mariners on two screens, cheering silently, then a TV teaser airs for the 2009 Sandra Bullock book-publishing movie The Proposal, set in Sitka, our next destination. We watched the movie on TV recently, and nothing about the film made me think of Alaska—not the way the characters act or dress or the giant mansion in which much of it takes place. With good reason of course. The movie was shot in Massachusetts, in the very town that I left to move to Sitka. Maybe I didn’t have to travel so far all those years ago.

  Kim points to the screen. “To Alaska,” she says, and we clink glasses.

  “We’ll get there someday,” I say dryly.

  “Here’s to that,” she says.

  The next morning we rise at what should be the crack of dawn, but the sun beat us by a couple of hours. As we drive to the ferry terminal, the first clouds we’ve seen since our plane landed slowly fill the sky. The ferry—cheaper than flying—is the only way to get your car from town to town in Southeast. It isn’t just called the Marine Highway here, it is the highway. Even foot passengers use it to haul stuff, and we’re surrounded by boxes from Juneau stores, fish coolers, gun cases, crates of bulk wares from Costco, disassembled furniture, suitcases, baby strollers, overstuffed backpacks, fishing rod cases, tents, camp mats, crates of groceries, and even a kayak on a two-wheeled cart.