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Also this issue: Icepack |
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July 18-24, 2002
naked city
 on the line: The author poses near the Pipeline, moving along billions of barrels of oil. : Toby Zinman |
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In novels and movies and TV specials, suddenly ice is hot. And Alaska is the place for ice. I spent three spectacular weeks there in June, with glaciers and snow-capped mountains under the Midnight Sun. A friend laughed and said, “You’re the only person under 87 I know who’s been to Alaska.”
But there's another Alaska, full of high adventure: I rafted a white-water river through a canyon and rode horseback through the tundra. I heard the silence and listened to remarkable people. I ate muskox and king crab and the freshest salmon in the world. I saw the moon rise over the mountains on the summer solstice. I felt lucky even while I was sleeping.
"There's a land where the mountains are nameless. ...
 cold comfort: One of the breathtaking views on Glacier Bay. |
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There are valleys unpeopled and still;
There's a land -- oh, it beckons and beckons,
And I want to go back -- and I will."
--Robert Service
My ideal vacation is one where I knock myself out during the day and then return to creature comforts (forget about tents): a hot shower, a glass of decent wine, interesting conversation and a delicious dinner.
This is exactly what Glacier Bay Cruiseline provided for a glorious six days, out of sight of anything but the most monumental scenery inhabited by the creatures who have always inhabited it: Eagles swoop; bears lurk; seals give birth to pups on ice floes; sea lions lounge on rocks; sea otters frolic; porpoises roll through the water. In the midst of it all, there we are: gazing out at immense waterfalls and magnificent glaciers, kayaking through a primeval seascape, hiking through 10,000-year-old forests.
Glacier Bay is a Vermont-sized body of water on the southeast coast of Alaska. Because it is a national park, it is protected, and only this native-owned company with its three very small ships is permitted access denied to the behemoth cruise ships, with their shuffleboard and tuxedo dinners.
On board were 30 passengers, two naturalists, a gourmet chef and the jolly, helpful crew. The park ranger who came on board for one day told us to think of Alaska not as the last frontier but as the last wilderness: This is not a world to be conquered but a world to be cherished, a place to take your breath away.
"In wildness is the salvation of the world."
--Henry David Thoreau
We're riding the Alaska Railroad (President Harding drove in the golden spike in 1923 to signify its completion) in a domed observation car. We climb up from Anchorage to 2,363 feet -- the watershed elevation where rivers change direction. The fir trees look dwarfed and spindly because they grow so slowly in the soil above the permafrost -- I'm told it takes a microscope to count the rings in a 100-year-old tree.
I arrive eight hours later at Denali Park, home of moose, caribou, mountain sheep and Mount McKinley -- the highest peak in the U.S. All the big cruise lines have a land option, and I joined Holland America Lines' -- too many retirees from South Dakota, but a linen-and-silver dining car and the beautiful rustic hotel, McKinley Chalets.
Then we travel north again to Fairbanks. The highway in Fairbanks has a sign: "Next Exit Anchorage" -- an exit 300 miles south. A lively guide takes us to pan for gold at the original Gold Dredge No. 8 (I found seven flakes!), and we eat a tasty miner's stew for lunch. We stop on the road to see the Pipeline as it brings crude oil from the North Slope to Valdez over- and underground, depending on the permafrost.
The surprisingly gorgeous campus of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks has a huge facility for the study of the aurora borealis, funded primarily by the Japanese, who believe that a child conceived under the northern lights will be a genius. Apparently the tourist trade from Japan in March is very brisk.
"Old longings nomadic leap,
Chafing at custom's chain;
Again from its brumal sleep
Wakens the ferine strain."
--Jack London
This is a place of extremes: It's either light all the time or dark all the time; it's either cold (Fairbanks gets six-week runs of temperatures 40 degrees below zero) or hot (the jokes about the mosquito being the state bird are not jokes).
People who choose to live where nature -- weather and animals -- governs life are necessarily extraordinary in the contemporary world, and I heard a lot of good tales in my travels (everybody's got avalanche stories, bear stories, moose stories, fish stories -- a photo of your host standing next to a halibut taller than he is beneath wall-mounted antlers).
There's the president of the University of Alaska who is a published poet and a retired two-star general. There's the geologist who found a gold mine outside of Nome and worked it with his wife (now running for lieutenant governor) and two daughters, and the actor who grew up on a tiny island in the Aleutian Chain and went to elementary school by bushplane every day. I met a woman, an East Coast lawyer, who married an Alaskan fisherman and has lived in a small town without a movie theater or a big store for 20 years, and another woman who lives alone in a log cabin outside Fairbanks and used to mush 50 dogs.
What a place!
