I let the dogs out and locked the doors with the engine idling. My companions marched in place as they relieved themselves, unable to tolerate the touch of the subfrozen ice for more than a second at a time. Dance of the deep freeze.
Next morning at breakfast I inquired about the temperature. “Forty-eight centigrade,” the cook said. Meaning minus forty-eight. Below-zero temperatures out here this time of year are referred to by numerics alone.
We rolled out into a world of bold, naked, granitic peaks, blanketed in snow and the orange glow of dawn. Warm at first, the truck began to exhibit a noticeable sluggishness, particularly on the uphill grades. Cold bearings, I figured, and a colder engine (forgot the cardboard for the radiator again). Another problem arose: panting like marathoners in the dry air, the dogs were frosting the inside of the windshield. When I diverted heat from the heater to the defroster, my feet began to freeze. Couldn’t keep up with both. This, along with a coarse whine in the gearbox, stole from the peaceful joy of my morning. I couldn’t shake the nagging thought of some malignancy in the transfer case which had denied me access to low range for several months. Should’ve had that looked at back in Maine.
At Muncho Lake we hit a surprise curve (I was steering with my knee at the time, scraping a rime of dog breath off the inside of the windshield with a credit card), requiring emergency maneuvers to avoid sliding down the bank. However, what had been a loose clutch first thing this morning had tightened up in the cold wind, requiring great pressure to disengage, and then a toe-pry off the floor to re-engage. The brake behaved similarly. We made it, barely, and then paused to allow the pedal linkages to warm up.
A few miles later, on the downward side of a long hill, I eased off the gas, but we continued to accelerate, speeding nearly out of control. In a panic I shut off the key, forfeiting power assistance to brakes and steering, and barely got us stopped upright and on the road. Gas pedal frozen down. I pried it up, restarted the engine, and drove on, careful to slip the edge of my boot under the accelerator and lift it any time I wished to decelerate.
Our road was wider now, but a bit rougher. We struck an unexpected mogul, took a small leap, and lurched about on frozen shocks, shaking loose the tail of a snowshoe lashed to the canoe, which rotated rather slowly down to touch the windshield, brittle at fifty below, decorating it with a scrim of cracks. One more badge of travel, another rite of passage.
We limped across the border into the Yukon (the Yukon!), and pulled up at the Contact Creek roadhouse for the ceremonial dog dance, fuel, and advice.
“Get a belly tarp,” the owner suggested.
I inquired about the current temperature.
“Sixty-five.”
“Centigrade or Fahrenheit?” I asked.
He smiled. “Don’t matter,” he said.
At Watson Lake I purchased a belly tarp, a swath of brown canvas that covered the front of the radiator and lapped halfway back beneath the engine, maintaining a bubble of engine heat under the hood, warming the heater and pedal linkages.
The next day, after 4,800 miles of hard and happy driving, I crawled out of the cab into the gelid air of Alaska, to celebrate my passage. I stared at the high peaks of the Wrangells a hundred miles off to the south, and westward along the Tanana flowage, out over the infinite frozen silent timeless beatific landscape. But what I drank to was the surest confirmation of my latitude: the wild, beautiful, penetrating cold.
Author and independent field biologist Jeff Fair follows loons and other wild spirits, including his own, across the North to study and write about them. A wildlife biologist by formal training, he had, prior to his emancipation, trapped and radio-collared grizzly bears in Yellowstone, worn the badge and uniform of a Utah game warden (one career arrest), and introduced snakes to tourists as a USFS naturalist in Oklahoma. He now lives in Alaska and spends a considerable amount of time hitchhiking by bush plane around the hinterlands with his notebook, bedroll, and the stub of a No. 2 pencil. The pay is lean, but it’s a good living.
ED RE AD ICKER-HENDERS ON
Surrounded by Bears
Why bother with humans, when there are so many salmon to eat?
THIS IS MY JOB: I REASSURE PEOPLE. I TELL THEM, “HEY, don’t worry. Bears don’t like the taste of GORE-TEX.”
Nobody looks reassured. Maybe it’s the t-shirt I’m wearing, the one that says, “Tourists: The Other Red Meat.”
We’re on a path, a mile or so long, full of blind corners. This walk into Anan Bear Observatory, near Wrangell in Southeast Alaska, is every Tarzan jungle walk you ever watched on a Saturday matinee, the blue screen of the TV opening up the impossible world beyond. Each time the boardwalk gives way to mud, there are fresh bear tracks on the trail. Some of the tracks are the size of your head. Beside the path, there are tree trunks that bears have clawed just for the fun of it. Some of the claw marks are ten feet up.
Something has been eating the bridge.
“Shouldn’t we have brought pepper spray?” Jean, the woman behind me, asks. She’s here bravely trying to overcome a lifelong fear of bears, but her husband stayed back in town, and behind her, the other three clients look like they might turn and run any minute.
But I’m here to reassure. It’s part of my summer job. I’m here to keep the tourists happy, keep them safe. These people are paying my bills, so reassuringly, I say, “Pepper spray doesn’t work on wet bears. The capsaicin molecules don’t bond well with water. In rain like today, we’d just be spraying air freshener in the bear’s face. Besides, every single person I know who has ever gone out with bear spray has ended up on the ground after blasting themselves in panic while the bear wandered off into the woods. The screaming is never pretty.”
At each blind corner—I’m not afraid of bears, right? That’s why I’m the guide—I call out, “Hey, bear,” just in case the bears are listening. Rule one: Never surprise animals with mouths bigger than your face. A startled bear is an unhappy bear.
The bears are here because each July and August Anan Creek is so jammed with returning pink and chum salmon that the eddies look like one solid fin. For those two months, over a half-million fish beat themselves again and again against a waterfall eight feet high and twenty feet wide. In the turbulence of the falls, the leaping fish are dark slashes that disappear, tossed back by the force of the water, faster than you can blink. The falls themselves almost glow because the treetops lace together so closely that directly over the stream is the only place you can see sky.
The place smells like somebody opened a thousand cans of tuna and then forgot all about them. There are fish carcasses—partial and whole—lining the stream’s banks, where the bears wait. The fish start dying the instant they hit fresh water; their bodies are able to process it only long enough to get upstream, spawn, and die gasping. But the bears get an awful lot of them first.
Jean reaches the viewing platform with a sigh of relief, as if she’s safe now. Proving that the man who hired me to help him schlep tourists out here should have thought about it longer, I tell her that a week or two ago, a bear came up onto the platform, chasing a photographer around. Nobody seriously thought the bear wanted to eat the guy. It was a game, a break between meals. Really, for all our atavistic fears of being eaten alive, from the bears’ point of view, with this many fish in the river, it’s just too much work to try and eat a person. Hiking boots don’t digest well, and no self-respecting bear wants to spend a week spitting up Nike logos.
Bears annually congregate along hundreds of Alaska’s creeks and rivers to fish for salmon; a handful of those streams have become especially well-known for their bear-viewing programs. Anan Creek is one. Pack Creek on Admiralty Island, Fish Creek near the Alaska-British Columbia border, and the Brooks River in Katmai National Park are others. The best known—and the standard by which all other bear-viewing areas are measured—is the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary, on the Alaska Peninsula. The focal point of the gathering is McNeil Falls, where dozens of brown bears congregate e
ach July and August to feed on chum salmon. As many as 144 bears (adults and cubs) have been identified along McNeil River in a single season. And in July 1997, biologists counted 70 bears at the falls at one time.
—Bill Sherwonit
We’re on the platform only five minutes before a black bear wades into the stream, grabs a fish on the first stab—there are so many it’s hard to miss—and walks back up, perching on a log to eat. He’s less than ten yards away.
After the first few days of the salmon run, once they’ve had their post-hibernation fill, the bears only eat the fattiest parts of the fish—the skin and the roe, the brains and stomach—letting the rest fall for the scavengers that move in as soon as the bear shuffles off to get another fish. There are gulls, terns, kingfishers. River otters move like oil slicks, and thirty bald eagles perch on the banks and in the trees. Far above us, ravens call, sounding like drippy faucets. There’s so much life here. There were a dozen seals at the river’s mouth, and we’d passed harbor porpoise on the boat ride in, their black fins cutting the gray water, chasing leaping fish ahead of them. Everybody is eating somebody else. Even the plant life within a half-mile of the stream banks depends on the nutrients of fish bits the animals drop.
So the odds are, if the bears think of us at all, they just think we are incredibly stupid. We’re the only ones not fishing, not eating. Each and every other animal in sight—except, of course, for the dying fish themselves—is acting like it’s the final night’s buffet on a cruise ship. We humans are just standing around like morons, staring, eyes and mouths wide open.
Six or seven more bears come and go. Meanwhile, the fish keep hurling themselves against the waterfall. Not a single one seems to make it. Some must—I can see fish in eddies above the falls, waiting while they gather strength to move into the calm water upstream—but below the falls, all I see is failure after failure, thousands of fish not making the cut. It’s Nature throwing an infinity of solutions at a small problem. In order to get one fish, you need ten thousand fish.
A black bear comes down the opposite side of the stream. She sits, sniffing the air for a moment, and her caution is rewarded: a brown bear comes out of the brush. The black bear turns into a blur, running away, picking a course that takes her through the thickest brush and up a nearly vertical rock face. She has completely disappeared in seconds.
Anan is one of the very few places in the world where black and brown bears share a river, but it’s obvious the brown bears, the grizzlies, are at the top of the pecking order here. This brown is a full-grown female. She’s close enough for us to see that she’s lactating, but there are no cubs. They must have died recently, taken by a wolf or by disease, or even by another bear. Like the fish hurling themselves at the waterfall, this bear hurled herself, her progeny, into the world. And like the fish she’s chewing on, her progeny fell short.
As many as a hundred bears—eighty black, twenty brown—come to Anan during any given year. Today, I lose count. There’s a bear in the pilings of the platform, chasing fish into a dead-end cave. There’s another on the hill opposite, twenty yards or so off. A third is hiding by crouching next to the platform stairway. Jean, a huge smile on her face, lifelong fear gone in sheer wonder, points out one in a cave on the other side of the stream. There are two more in the upper river. There’s a brown bear, a yearling, in the stream below, pouncing on fish with legs splayed, butt in the air, body not yet sure what to do with the knees, while the fish get away.
There is no way to keep all the bears in sight at the same time. The forest is so thick there could be a dozen more out there, patiently waiting their turn at the river.
And this is a good thing. It’s good to find out that nature still has you hopelessly outnumbered.
On our way back to the boat, a brown comes out of the bush and sits on the trail in front of us. In the movies, bears crash through the bushes, making as much noise as a freight train, but they’d be lousy predators if they did that. This one appears as silently as a ghost. She’s three, maybe four years old, 600 pounds or so. She has a huge scar on her hind leg from a fight with another bear. She’s about ten feet away. She looks at me. I look at her. A few minutes ago I’d watched her dissect a fish, her claws as agile as a surgeon’s scalpel, as dexterous as chopsticks, but the size of butcher knives.
I bow to her, in respect. She scratches her ear and walks into the bush, utterly indifferent.
She smells like a very large, very wet dog.
Here’s the lesson from the bears, what I think Jean’s taking home with her: Tarzan was never lord of the jungle. It’s just that the jungle was so full, the animals didn’t get around to eating him. What Tarzan was yelling about was not danger, but sheer joy. There’s so much of it. More than we ever imagine.
Ed Readicker-Henderson has been traveling in Alaska since 1978, and is the co-author of eight guidebooks on the state. Over the years, he’s been chased by wolves, charged by moose, attacked by eagles, ravens, and snow geese, and once had to deal with an enraged pika. Bears, though, are never a problem.
JON KRAKAUER
The Flyboys of Talkeetna
Glacier landings and flying blind without instruments are routine for the off-strip set.
IT’S AN ORDINARY JUNE MORNING IN DOWNTOWN Talkeetna, cultural hub of Alaska’s upper Susitna Valley, population maybe 250 on a good day. The dawn breeze carries the scent of spruce and wet earth; a moose wanders across the hamlet’s deserted main drag and pauses to rub her head against the fence of the local ballpark. Abruptly, out on the airfield at the edge of town, the peace of the young day is shattered as the engine of a small red airplane coughs two or three times and then catches with a roar.
The fellow in the pilot’s seat is a big shaggy bear of a man named Doug Geeting. As he taxis his craft to the end of the runway, Geeting gets on the radio and files a flight plan in the terse, cryptic argot that’s the lingua franca of aviators everywhere. “Talkeetna, four-seven-fox. We’ve got four souls to the Southeast Fork of the Kahiltna. Three hours fuel. Hour and thirty on the route.”
“Four-seven-fox, roger. Wind three-five-zero at six, favoring three-six. Altimeter two-niner-eight-niner.”
Alaskans have long debated the proper name for North America’s highest mountain. Though it’s officially been called Mt. McKinley since 1897, many residents believe the peak should be given the name that Athabascans living north of the Alaska range used for centuries: Denali, “The High One.” Among those to prefer Denali was Hudson Stuck, leader of the first expedition to reach the great peak’s 20,320-foot summit in 1913 and author of The Ascent of Denali. In Stuck’s view, the use of McKinley was an affront to both the mountain and the region’s Native peoples: “There is, to the author’s mind, a certain ruthless arrogance that grows more offensive to him as the years pass by, in the temper that comes to a ‘new’ land and contemptuously ignores the Native names of conspicuous natural objects, almost always appropriate and significant, and overlays them with names that are, commonly, neither the one nor the other.”
—Bill Sherwonit
“Two-niner-eight-niner, roger. Away we go.” With that, the thirty-five-year-old pilot pulls back on the throttle, the din of the engine rises to an unholy wail, and the little airplane leaps off the tarmac in the huge Alaskan sky.
Beyond Talkeetna’s two airstrips, half-dozen dirt streets, and ramshackle assemblage of log cabins, trailers, Quonset huts, and souvenir shops lies a vast plain of black spruce, impenetrable alder, and waterlogged muskeg—a mosquito’s idea of paradise that’s flat as a griddle and barely 350 feet above sea level. Just fifty miles away, however, the immense ramparts of Mt. McKinley— the highest point in North America—erupt out of these lowlands without preamble. No sooner is Geeting in the air than he banks sharply to the left, buzzes west over the broad, silty braids of the Susitna River, and points the airplane squarely toward that hulking silhouette.
Geeting’s craft is a Cessna 185, a six-seater with about as much room inside a
s a small Japanese station wagon. On this particular flight he is carrying three passengers, who are jammed into the cabin like sardines beneath a heap of backpacks, sleeping bags, skis, and mountaineering paraphernalia that fills the airplane from floor to ceiling. The three men are climbers, and they have each paid Geeting two hundred dollars to be flown to a glacier at the 8,500-foot elevation on Mt. McKinley, where they will spend the better part of a month trying to reach the 20,320-foot summit.
Approximately one thousand climbers venture onto the slopes of McKinley and its satellite peaks each year, and landing them on the high glaciers of the Alaska Range is Doug Geeting’s bread and butter. “Glacier flying”—as this demanding, dangerous, little-known facet of commercial aviation is generally termed—is practiced by only a handful of pilots the world over, eight or nine of whom are based in Talkeetna. As jobs go, the pay isn’t great and the hours are horrible, but the view from the office is tough to beat.
Twenty-five minutes out of Talkeetna, the first snaggle-toothed defenses of the McKinley massif rise sharply from the Susitna Valley, filling the windshield of Geeting’s Cessna. Ever since take-off the airplane has been laboring steadily upward. It has now reached an altitude of 8,000 feet, but the pickets of snow-plastered rock looming dead ahead stand a good 1,500 feet higher still. Geeting—who has logged some fifteen thousand hours in light planes, and has been flying this particular route for more than fifteen years now—appears supremely unconcerned as the plane bears down on the fast-approaching mountain wall.
A few moments before collision seems imminent—by which time the climbers’ mouths have gone dry and their knuckles turned white—Geeting dips a wing hard, throws the plane into a dizzying right turn, and swoops through a narrow gap that appears behind the shoulder of one of the loftier spires. The walls of the mountainside flash by at such close range that individual snow crystals can be distinguished glinting in the sunlight. “Yeah,” Geeting casually remarks on the other side, “that notch there was what we call ‘One-Shot Pass.’
Travelers' Tales Alaska Page 2
