Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now

by C. B. Bernard

  Just you wait.

  My first two trips to Alaska, I came here, and after I moved to Sitka I visited often. If you live in Sitka, Juneau’s the big city nearby, a ferry ride for a business trip, a shopping excursion to the box stores, a fogged-in layover on a flight to the Lower 48. Sitka’s practically a suburb, except neither town is accessible by road. In winter, people come to ski at Eaglecrest, the Douglas Island ski area, where four chairlifts serve as the starting point to a backcountry weighed down by more than 300 inches of snow each year.

  Superficially Juneau looks a lot like the rest of Southeast Alaska, sharing the general topography of mountains, rain forests, and water, and it’s in the Ketchikan-to-Yakutat Banana Belt, so the weather’s familiar: rain with a chance of rain. But look more closely and differences emerge. Juneau has a decidedly urban feel, with office buildings and hotels, stoplights and intersections, bus stops and strip malls. As the Mendenhall Glacier recedes from the valley northwest of town, industrial sprawl replaces it. The capital is more crowded than the rest of Southeast too—on your average winter day, home to just over 31,000 people, more when the state legislature is in session and lawmakers fly in from all over the state. As cities go, Juneau’s size underwhelms visitors from New York, Boston, or even Topeka. A small stadium like Fenway Park holds more people than the entire population, but it’s all about context—Juneau’s twice the size of Sitka and Ketchikan, Alaska’s fourth- and fifth-largest cities, combined, and the state has more than 120 incorporated cities with fewer than 1,000 residents. The smallest, Kupreanof, has just twenty-one—imagine how big Juneau must seem to them.

  Juneau’s infrastructure is also minimal for a state capital. The urban side is a relaxed urban, and thins quickly outside the heart of downtown. The sole bridge across the channel leads to Douglas Island, where you’ll find the bedroom community of West Juneau, the ski area, some gorgeous beaches, and forest and trails. Waterfowl gather in scenic wetlands outside town. Fireweed rims the shoulders of the road. Looming mountains constantly remind you that you’re in Alaska, damn it, and not Middle America. Of Juneau’s 3,248 square miles, just 264 of them are developed; the rest are rain forest, wilderness, water, or ice, and often all four at once. At its widest, the highway is two lanes in either direction. Who needs more? The roads don’t go anywhere, strictly speaking. Juneau occupies the mainland, but you can only get here by air or water. Thane Road drops from the southern edge of town to end after 6 miles. Go north, and the highway slims to a two-lane road that ends officially 45 miles later, though signs of the city fade long before that.

  The State Office Building, known to locals—especially those who work there—as the SOB, rises just eleven floors, the tallest building in town a twelve-story low-rise apartment complex. Cruise ships are the closest Juneau gets to a true high-rise, skyscrapers tipped on their sides to spill passengers onto the docks. Three, four, five, six ships some days, each carrying anywhere from 2,000 to 6,000 passengers. Not long ago, crooked, gap-toothed docks greeted them with missing planks, overlooked by the decrepit buildings of a town in decline. But with the influx of tourists came tourist dollars. The cruise lines recognized the value of investing in infrastructure, and their influence is visible in the fresh paint, renovated shop fronts, banners decorating new streetlamps, and the islands of planted flowers that brighten the sidewalks, medians, and roundabouts. It’s downright welcoming. Juneau!

  Walk a block or two deeper into the city, though, past the unofficially designated tourist area, and the shine wears off. Oh . . . Juneau.

  It’s fine, though, because most cruise passengers don’t explore very far. Why stray beyond the pocket of town all but reserved for them? Unless they’re on a boat or a bus, they stick within its confines like timid dogs at an invisible fence. Within this pocket, Juneau has surrendered itself to tourism with abandon. Trinket shops advertise cheap T-shirts, ball caps, and shot glasses. Every storefront sells ulus, the half-moon Eskimo women’s knives that have become a symbol of the Alaska tourism industry. You’ll find the same stores in Skagway to the north and Ketchikan to the south selling the same T-shirts, shot glasses, magnets, and ulus. Welcome to the Inside Passage, cruise-style. Chinese factory workers made most of the Alaska souvenirs and crafts. Most of the shops aren’t owned or operated by locals; some, as their names imply—Princess Jewelers, Caribbean Jewelers, Royal Jewelers, Celebrity Jewelers—run by the cruise lines themselves.

  You can find truly local merchants, Juneau people trying to earn a living, and the chamber of commerce promotes these shops as best it can—Wm Spear Design, Glacier Smoothie Soaps, Alaskan Fudge Company—but even with quality wares, it’s not easy competing with transient power vendors. The much-loved local Alaskan Brewing Company maintains a storefront in tourist town, well away from the actual brewery, where you can fill your suitcase with themed merchandise but you can’t buy any actual beer.

  Some shops display stickers in their windows that say “Owned by an Alaska family.” A Juneau friend laughed when I asked about them. “Those are just there to keep people from throwing rocks through the windows when the stores are boarded up for the winter.”

  Having prepared Kim that it will rain every day we’re in Southeast, the 74-degree sunshine seems a gift we’re both eager to enjoy, so we check in, drop our bags in our room, then swim the sea of tourists as we make our way down Franklin Street. They surge in and out of trinket shops and around us like a fickle tide, and within a couple hundred feet they’re already irritating me. With so many people shoehorned into such a small downtown area, it’s impossible to walk. They mill around aimlessly, three, four, and five deep, stopping without warning in front of shop windows or to take photos. “Look, an eagle!” one says, and an entire regiment will stop cold to raise their cameras like an honor guard’s rifles. When they spot a picture or souvenir they want, they head straight for it, walking off the sidewalk and across the street, oblivious to traffic. Almost to a one, they’re blissfully unaware that this is a functioning city, a state capital, not a Disneyland exhibit or the Alaska Pavilion at Epcot Center. Hear them bragging to the teenage cashiers at the trinket shops: “We landed a helicopter on a glacier,” they say. “We rode a dogsled.” As if they mushed the dogs themselves, or piloted the chopper. As if the cashier didn’t hear it from a hundred other people every day, a hundred days a year. As if touring glaciers by helicopter and dogsled wasn’t a mundane activity.

  That’s just the thing—landing a helicopter on a glacier is cool. It’s cool as hell. So is riding a dogsled—especially on a glacier—and you’d have to be shoved well beyond the boundaries of cynicism to think otherwise. Such is the price of tourism on a community, turning good people bad. Locals avoid downtown as much as possible when ships come in. Juneau welcomes tourism but maintains a love-hate relationship with the industry, and it’s easy to see why. Some say Juneau will founder without it; others insist that the city survived a long time before the cruise industry colonized it, and could make do. Both are probably right.

  But who am I to argue? Despite my own bittersweet history here, I’m no longer a local. I’m one of the others, an outsider. I can say all I want that I’m a traveler, not a tourist, but that’s splitting hairs. Every time I pull out my own camera for a photo, some local shoots me a look of disgust to remind me that I don’t live here anymore.

  We take the tram up Mt. Roberts, a 3,819-foot peak just a short walk from most of the downtown hotels. The tram deposits passengers 1,800 feet up the mountain at a landing station overlooking Juneau and Gastineau Channel. You can hike from town on a 4.5-mile trail that begins atop Sixth Street, but Kim and I shell out $30 apiece for the shortcut and cram into the cable car with twenty-five other tourists for the ascent.

  Our tram operator, a young Tlingit (roughly pronounced KLINK-it) kid, greets us in the Tlingit language, then lapses into a monotonously well-rehearsed routine in English, hitting scheduled jokes and pausing for laughter
. He works for Goldbelt, the Alaska Native corporation that owns the tram. If he’s a Juneau Tlingit, his family might also be shareholders, which means he gets paid for giving the tour then paid again with a dividend check at the end of the year. No wonder he’s full of jokes.

  Alaska Natives were not part of the federal government’s treaty-making machine, which shut down too early to include them in 1871. Their turn came a century later with the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), which created a dozen Native regional corporations around the state—plus one for Alaska Natives who no longer lived in Alaska—and more than 200 village corporations. ANCSA distributed 44 million acres of land and $963 million in cash among those corporations, and overnight all qualifying Alaska Natives—anyone at least one-fourth Native born on or before December 18, 1971, the day President Nixon signed the paperwork—became shareholders. A provision allowed for sale of stock to non-Natives beginning in 1992, rendering the Native corporations potentially more corporate than Native, but the Alaska Federation of Natives still preferred ANCSA to the reservation system because it let Alaska Natives participate in the country’s economic system while preventing the government from exercising the same dubious powers the Bureau of Indian Affairs had demonstrated.

  A cynical view holds that ANCSA was the government’s indirect response to the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay in the Arctic in 1968. The best way to export the oil was a pipeline across Native-owned land, and Alaska Natives were paid to surrender any future rights to land other than the 44 million acres allotted in the deal—roughly one-ninth of the state. Was $963 million a good price? Depends who you ask. It was what the federal government felt it could afford, not what the land was worth. With any such deal, there’s risk involved, and in 1981, a decade after the ink dried, $12 billion worth of oil was extracted from soil newly owned by the government.

  Alaska’s Native “villages” are more or less the equivalent of “tribes,” and there are no reservations to speak of, no domestic dependent-nation sovereignty or casinos.6 The money comes from other sources. When ANCSA took effect, qualifying Juneau Natives received 100 shares of stock in Goldbelt, the Juneau village corporation, and 100 shares in Sealaska, the Southeast Alaska regional corporation. Goldbelt chose its ANCSA land settlement wisely, and for two decades harvested timber to fund real estate and stock market investments. When the trees disappeared, it turned to tourism, and now the corporation owns a downtown hotel and high-end marina, as well as the tram. It also split into twelve separate companies that serve as government contractors in fields as diverse as construction, military training, logistical support, aerospace engineering, and private security. All told, Goldbelt employs more than 900 people in twenty states.

  In 2009 Sealaska shareholders with the original 100 shares earned dividends of $1,200 apiece, and Goldbelt paid 3,300 shareholders $2.75 a share. Like all Alaskans, Native or otherwise, they also received a dividend check from the state’s Permanent Fund, residents’ share of the state’s oil windfall, which they’ve been getting since a 1976 constitutional amendment. Alaskans don’t pay state income tax—the state pays them to live there. The amount varies, climbing as high as $3,269 in 2008.

  With checks like those, who needs casinos?

  The tram ends high atop Mt. Roberts at a gift shop, cafe, and restaurant, plus a small “nature center” that sells trail guides and wildlife photos. An eagle eyeballs passersby from its cage. Easy hiking trails lead to several scenic viewpoints. Some trails continue higher up the mountain, others run down its slopes to town, but most tram passengers never leave the landing station or gift shop.

  Kim and I climb farther up the mountainside. The views are astonishing. We remind each other that we woke up this morning in rainy Portland, and before dinner we’re 2,000 feet above Juneau looking out at the sun-dappled slopes of the St. Elias range. The fireweed is beginning to bloom, adding another layer of color to the flora that carpets the slopes. We can just make out the moving white specks of mountain goats on Mt. Juneau across the valley.

  While waiting for our tram back to town, we take photos from the landing station, where we have a clear view of the bridge across Gastineau Channel to Douglas Island. Three cruise ships languish at the docks below us, their basketball courts, deck chairs, driving range, and putting greens all in use. It’s a beautiful day in Alaska. People who paid a lot of money to experience the Last Frontier have chosen to remain aboard playing golf and shooting hoops—trip of a lifetime.

  An older man and his wife stand beside us, both carrying Royal Caribbean tote bags. She’s taking photos.

  “There’s our ship, Honey.”

  He can barely hide his scorn.“Look at that. This ridiculous town only has one bridge across the river. That’s the only way out of town. It must get all jammed up at rush hour.”

  “What river is it?” his wife asks.

  “How the hell should I know?”

  Kim looks at me and smiles.

  Later that night we eat dinner downtown and walk down to the floating dock on the waterfront. Though it’s 9 or 9:30 p.m., we still need sunglasses. People play Frisbee in the small park, read on benches, enjoying the rare summer sun. All the floatplanes have returned to their slips, all the cruise ships gone to their next destinations except one, the Statendam. She rests with her heavy lines tied just a few dozen feet from us.

  “I’ve been on that ship,” I tell Kim.

  As if on cue, the Statendam blasts her horn and peels away from the dock. We look for passengers waving from the decks and balconies, but they’re all inside at buffets, casinos, or bars, Juneau already behind them. Tomorrow they’ll awaken in a different town to find the same stores, the same gewgaws. Kim and I walk back to our hotel through half-empty streets, a few small groups milling around seemingly without destination. Charter fishermen, locals reappearing now that the last ship has left, a few drunk Natives, a few drunk whites—alcoholism an equal opportunity pastime in Alaska. No one is ready to go to bed yet. It’s still early, or at least it’s still light out.

  “So,” I say to Kim, “good first day?”

  “Good first day.”

  “What do you think so far?”

  “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

  11

  Epsom Salts and Seasick Bears

  Inograuna, Tadjiak’s wife, went insane and we had to strap her down in bed aboard the Rose H. Poor thing, I wonder if she will recover. She has been very bad for the past few days and we made a walrus hide straightjacket but she was able to take it off. She is now in the room next to the hall by the galley and her door is kept open.

  Joe spent the next two years in the Canadian Arctic, aided by his makeshift crew. After leaving Barter Island, the Teddy Bear sailed 700 miles east into Coronation Gulf, a vaguely fish-shaped body of water between what’s now the Canadian province of Nunavut and Victoria Island, the eighth-largest island in the world, at nearly 84,000 square miles bigger even than Great Britain, over which the monarch for whom it was named once ruled. From the air it resembles a maple leaf—happy geometry for a Canadian landmass. Storker Storkerson mapped the last remaining portion of the island’s coastline, first sighted by a European in 1826 and charted piecemeal over the next hundred years or so, giving his own name to a peninsula on the northeast corner.

  The wild Coppermine River drains forcefully into Coronation Gulf across from the island on Canada’s mainland. The Coppermine Inuit traditionally used the river to reach their inland caribou hunting grounds, and it takes its name from the copper ore found along its banks. Sir John Franklin traveled it during his search for the Northwest Passage in the mid 1800s—that is, before he and his 128 crewmen were lost—and Joe found winter quarters for the Teddy Bear 18 miles east of there in September 1910.

  A few years later the area became the focus of Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s search for “blond Eskimos,” a fabled race of Inuit wh
o had never seen a white man yet tended toward fair-colored hair and blue eyes. He first heard of these people on Herschel Island in 1906 while awaiting the arrival of Leffingwell and Mikkelsen, and later reported in his diaries that he’d seen such people himself. Stefansson hypothesized that these “Copper Inuit,” as he later referred to them, had centuries earlier assimilated a lost Norse colony from Greenland or had mixed with the survivors of an ancient migration across the Bering Strait. Joe rightfully disputed his claims. In 2003 Gísli Pálsson and scientist Agnar Helgason ran DNA tests on one hundred Inuit from the Victoria Island area and compared them against the DNA of Norse descendents from Iceland. The results essentially disproved Stefansson’s theory, which Pálsson thought might have been a calculated bluff to increase government funding for Stefansson’s expeditions. It worked, leading directly to sponsorship for the Canadian Arctic Expedition, but it also provided fodder for critics who Pálsson said accused Stefansson of being as much showman as scientist.

  That winter near the Coppermine River, Stefansson and Joe met for the first time. On an expedition funded by the American Museum of Natural History and the Geological Survey of Canada, Stefansson arrived by sled at the Teddy Bear’s anchorage in early 1911, accompanied by Dr. Rudolph M. Anderson and two Native guides. They’d been searching for the schooner since a group of Inuit told them they’d seen a ship piloted by a white man and “strange Eskimo,” as Stefansson recounts in My Life with the Eskimo.

  Of all the things that these Eskimo told us, the one that surprised us most was the undoubtedly true statement that a ship manned by white men and strange Eskimo was wintering in Coronation Gulf. This was felt as the reverse of good news, for the natural feelings of sympathy that had grown up through a year of association with these people, who in their way were so infinitely superior to their civilized brethren in the west, made me regret that civilization was following so close upon our heels. . . . We were not in particular need of assistance from anybody, but still in a far country like this one is always willing either to help or be helped, and there was no doubt that the meeting was likely to be both pleasant and profitable to all concerned. In other words, now that the ship was there we would make the best of a situation we regretted; we would make what use of her we could and be of as much use to her as possible, although had we had our way we should have wished her on the other side of the earth.