YAKUTAT
As far as is known, there were no casualties in the 1899 Yakutat Bay earthquake, a fortunate result of extremely low population density. More than a century later, Yakutat still has a reputation as one of the most remote towns in Alaska. It sits on the least inhabited stretch of coast between Ketchikan and Anchorage and is backed by public wilderness for a hundred miles or more in all directions. If someone were really determined (and didn’t mind fording rivers, scaling mountains, and dodging wolverines), he or she could walk from Yakutat to Nome, nine hundred miles away, and cross only two roads. Cell phone service didn’t reach the town until 2012, and it’s still pretty spotty. The ferry stops in Yakutat only once every two weeks, even in midsummer.
Melanie Heacox had suggested I visit Jim Capra, a ranger based in Yakutat, which is tucked between Glacier Bay National Park and the Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve. You could spend a lifetime exploring Wrangell–St. Elias, since the park is the second largest in the world—six times the size of Yellowstone and approximately equal in area to Switzerland, though with more impressive mountains. (The world’s biggest national park is in northeastern Greenland, if you happen to be in the neighborhood.) The town of Yakutat is a little larger than Gustavus, population-wise (662 as of the last census), but more spread out. What had looked on my phone to be a short walk from my B & B to the Park Service office turned out to be several miles, so I stuck out my thumb and tried to hail a ride. Fifteen minutes went by and not one vehicle passed. I went back to the inn and borrowed one of the bicycles in the yard, which turned out to have a wonky chain that fell off every quarter mile or so.
The NPS offices were in an old airplane hangar, its door marked only by an arrowhead. I was a half hour late, and there was no cell signal to send a message, but people in rural Alaska are pretty laid-back about appointments. You’ll turn up eventually, and if you don’t, it’s probably time to call search and rescue. I knocked, waited a few minutes, knocked again, walked over to the National Weather Service office to make sure I was knocking in the right place, and by the time I returned, Jim Capra was waiting in his uniform, smiling, with the door propped open.
Perhaps the most famous attraction near Yakutat is the Hubbard Glacier, renowned for two reasons. One: It is huge. The Hubbard’s face is three hundred feet high and six miles wide, making it the largest tidewater glacier in North America. Two: Unlike most of the glaciers in Alaska, it is growing. This makes it very popular among those who believe climate change is a hoax.*
“The Hubbard has Mount St. Elias on one side and Mount Logan on the other,” the second- and fourth-highest mountains in North America, Capra explained. We were sitting in a small office kitchen. Capra got up and drew his finger on a Forest Service map taped to one wall. “One theory is that because the accumulation zone is higher, it’s less affected by climate change so far.” Ned Rozell, at the UAF Geophysical Institute, has written that the Hubbard may also be located in the wettest spot on earth. No one can be certain, because no one has ever been able to install a precipitation gauge in the remote mountains outside of town. In 1986 and again in 2002, the Hubbard blocked the entrance to Russell Fjord—John Burroughs’s “playground of the early ice gods”—causing the water level behind the ice dam to rise precipitously before bursting. One glaciologist estimates that the breach will seal again by 2025.
People who come to Alaska looking to escape from civilization are called end-of-the-roaders. During his 1879 excursion with Hall Young, Muir heard stories of a Harvard graduate “bearing an honored New England name” who had taken refuge among a remote Tlingit tribe. When they finally located what may have been the first end-of-the-roader ever recorded in Alaska, he was dressed only in a cheap blanket and mumbled monosyllabic answers to their questions.
Because of its total isolation, Yakutat is known for attracting the most extreme dropouts, people who’ve burned through every other place to live. “We’re a little beyond the end of the road, so we get our share of them,” Capra said. “They’re usually not too scary.” I asked if there were any hermits in the vast wilderness. “You occasionally see their tracks or hear accounts of people living out in the forest,” he said. “Survivalists. One guy had fifty thousand rounds of ammo.” A woman once hosted a meeting at her cabin just outside the park and multiple people showed up who not only were strangers to the host but whose existence had previously been unknown to anyone, including one another.
Capra talked a little bit about his own path to such an isolated spot, working two years as a ranger at Independence Hall, in Philadelphia (“I dealt with a lot of prostitutes and crack addicts—I’m told the neighborhood has gotten better”), and a stint in Arkansas. He’d grown up in Los Angeles and had family who worked in show business, but he wanted to get far away from Southern California and ended up here. “Yakutat is a different variety of isolation, surrounded by millions and millions of acres,” he said. “Some people can’t take the quiet.”
Capra walked me out, took one look at the woeful chain on my bike, went back in, and returned with a wrench. “This won’t solve the problem, but it should get you back to town,” he said, bending metal and tightening a nut. I asked if by any chance he was related to the director of that epic of small-town American values, It’s a Wonderful Life.
“Frank Capra was my grandfather,” he said. He had fond memories of watching thirty-five-millimeter movies at his grandfather’s ranch. Jim’s dad had worked in TV news; other Capras had tried to ride Frank’s coattails to Hollywood. “I just wanted to get away from the TV and movie business,” he said.
Other than the glaciers, the one thing I knew about Yakutat was that it is Alaska’s unlikely surf capital. Jim Capra, who’d grown up “as a punk surfer kid in L.A.,” confirmed this and advised that if I wished to sample the local waves (which I did not), I should watch out for local hazards. “The sea lions here are bigger than the ones in California, and very curious,” he said. Another surfer I’d met told me he’d ridden a Yakutat wave into shore only to find himself trapped between a brown bear and a storm cloud of mosquitoes.
The red-hot epicenter of this surf mania, I’d gathered from reading stories online, was Icy Waves Surf Shop. I rode back down Airport Road, passing people standing in the brush just off the shoulder picking salmonberries and tossing them into five-gallon buckets. I twice rode up and down the side road that, as far as I could remember, led to my destination, before I noticed that one of the houses had a back door plastered with surf stickers. One of them read ICY WAVES SURF SHOP: THE FAR NORTH SHORE. I took two steps toward the house, and a very unhappy guard dog rushed out to meet me, stopped short by his chain. The dog apparently doubled as a doorbell, because a head popped out, silenced the beast, and invited me to come around back.
Jack Endicott didn’t look like a stereotypical surf kingpin, even an Alaskan one. He was tall and stocky, with a bushy white Santa Claus beard, and instead of board shorts was wearing Carhartt overalls and a baseball cap. The Icy Waves world headquarters turned out to be a room at the back of his house filled with all sorts of gear. Endicott sat next to the cash register, surrounded by photos of famous surfers. “You never know who’s going to knock on the door,” he said. Seven-time women’s world surf champ Layne Beachley showed up on her own one time.
Endicott wasn’t one of those guys who heard “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and drove west dreaming of woody wagons and longboards. “I came to Alaska to become a fisherman and trapper,” he said. A job became available in Yakutat working as a meteorologist for the National Weather Service. “All the Gulf of Alaska storms come in—that’s what makes the breaks,” he said. If conditions are right, swells can reach twenty feet. I noticed that Endicott rented wetsuits for reasonable rates, a necessity in a place where water temperatures rarely reach sixty degrees even in summer.
The obvious question was how Endicott had gotten into the surf business at all. “We have seven children, and we’d go to Hawaii once in a while,” he said. “The kids would say, ‘The waves at home are as good as the ones here.’”
The local paper did a story, which got picked up by a Juneau daily, which was seen by a reporter at the AP, whose subsequent story caught the eye of someone at CBS News. Pretty soon surfing Yakutat became a bragging-rights thing. “People who come here say, ‘I can go to Hawaii or Indonesia, but no one comes to Yakutat.’
“We’re the most isolated community in the United States,” he said. “That’s the good and the bad.”
My amazing luck with Yakutat’s notorious weather was holding, so I wandered over to Cannon Beach. The beach got its name from a group of large World War II guns, still in place where they once guarded the coast from Japanese invasion. The barrels had been sawed off and filled with asphalt because one too many local revelers had dumped gunpowder down a neck and fired his own projectile out to sea. STRIKE! BOWLING BALL SINKS CRUISE SHIP was a headline no one needed to see.
Walking on the beach was like stepping onto another planet. If ever a picturesque seashore on a warm, sunny June day could be said to be spooky, Cannon Beach might be the one. Dark sand stretched off for miles in both directions, littered with deadwood. School was out and tourism season had begun. With the aid of binoculars, I spotted eight people in an hour. Sea traffic consisted of one cruise ship in the distance and a girl kicking back and forth in the shallows on an inflatable raft. Jack Endicott had predicted decent wave conditions, but there wasn’t a surfer in sight. To the north, snowcapped Mount St. Elias rose symmetrically from sea level like the Great Pyramid over the desert. “It is the most superb mountain I have ever seen, Mont Blanc and all the others are pygmies compared to it,” artist Frederick Dellenbaugh wrote in his diary, and I had to agree.
Like Gustavus, Yakutat had no real downtown, just a loose cluster of buildings that made up the town center. A visitor could buy food at Mallott’s General Store and alcohol at the Glass Door Bar, but if that same visitor wanted to sit down and consume food and alcoholic beverages together, he had to ride his lame bike all the way back out to the fishing lodge at the airport. Jim Capra had advised against stopping in for a drink at the Glass Door. “Every time I set foot in there, one of two things happens,” he told me. “Somebody lines up six shots on the bar, hoping to play ‘Get the Ranger Drunk,’ or somebody starts an argument that they hope turns into a fight.” I didn’t need to know what sort of temptation a visitor from New York might present.
The only other establishment was Fat Grandma’s, a large purple building that billed itself as a gift shop and bistro but was more of a gift shop and coffee shop that sold a daily hot lunch on paper plates and also offered indoor tanning. Three walls were occupied by thousands of used books, which the proprietor, Candy Hills, told me were free for the taking when she rang up my coffee. I asked if she knew anyone interesting in town whom I could speak with. She said she’d think about it.
A few minutes later, as I sat sipping my coffee and wondering whether a slightly dog-eared first edition of Humboldt’s Gift was worth the space in my backpack, a disheveled man pulled out the chair next to me and sat down. He had a wispy beard and wore a dirty, untucked denim shirt. “Candy says you want to talk to the most interesting person in Yakutat,” he said, pointing a thumb at his chest. “That’s me. I’ve been in Yakutat sixty-six years, since there were no lights or heat.”
His name was Roy. His father’s father had come to Yakutat after a disagreement elsewhere. “I’m pure-blood Tlingit—Eagle. Vietnam vet. Marines. Went to school in Oregon, traveled in California. Yakutat is the most beautiful country in the whole world. Rich in its own way, in food. In my father’s day, if someone brought in a seal, everyone shared. They took care of widows. But the green dollar bill came in and changed everything.”
Roy had lived a bumpy life. “I got married, got divorced. I regret some things I’ve done. One time a white guy started a fight and I lost my cool. He never knew he was out. In 1976, they said I was shouting at cops in Angoon”—a small town northeast of Sitka. “They lied about me in court. They sentenced me to three years and I pleaded to parole.
“My father’s Tlingit nickname translates as ‘womanizer.’ He had six different lots down in the village. Traded one for a leather jacket and a quart of whiskey. He died in Juneau, an eighteen-wheeler ran him over. My brother was killed in Seattle, beaten unconscious by three men. My little brother Walter wrapped himself around a telephone pole in Kodiak. My little sister was killed execution style. Killed her dog, too.” He paused. “Mom died of old age.
“I’m homeless. Put in an application for a home with the military. My sisters are coming up, maybe on the ferry.” The Kennicott, my old friend from the Bellingham-to-Ketchikan run, was due to make its every-two-weeks stop that evening. “It might be the next one. I don’t have a phone. If you put me in your book, send me a copy, okay?” He took my pen and wrote a P.O. box address in my notebook.
When the Elder departed Yakutat Bay, Frederick Dellenbaugh noted the solitude into which they were sailing. “Not a sign of a sail is visible anywhere on the wide waters,” he wrote, “nor has there been any since we left Sitka.” The only company was an albatross, which followed the ship for hours, soaring effortlessly and swooping toward the waves. (The frustrated hunters among the expedition, being of a literary bent, surely knew from Coleridge’s poem about the ancient mariner that shooting an albatross invited trouble.) As they continued west into Prince William Sound, it would have been easy to imagine that they had left the messiness of the industrial world behind.