SNOW IN AUGUST. A big storm rolls off the Gulf of Alaska, soaks Anchorage in heavy rain, and slams into the Alaska Range. Clouds billow over the highest peaks. The summit of North America disappears; all summits disappear. In hours the park turns white, goes silent. Only the wind has something to say as wildcat gusts rip down the north-flowing Savage, Sanctuary, Teklanika, and Toklat Rivers.
I trudge on, my pack heavy, the straps digging into my shoulders, the wind pushing me from behind. Why all this stuff? Ice axe, stove, cook kit, camera, lenses, film, tripod, processed food, synthetic clothes, plastic tarp, rip-stop tent and sleeping bag—wet, everything wet. I’m a walking, staggering slave to my possessions. I follow my feet, one step at a time over the Thorofare River Bar, my sodden boots taking me home after three days camping in the backcountry. At this lower elevation the snow melts when it alights on the riverside cobbles and rocks, each stone a wet, glistening window into the park’s distant past. I love the names: gabbro, argillite, graywacke, and granite; micaceous sandstone, serpentine, actinolite schist, and radiolarian chert; granodiorite, limestone, green tuff, and metarhyolite. Speaking them softly deludes me into thinking I understand their stories and history. All three major rock types are represented here: sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic, excavated from the tortured, weathered spine of the Alaska Range, the rounded cobbles tumbled by water, the angular rocks dropped by ice. They exist in a freeze-frame in time to me, but in fact they have their own clock, older and more patient than mine. If millennia were minutes they’d move as fast as I do, probably faster, en route from the mountains to the sea. And they’d break up as they go, rocks to sand, silt, and clay. The fine sediments accumulating in deep marine beds, baking and hardening under the weight and pressure of more sediments, and more, thousands of feet thick, millions of years in the making. Erosion and deposition. Continents drifting, colliding, subducting. Tectonics and volcanism building the mountains up; glaciers and rivers tearing them down. This is the study of deep time, the drama of epochs, a never-ending story; this is the science that got Darwin out of the ministry and onto HMS Beagle, which took him around the world.
This is geology.
About 400 feet elevation above me, on mile 66 of the park road, Eielson Visitor Center moves in and out of the clouds like an illusion; it’s the clouds that move, of course, always going, always late, chased by more clouds and more after that, the storm exhausting itself. Now and then a piece of blue sky opens up.
I leave the river bar and begin to climb, working my way through thick willow and dwarf birch. Still in full leaf, they bow heavy under their new burden of wet snow. On windswept tundra I find a gentian and an arctic poppy rising through the whiteness, impossibly resolute. Arctic ground squirrels peek out from their burrows. More blue sky. I hear birdsong. A fox sparrow? Lincoln’s sparrow? (I should know my sparrows, their songs and preferred habitats.) As I gain elevation, the snow deepens in some places up to my knees; I avoid the worst of it by following windblown areas. By the time I reach the visitor center the storm has mostly cleared and sunlight dances off white peaks all around me. The Thorofare River shines below—a braided beauty. I can see the road has been recently plowed east and west by the maintenance gang, Brad Ebel and his boys. Rick McIntyre opens the visitor center door.
“Hey,” he says, “you’re not dead?”
“Not yet.”
“You will be one day, though.”
“You too, amigo.”
He shrugs. “How was it out there?”
“Wet.”
“And cold, too, I’ll bet.”
“A little.”
“Where are the buses?”
“They’re coming. You want something hot to drink?”
Rick has the best interpretive job in the park. He lives in a basement apartment at Eielson Visitor Center, with a full window view of the Alaska Range and the surrounding foothills and tundra-scape. He wakes up at times to see caribou or grizzlies looking in, making sure he’s okay. Five days a week he reports for duty upstairs, and greets visitors with his wit and deep knowledge. Rather than be a permanent career ranger with the National Park Service, he’ll remain a seasonal with no benefits or retirement, which is fine with him, near as I can tell. He spends his summers in Denali and his winters down south in Death Valley and Big Bend. At Eielson, he leads daily hour-long hikes, and once a week a four-hour-long discovery hike in the coveted west end of the park. He also gives his popular arctic ground squirrel program at Wonder Lake Campground.
My job is almost as good. I too work at Eielson, and lead hikes, but I live at the Toklat Work Camp, at mile 53, with two dozen other NPS employees. For screwing up at Riley Creek Visitor Center and failing as a park ranger, this is my reward. A better job. In fact, I’ve been sent out here to write a road guide, a mile-by-mile description of what visitors can expect to see in the park. It’s not Hemingway in Cuba but it is a writing assignment. In my own American expat way I can say things beyond the descriptive, according to Bill Truesdale, chief of interpretation. Have at it, he tells me. Say what needs to be said. Tell the readers where they are and what they’re looking at. But also provoke them, challenge them; go ahead and get philosophical if you’d like. Make them think.
“Really?” I say.
“Really,” Bill says.
“Thinking is no easy thing.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m going to have to think about how to make the readers think.”
“Take your time.”
I like Bill. He’s an old school park ranger. “It’s important to remind people that national parks don’t happen by accident,” he tells me. “They’re established and defended through great commitment, vision, and force of character. They show us another kind of wealth, one that cools the fevered money culture of American capitalism. Big, wild national parks are the best thing we got going. Don’t let people forget that. Never let them forget that.”
“Hit them over the head with it?”
“No. Massage it into them.”
“How do I do that?”
“Delicately.”
“So, I still have a job?”
“Yes, but no more confrontations . . . and no more red socks.”
RICK HANDS ME a cup of tea. I warm my bones as we watch the mountains come out one cloud at a time: Scott Peak above the headwaters of the Thorofare River, followed by Mount Eielson to the west, then Mount Mather, Mount Brooks, and Denali itself, much larger and higher than the others, a giant, a guardian, its twin peaks, the south and north summits, two miles apart, separated by the high reaches of the Harper Glacier. Below the north summit, on the right flank of Denali, the Wickersham Wall drops 14,000 vertical feet in one of the most daunting mountaineering challenges in the world. Rick points out the Muldrow Glacier, one of forty named glaciers on the mountain, the largest on its north side. Twenty thousand years ago, when glaciers ruled much of Alaska’s mountainous regions, the Muldrow reached north into the Kantishna Hills, twelve miles beyond its present terminus. With its lower reaches today covered by rock, soil, and vegetation, the Muldrow looks nothing like a river of ice. “What glacier?” people ask. For reasons not entirely understood, the Muldrow “galloped” forward in the summer of 1956, advancing up to 1,100 feet per day. It came to within a mile of the park road and slowed down, and by 1957 returned to relative dormancy. Rick says he’s waiting for it to gallop again.
“When will that be?” I ask.
He looks at his watch. “Hard to say.”
“So glaciers ‘gallop’?”
“They don’t charge or race or blitz or sprint? Why is that?”
“I don’t know. They ‘gallop’ and ‘surge.’ Those are the terms glaciologists use. Don’t ask me why. The Bering Glacier surges, I think. So does the Hubbard. The Black Rapids Glacier galloped some years back and almost ran over the Richardson Highway.”
Galloping glaciers. I’d heard of them. Prior to Denali, I’d worked two summers as an interpretive park ranger in Glacier Bay National Monument (now a national park) and knew a little about glaciers—just enough to make me want to know more. Glacier Bay itself, seventy miles long, ten miles wide, was entombed by a surging glacier back in the mid-1700s, and many times before that over hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of years. Study glaciology and you quickly learn that ice has its own metronome, a tempo. It floods and ebbs, advances and retreats. Many things oscillate in the far north: lynx, hares, caribou, glaciers; the populations up and down, the icy rivers flexing back and forth, the land itself beating to a rhythm we may never fully understand, the music of the high latitudes.
Sitting there drinking my tea, I tell Rick that what intrigues me about Interior Alaska is its history of an absence of glaciation. While ice covered much of northern North America twenty thousand years ago and dominated the mountainous coasts of south-central and southeast Alaska, the low-lying regions of Interior Alaska, along the Tanana, Yukon, and Kuskokwim Rivers, while cold, had no nearby mountains, no places to accumulate great amounts of snow. And so remained glacier-free.
“And filled with cool Pleistocene megafauna,” Rick says. “Woolly mammoths, mastodons, North American camels, short-faced bears, and saber-toothed cats, to name a few.”
There’s only so much water in the world, after all. It’s a closed system. With more of it invested in glacial ice twenty millennia ago, sea level dropped three hundred feet. A land bridge opened between Asia and Alaska where the shallow Bering Sea is today. As best we know, the first humans to arrive in North America came by that bridge from Asia, hunting and gathering, and fishing along the coast. It wasn’t so much a bridge as a causeway, hundreds of miles wide.
Rick and I talk about what it must have been like to hunt mammoths and bring one down, to be pagan, primitive yet not crude, but deeply content and in love with the people around you, respecting them and their skills as they in turn respected you and yours; to survive as a family, a tribe, a little band of humanity living through times of bounty and want, always facing death and as such always acutely alive, alert, robust, making music and fire and stories and love to stay warm. A far cry from shopping at Safeway. How easily we in our modern world, seduced by our clever devices and aisles of disposable consumer goods, blithely plunder nature and crow about progress and regard the distant past as feudal and brutal and backward. For many, life long ago was difficult and filled with suffering. Yet for many others life was simple, beautiful, and bountiful, the days filled with flowers and birdsong, clean water and air. Bring those people forward to today, stuff them in tight shoes and a cubicle office, have them commute in traffic and eat microwave dinners off plastic trays while watching loud sitcoms on a big TV, and they’d curl up and soon die. Worried about the unlivable future? We’re already there.
“You ever think about progress?” I ask Rick.
“Not a lot.”
“Neither do I.”
“What? You think about progress all the time.”
“You’re right, I do.”
“It’s a writer’s curse to think about things too much.”
“Maybe I’ll be a carpenter. Jesus was a carpenter.”
“And look what happened to him.”
“I know . . . sad.”
“Check out that cloud over Pioneer Ridge.”
I check it out; for a while we say nothing, Rick and I. We let Denali do the talking. Words only get in the way. But words will soon be required. The buses are coming, buses filled with people hungry to see, to bask in the American landscape. We have the privilege to help them do that.
“You think this park can make the world a better place?” I ask Rick.
“Absolutely.”
We grow silent again and drink it in, as if the land could nourish us. Blue sky, new snow, ancient rocks, the topography etched perfectly into our hearts. Not a bad deal. A truck arrives from Toklat with a couple of maintenance guys. I throw on my NPS uniform; it’s time to go to work.
I look down at my socks. They’re brown.
A CROWD gathers as Rick talks about Denali, the High One, the mountain that commands the visitor center’s large west-facing window; sacred to the Tanana and Koyukon peoples. The first recorded reference occurred in 1794, Rick says, when Captain George Vancouver, charting Cook Inlet near present-day Anchorage, described “distant stupendous peaks” to the north. Throughout the 1800s, Russian and American trappers, prospectors, and army surveyors noted how the mountain dominated the horizon. In 1902 Alfred Hulse Brooks of the US Geological Survey led an expedition of seven men and twenty packhorses, and wrote:
The task before us was to find a route across the swampy lowland, traverse the mountains, and, following their northern front, approach from the inland slope as near the base of this culminating peak of the continent as conditions and means would permit; we must map the country and incidentally explore a route which some time could be used by that mountaineer to whom should fall the honor of first setting foot on Mount McKinley.
Brooks did this, covering eight hundred difficult miles in 105 days, from Cook Inlet to the village of Rampart, on the Yukon River. At one point, while off climbing alone, he fell under the mountain’s spell, moving up treacherous slopes of ice:
Convinced at length that it would be utterly foolhardy, alone as I was, to attempt to reach the shoulder for which I was headed, at 7,500 feet I turned and cautiously retraced my steps, finding the descent to bare ground more perilous than the ascent.
Near where he turned around, he built a cairn and buried a cartridge shell from his pistol that contained a brief account of his journey, and a roster of his party.
Others followed. McKinley was a prize, the undisputed crown of the continent.
In 1903 Alaska Territorial Judge James Wickersham, having set up a district court in Eagle, and civil offices in the new gold strike town of Fairbanks, made an assault on what he called “the monarch of North American mountains.” He and his party traveled by boat—first a steamer called the Tanana Chief, later a poling boat called Mudlark—down the Tanana River and then up the Kantishna River. Marching overland, they passed lakes brimming with waterfowl, hunted caribou, made jerky, and in the northern reaches of the Kantishna Hills, on Chitsia Creek, they staked ten placer gold mining claims. While not impressive in quantity, the claims would nonetheless contribute to a stampede and help write an entire chapter of Denali’s history.
Wickersham and party climbed the mountain’s northwest buttress, a difficult route, and soon found themselves high above the Peters Glacier, stymied by “a tremendous precipice beyond which we cannot go,” Wickersham wrote. “Our only line of further ascent would be to climb the vertical wall of the mountain at our left, and that is impossible.” They were at 10,000 feet, face to face with what today is called the Wickersham Wall.
Two months after Wickersham’s climb, Frederick Cook, a medical doctor with a winning personality, attempted Mount McKinley by roughly the same route, and reached an elevation of 11,000 feet, over halfway to the top. He received high praise, and his reputation would have remained stellar had he stopped there. But three years later, in 1906, Dr. Cook, a veteran of the Arctic and the Antarctic, returned to climb McKinley with another team, including Herschel C. Parker, a Columbia University physics professor, and Belmore Browne, an artist, hunter, poet, scholar, and lumberjack. After two months slogging up the Susitna River into the Alaska Range, finding the terrain vexing at best, the expedition members turned back while the doctor stayed in the mountains with his horse packer, Robert Barrill.
In an unexpected September telegram to his East Coast backers, Cook announced: A LAST DESPERATE ATTEMPT ON MOUNT MCKINLEY.
Moving fast up the Ruth Glacier, he bagged the great mountain in two weeks, he said; up and back, simple as that. He had a photograph to prove it. Sure enough, there he stood alone on bedrock, triumphant, shot from below, backdropped by nothing but sky. The claim provoked immediate skepticism.
Rick tells the crowd, “The photo was actually taken on a granite knob above the Ruth Glacier, at fifty-five hundred feet elevation, only about one-fourth as high as the summit of Denali. Today it’s called Fake Peak.”
The crowd is mildly stunned. People don’t know what to think. Rick smirks as he sweeps his long red hair out of his eyes. A good joke, the crowd agrees. Fake Peak. Two young men laugh. “It’s true,” Rick says.
Dr. Cook did it again in 1908 when he claimed the North Pole with a sudden dash from Nansen Sound, off the north coast of Ellesmere Island, in an impossibly short period of time. Again, skepticism ensued.
About Cook’s outrageous McKinley claim, C. E. Rusk of the Oregon Mazama Mountaineering Club wrote, “That man does not live who can perform such a feat. Let us draw the mantle of charity around him and believe, if we can, that there is a thread of insanity running through the woof of his brilliant mind. . . . If he is mentally imbalanced, he is entitled to the pity of mankind. If he is not, there is no corner of the earth where he can hide from his past.” Cook never admitted wrongdoing. He was dropped from the Explorer’s Club, where he was a past president, and from the American Alpine Club and other prestigious societies.
BURDENED by Cook’s story, I walk out the visitor center doors, wondering why a man would do such a thing. Climb so high, and risk falling so far.
Forty or fifty people stand outside in the parking lot, in the brilliant sunshine, most of them silent. As if the park were a holy place, the mountain a religious icon, they look about, warmed in the sun. Some stand atop picnic tables and take photos. Others hold loved ones and speak quietly. There’s no wind.
I say nothing; nobody approaches me.
South of the visitor center, where the topography falls away to the Thorofare River, a young man trudges determinedly through deep snow, headed for a clean white north-facing slope. He’s by himself, moving with conviction. I watch him but think little of his actions, his willfulness. After a minute I go back inside where Rick still has a crowd. “The Brooks, Wickersham, and Cook expeditions were merely reconnoiters. None got close to the summit,” I hear him say. “But they set the stage for three expeditions that did: the Sourdough Expedition, the Parker-Browne Expedition, and the Stuck-Karstens Expedition that finally reached the summit.”
IT OCCURS TO ME, watching Rick hold a crowd: people love a good story. Facts are nice and especially useful when manipulated. Art and photography have their persuasions. Music brings people together; wars tear them apart. Demagoguery can turn entire nations upside down. And don’t forget oratory and rhetoric. But there’s nothing like a good story, well told, rich in content and delivery. Rick excels at it.
He ticks off the three mountaineering expeditions, one at a time.
The 1910 Sourdough Expedition. Believing that Alaskans, not outsiders, should be the first atop Mount McKinley, four Fairbanks prospectors—Billy Taylor, Pete Anderson, Charley McGonagall, and Tom Lloyd—wagered a bet that they could do it. Wearing bib overalls and “light duck parkees” (light parkas without fur lining), they followed the Muldrow Glacier and established a base camp at 11,000 feet. On summit day, three men (the overweight Tom Lloyd stayed at camp) climbed in subzero temperatures and consumed nothing more than hot chocolate and donuts as they ascended today’s Pioneer Ridge, the sinuous northeast route that knifes between the Wickersham Wall and the Muldrow Glacier. Covering 8,500 vertical feet in an eighteen-hour ascent and return, Taylor and Anderson reached the north peak (while McGonagall dropped out not far below) and planted a fourteen-foot spruce pole (with a six-by-twelve-foot American flag) as evidence of their success. Could the two men see that the south peak, two miles distant, was in fact 850 feet higher, the true summit? When asked about this nearly three decades later, Billy Taylor would respond, “It didn’t seem to have any elevation more.” Besides, the north peak, the one visible from Fairbanks, had been their objective, and they’d succeeded with remarkable pluck.
But when Lloyd returned to Fairbanks before the other three, and boasted that all four men had climbed both summits, his false testimony clouded the expedition’s true achievement. For awhile the Sourdough Party was regarded as just another Cook-like fantasy. People in Fairbanks shook their heads. The most powerful spotting scopes strained 170 miles to the southwest and showed no flagpole.
The 1912 Parker-Browne Expedition. Herschel Parker and Belmore Browne, former colleagues turned critics of Frederick Cook, attempted McKinley via the Muldrow Glacier. While relaying supplies up the glacier by dog team, Browne did double duty after a third member of the party, Merl LaVoy of Seattle, injured his knee. As they gained altitude, snow blindness plagued them. They found that their bodies, starved for oxygen in the thin air, could not metabolize the fat in their pemmican; they resorted to a starvation diet of tea, sugar, raisins, and hardtack (crackers). A stabbing cold hounded them. They pushed on, higher, higher. Browne wrote that the summit rose “as innocently as a snow-covered tennis court and as we looked it over we grinned with relief—we knew the peak was ours.” It was not.
The wind intensified, the sky darkened. A storm advanced from the south. Less than two hundred feet below the summit, hurricane force winds pinned them in place, and showed no sign of abating. “The game’s up,” Browne screamed to Parker and LaVoy. “We’ve got to get back down.” If they didn’t, they’d die. Browne later called it “a cruel and heartbreaking day.”
The next day they recovered at a high camp, ate hardtack and raisins, and applied boracic acid for snow blindness. Then they tried again, leaving for the summit at 3 a.m. And again a fierce storm pinned them just below their objective, leaving Browne with “only a feeling of weakness and dumb despair.”
Later, while recovering at Cache Creek after descending the Muldrow Glacier, the three men were nearly knocked off their feet when a massive earthquake shook the Alaska Range. Geologist Michael Collier would later write: “The ground around them pitched like a ship at sea. As they watched, the western flank of Mount Brooks was swept clean by a miles-long avalanche. A cloud of snow four thousand feet high swept over the climbers in an icy sixty-mile-an-hour blast. Summit or no summit, the men, still alive, counted themselves lucky to be off the mountain.” Later, the climbers would learn that the earthquake was an aftermath of the cataclysmic eruption of Novarupta, in today’s Katmai National Park, three hundred miles to the south-southwest, that created the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, darkened the skies of Kodiak Island, and blasted volcanic ash high enough into the upper atmosphere that it circled the world many times.
The 1913 Stuck-Karstens Expedition. Alaska’s Episcopal Archdeacon Hudson Stuck, a traveling missionary, organized an expedition and went looking for a partner who could lead “in the face of difficulty and danger.” And so he found the indomitable Harry Karstens, former wilderness guide for hunter/conservationist Charles Sheldon in 1906–1908. They recruited Walter Harper, Stuck’s aide, and Robert Tatum, a theology student, both strong young men. Like Karstens, Stuck was no stranger to what Teddy Roosevelt called the “strenuous life,” a toughness and wisdom gained by learning from the Natives, knowing the land, sleeping on the ground. Still, Stuck failed to do his share of camp chores, and he erringly regarded Karstens at times as an assistant, even though Karstens was the key to the expedition’s success. Through his skills and tenacity, it was Karstens, not Stuck, who repeatedly saved the day and kept the party together, though Stuck would later take credit.
A campfire on the Muldrow Glacier destroyed or damaged their mitts, socks, and tent. Despair set in. Maybe they should turn back. “Forget it,” Karstens said. They advanced upward and discovered a bewildering maze of tumbled, jumbled ice blocks larger than buildings, the entire scene created by the previous year’s great earthquake. For twenty days Karstens and Harper cut three miles of ice steps into the concrete-hard ice. Karstens noted that some of the ice blocks, balanced precariously against each other in defiance of gravity, appeared ready to fall if somebody whispered. At an elevation of about 16,000 feet, they spotted the spruce pole planted three years earlier by the Sourdough Party on the north peak. At 17,500 feet they set up their final camp. Fifty-year-old Stuck struggled in the thin air. The summit day dawned clear and cold; at minus four degrees Fahrenheit Karstens assigned Walter Harper to lead the assault. Many times Stuck blacked out; he had to rest to recover and would be relieved of the mercury barometer he carried to make scientific measurements.
It was Harper then, the smallest man in the party, a robustly built half-Athabascan Native, who on June 7, 1913, first set foot on the top of the highest mountain in North America. The others followed, and for ninety minutes they looked about, took measurements, and congratulated each other. Stuck attributed the benevolent weather—a perfect day—to God’s design. “There was no pride of conquest,” he later wrote,
. . . no trace of that exultation of victory some enjoy upon the first ascent of a lofty peak, no gloating over good fortune that had hoisted us a few hundred feet higher than others who had struggled and been discomfited. Rather was the feeling that a privileged communion with the high places of the earth had been granted; that not only had we been permitted to lift up eager eyes to these summits, secret and solitary since the world began, but to enter boldly upon them, to take place, as it were, domestically hitherto in their sealed chambers, to inhabit them, and to cast our eyes down from them seeing all things as they spread out from the windows of heaven itself.
RICK FINISHES, and everybody takes a moment to regard the three-dimensional map of Alaska before them, the long arc of rugged peaks that comprise the Alaska Range, and the crowning mountain itself out the west-facing window, bathed in sunlight and new snow.
“Hey,” somebody says, “what’s that guy doing?”
Everybody looks out the south-facing window. The man I’d seen earlier marching with determined willfulness below the visitor center toward a north-facing slope is now kicking large, bold letters into the snow, making a proclamation to the world:
JESUS SAVES
I am not a godless man. I appreciate the mysteries of the universe, the possibility that things are ordered by a divine power, a maestro, a simple carpenter or a musician, a minstrel. I’ve read some of the Bible and caught myself praying now and then, a few times fervently. So when I see the man writing in the snow and I look at Rick and he looks back at me as if to say, “Hey, I’m on break. You go tell him to erase what he’s just written into the pristine Denali landscape,” I know I’m about to be tested. Again.
I go.
Perhaps this crusader should be in advertising: the billboard business. His handiwork preempts everybody’s view of the Alaska Range. The lettering is perfect in the angel-white snow. Visitors who previously stood about and enjoyed their national park, each in his or her own private way, what Hudson Stuck might call a “privileged communion” with nature—a beauty beyond improvement—now watch me as I walk out onto the visitor center deck and wave at the billboard man. The communion has been broken. For us all. He waves back. He’s about three hundred meters away. I shake my head at him. He raises his arms in a questioning manner, palms up, as if to say, “What?”
“Erase it,” I yell; my voice abrasive by its volume. I wish I could whisper to him, tell him to please undo what he’s done. Get on my knees if I have to. Treat him like a flower.
Again he raises his arms in a “What do you want me to do?” gesture.
“Erase it,” I yell. I might have to go down there and do it myself.
But he gets it. He spends a good ten minutes tracking through his own lettering, obliterating it. He walks back upslope to where I wait.
“Thank you,” I say.
“I apologize if I did anything wrong,” he says.
“Apology accepted.”
He’s so young and sincere, not so much a man as a boy, not a day over twenty. Short haired, clean-shaven, clear-eyed, the smile of a salesman, the heart of a missionary, he puts his hand on my shoulder and says, “You know, a single lifetime is very short, while eternity is forever. Without a Heaven, all we have is the Earth.”
TWO WEEKS LATER autumn arrives and I am tested for a third time. Snow has melted from the tundra yet persists on the high peaks. Bearberry leaves color the land crimson while dwarf birch makes it russet orange. Caribou and moose wear thick, luminous coats burnished by the hormones of the rut, the bulls feisty with full antlers. Grizzlies spend all day with their heads down, eating soapberries and blueberries. For many people who love Denali National Park, this is their favorite time of year.
Once again I’m on duty at Eielson Visitor Center when a couple approaches me. The wife says, “Ranger, there’s a man over there, down off the trail, with a camera, sneaking up on a bear, getting really close.”
They lead me to an overlook and point down. Sure enough, about four hundred meters away a man is sneaking up on a bear that’s got its head down, facing away, eating berries, fattening up for the long winter. What to do? Let the man proceed and see what happens? Watch the bear finish eating berries and start eating him? Yell at him to back off? Run down there and grab him and pull him back and risk my life with his? Start a betting pool? A memorial fund?
Every passing second brings the man closer to the bear.
I yell.
He doesn’t hear me, or he ignores me.
He steps closer.
I yell again. “Hey, get away from that bear. RIGHT NOW.”
The man turns and glares up at me. He looks back at the bear, back at me, back at the bear, his head snapping to and fro. I motion him to get back up here. He resumes his crouched position, camera at his face, and makes two more steps toward the bear, now very near, maybe only about twenty meters away.
A few years ago a backpacker in Glacier Bay encountered a coastal brown bear on White Thunder Ridge and took two photos of the bear before the bear killed him. All that remained days later when the rangers arrived was a ravaged campsite, a few scattered bones of the backpacker, his boots, torn clothing, and his camera.
“Stop,” I scream. “Get away from that bear and get back up here. NOW.”
The man stops and stands upright, turns and walks back upslope, his eyes fixed on me. The entire time the bear, busily eating, hasn’t lifted its head. Here comes Mister Camera Man, Mister Wildlife Photographer of the Year. He’s about to thank me for saving his life, nominate me for an award, give me a big hug. I’m his hero. In full stride now, he comes at me, a bear himself. A crowd gathers for my award ceremony.
“Wow,” I hear somebody say, “he’s really angry.”
Bill Truesdale’s caveat comes to mind: No more confrontations.
How far do we have to go to find out who we are? Our family cat, G-2, never left Spokane’s South Hill; he considered himself a king until the night he lost his first fight and turned up on the porch with one ear chewed off, his golden fur matted in dried blood. It stunned me and felt like the end of an era, the fall of an empire. My brother Mick was overseas. “Who’s going to tell him?” I asked. Mom did. Should we lock G-2 indoors to keep him safe? “No,” Mick said. “Let him go.” On a cold moonless night a few months later G-2 went out and never came back. We could only guess his fate. Mortally wounded, he probably crawled under a bush to die alone; his final victim not some other cat, but himself.
Mr. Wildlife Photographer of the Year strides up to me and says, “Are you insane?”
“No.”
“What’s your name?”
“Kim.”
“Rangers are supposed to protect people in a national park, not endanger them.”
“That’s what I just did.”
“You could have gotten me killed yelling like that, so close to that bear.”
I sigh. Next time I’ll do better.
THERE IS NO NEXT TIME. The Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos Islands offers me a position in a naturalist training course and I accept, leaving Denali early. Because of this and perhaps other matters, my final evaluation doesn’t read “highly recommended for rehire,” which most rangers get, or even “recommended for rehire.” Instead, I get “not recommended for rehire.”
Bill Truesdale drives me to the train station. He says, “If a ranger leaves early, Kim, that’s the final evaluation I’m required to give. I hope you understand.”
“I do.” I don’t.
Out the window of Bill’s truck, aspens and birches flash by, the leaves golden medallions in the sun. Silver clouds sail over the peaks of the Alaska Range. I roll down the window to let the cool air wash my hair, feel the sharp stab of winter’s approach.
Bill, I want to say, turn this truck around, take me back. Keep me here. I’ll sleep with the sled dogs and eat hardtack and never complain. But I say nothing. We see a cow moose and her grown calf. She should have two; a bear probably got the other one. Eat or be eaten. Danger, sex, food. Music, fire, love.
“Keep writing,” Bill tells me.
“I will.”
My heart is breaking. Mountains, tundra, forests, flowers, braided rivers and galloping glaciers, golden eagles and golden bears, sandhill cranes and sudden rains, the quilt of life so thin yet robust, resilient yet vulnerable. A tear lodges behind my eye. Will it all still be here when I return?
If I return?