Muir’s Alaska

We were supposed to fly to Kantishna, but the sky was heavy with rain. Too low, too low, with no visibility, we were not allowed to fly. Instead, we drove two hours to the gates of Denali National Park where we boarded a rattling school bus piloted by a guy with a perfect radio announcer voice and 30 plus years of living in and around the park. The seats were hard, the heat was weak, the windows fogged when shut and dripped when slid open just enough to keep the fog away. The rain was relentless, persistent, the kind that finds the one tiny gap between your coat and the bare skin on the back of your neck. In short, it was viciously crappy weather.

And I was stunned by the beauty of the landscape.

Landscape is for photographers, mostly, with tripods and slow shutter speeds and patience. A wide format is a fine approach for exploring landscape, the 16 x 9 sweep of a video camera, preferably mounted to a low flying plane on some kind of stabilization rig. A well crafted photograph can catch the drama, the space, the scale. JP Hubrick — a photographer who lived in McCarthy in the early 1900s and shot panorama photographs of the Wrangell Mountains and the surrounding area — had the right medium. Words are harder to work with.

Prior to heading to Alaska, I cracked John Muir’s “Travels in Alaska”, written by the great naturalist on a trip up the Inside Passage and beyond in the late 1800s. I found it florid, tough going, hyperbolic. There are long passages about the sky, the light, the color. I slogged through the first few chapters, reading a little on my couch in Seattle, a little more in bed, some more on the plane to Fairbanks.

By the time I got to Denali, I understood. Muir wasn’t exaggerating; he was just describing Alaska as it was. As it is now.

Under the wheels, the road was a slick stripe of muddy gray, the bus rattled and groaned. On the right side, the land lifted up, on the left side, the glacial valley yawned wide across to the foothills; a brown braid of river lay flat on a pale sandbar. At one point, the valley was so wide that I felt confused, disoriented. It seemed I was looking out across an ocean inlet, the water covered with ripples. It was sand, glacier silt, and in between there were little flames of gold, the leaves of the balsam poplar trees, turning with the season.

Fall lasts about four weeks in Denali. This late August day on the bus came from right in the middle of a Seattle November. It was in the 50s, the rain would not let up. The bus came to a full stop and the driver shut off the engine. We gawked into the brush where two bull moose were browsing – their eating behavior is called browsing – eating the tips off the willow bushes. One had a brown velvet covering on his antlers, the other had rubbed the velvet clean off, his antlers were pale, unmistakable.

I had wanted dearly to see moose – a few days later, watching a moose bathe in a pond from my seat in a bush plane, I joked that I was “over” them. Not so. Not so at this first sighting, not so at the last. I also saw a grizzly, grazing on the green grass verge next to the highway north out of Coldfoot and another big brown bear, disappearing into the scrub while I stood on the Root Glacier outside of Kennecott. Dall sheep dotted the upper slopes of the mountains around Denali and the Wrangells; big white swans paddled the lakes.

Everything in the landscape was too big for words. The bush pilots, understated guys, talked to us passengers through big clunky headsets, telling us what we could see outside the Plexiglas windows of the tiny noisy planes — cranberry colored foliage on the blueberry bushes, a pale sage lichen favored by caribou, more of those balsam poplars, their leaves aflame with color, and, soap berries – a treat for bears – bright, bright red like holly, and in between, ochre and mustard colors, scrubby little plants on their way to red but not quite there yet. “Oh, the colors are just beautiful at this time of year” would be the static-y words in my ears, and I would turn and look out the window and for miles, miles in every direction around us would be the fall palette. “Amazing…” I would say, unable to take it in, my eyes exhausted from the expanse of it, my vocabulary insufficient and frustrated.

Muir wrote about the sky, repeatedly, in Travels in Alaska; he described the texture of the clouds and what color they were on the edges as opposed to in their fluffy centers. He started at the horizon and described his way upward, missing nothing.

But Muir didn’t travel by bush plane, he couldn’t look through those clouds spread thin across the flanks of the Kantishna foothills, and he didn’t see the colors framed by gray and white strands of sky. He traveled by steamer and he walked, he did not gaze out the window of a speeding SUV, wedged in by luggage, snacking on Ritz crackers with peanut butter. He wouldn’t have dreamed of covering 250 miles in a day – a mere day! – and his gear would have been heavy and rough and bulky. I have rain pants that weigh nearly nothing and merino wool long underwear, fine and light, and a digital camera, and Goretex lined hiking shoes. I envied him only the luxury of a seemingly endless amount of time.

I intentionally ended my adventure with a few solo days in Anchorage. I like to sit and write in the place I’ve visited, even if it’s a chain hotel with little in the room to identify the place. The anonymity of a room far from home helps me think through what I’ve seen before I’m back to the familiar, back to the routine of padding into the kitchen in my socks, looking out into the fenced backyard from my every day seat at my desk. While traveling these vast distances in such a short time, there’s little time to write. The landscape flies past the blurry rain streaked windows of a bus, a bush plane, a shared SUV. It makes me dizzy with motion, not always a bad feeling.

But now, I have time to think about Muir, sitting at a campfire of his own making, unpacking his words at the end of the day and using them to generously show us this Alaska.

My trip was funded by Travel Alaska.