The Final Frontiersman

by James Campbell

  Randy takes a big bite of his hamburger but doesn’t stop talking. “I still get letters [Randy and Heimo were part of a 1992 National Geographic documentary called Braving Alaska] from people who are looking to get out into the country. I’ve heard the argument about society not making young men like us anymore, and I don’t buy it. There are adventurers out there. When they contact me, I tell them to go into a village and let it be known that they’re interested in going out to the woods. But to come out and jump off the way I did, that’s a thing of the past. Now the land can be accessed by airplane trappers and snow machine trappers who blaze out into the country for a week, even a day.”

  After visiting with Brown, I call Alonzo “Lon” Kelly, an outdoor recreation planner for the White Mountains National Recreation Area for the Bureau of Land Management in Fairbanks. “I don’t buy it,” Kelly says. “I was the former realty specialist and later an outdoor recreation planner for the Fortymile River country with the BLM. I don’t know what the Park Service did. But I don’t put any stock in the accusation that it put people out. If people had wanted to stay, they could have. Living that life today is not out of the question. I’m not familiar with the exact agency guidelines, but if someone wanted to build a cabin on the BLM’s 72 million acres, or at least on much of that acreage, he’d be welcome to present a proposal to us. He’d have to have been trapping the land for a while though, and he’d have to document his use with fur sale receipts or something and prove that there is no existing conflict with ongoing subsistence or recreational users. Then we’d consider it, I think. It’s complicated, but in assessing the request, we’d follow the legislative framework of ANILCA and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.” Though Kelly is sincere, what he doesn’t say is that even if a person were to follow the prescribed steps, the chances of the BLM giving him the go-ahead are anything but guaranteed. Such a messy bureaucratic process would have been anathema to the Randy Browns and Heimo Korths of the world, and there is no reason to think that today’s would-be adventurers would react differently.

  But it’s those modern-day adventurers that Kelly doesn’t see. “It’s a nonissue these days,” he says, unequivocally. “No one is interested in going out into the country.”

  I am sitting in Roger Kaye’s house in the hills outside of Fairbanks, where Kaye surrounds himself with examples of America’s woodcraft wilderness tradition—Philip R. Goodwin sketches, old guns and traps, first-edition books of exploration and adventure. Outside, the temperature slips to 25 below. Inside, the handsome woodstove, which acts as the centerpiece of the living room, gives the home a generous, hospitable feel. Roger’s Japanese wife, Masako, has just prepared a delicious dinner of sushi, salad, and roast chicken. A friend of Roger’s, Tom Paragi, a wildlife biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and a part-time trapper, brings with him a surprisingly good beaver stew.

  After dinner Roger shows us a photo album of his days on the trapline. He trapped for only a year on Beaver Creek, forty-five miles south of Fort Yukon, but that year was formative. Except for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, there seems to be nothing he enjoys talking about more. “I get great satisfaction knowing that there are still a few people in the bush toughing it out, keeping those wilderness skills alive,” he says, slowly turning the pages of the album.

  Roger sips his wine and flips to a photograph of a wolverine. “It was a big one,” he says, obviously still proud of his catch. Then he closes the album and leans back in his chair. “You have to understand,” he says. “These bush rats would not have had this right in any other country. They came to the woods, built illegal cabins, and now they have the legal right to be there because ANILCA made accommodations for their life way. But ANILCA does not allow for the expansion of the bush rat experience. It couldn’t be done and still protect the values that the refuge and other places like it were set aside for. The refuge is a place for wildlife, particularly for species not tolerant of civilization; a place of scenic values and scientific values; a setting for recreation. The refuge has other meanings, too. It is a place of solitude, mystery, discovery, exploration, a place of restraint, even sacredness. Many Alaskans don’t think about the need to protect wilderness because we’re surrounded by it here. The scale is enormous, and people can’t conceive of it ever being diminshed. They don’t understand that Alaska is the last refuge for wilderness.

  “That’s not to say that if someone wanted to come up and trap in the refuge, he couldn’t. In fact, he could as long as he didn’t put up a permanent structure. He could trap out of a wall tent. That’s permitted. In other areas of Alaska, a person could go through a realtor and buy land if he had that kind of money. Granted, it’s not the same experience as Coming into the Country, where you could go out and build a cabin and essentially do whatever the hell you want. Those days are gone.”

  I leave Roger’s house near midnight, and it occurs to me that it would be interesting to get Roger Kaye and Bill Schneider, UAF’s oral history coordinator, in the same room. I recall my conversation with Schneider the previous week. We’d been talking about ANILCA, and the role of the governmental agencies. Schneider spoke vehemently: “I don’t think it’s justifiable for the lead agencies of preservation, which includes historical and cultural preservation, to discourage recolonization. There have always been people out there, living off the land. I often wonder what the constructors of our current wilderness ethic would say. Take Bob Marshall or Margaret Murie—these conservation icons all had local guides on their adventures in Alaska.

  “In many ways ANILCA is a dead end for subsistence users,” Schneider continued. “As much as it supports subsistence activities for this generation, I think its framers had trouble fathoming that subsistence could be a lasting value. I don’t think they could imagine a young person choosing that way of life. They [the federal agencies] could glorify it, put up with it for a while, but I don’t think they could imagine future generations doing it. If we as Americans don’t create places and opportunities in our vast and bountiful land for people like this, whether they be Native or white, then we have lost important historical and cultural values. The argument, of course, is the land can’t accommodate it, but we’re not talking about large numbers of people.”

  Kirk Sweetsir, who owns Yukon Air Service, flew me out to the Korths’ upper Coleen cabin in spring. We were over the Yukon Flats, where the snowy surfaces of countless small lakes are accented by muskrat pushups and the tracks of peripatetic caribou. Sweetsir was punching the cabin’s coordinates into his GPS and talking at the same time. “The experience will be increasingly less available to guys without money,” Sweetsir said, “and more available to guys from Anchorage and Fairbanks. It’s unfortunate, but civilization continues to creep into the most remote parts of Alaska. Heimo has built his firebreak against it, and he’s trying to hold it off as best he can, though I think even he is aware of the inevitability of it—things will change.

  “What gets to me is the somewhat unremarkable incrementalism that creeps up on people who are stitting still. All around them things are moving along and one day they realize that just because they’re not bothering anyone, it doesn’t necessarily follow that no one’s going to bother them. It all seems a bit of a tragedy. We have no reverence for a person like Heimo. He’s likely to die defending a vague idea of what his world ought to look like. Not long ago, he was one of many similarly situated people and they generated their own gravity. Now it’s down to him. He becomes more of an anchronism with each passing year.”

  In mid-July, before going out to the river, I visit Harry Bader, director of Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Northern Region. Bader elaborates on Sweetsir’s idea. “People are moving out to the woods with all the capital that makes it comfortable. Their relationship to the land is very different from the guy who’s out there, barely scraping by, trying to make a go of it. I call ’em trust fund homesteaders, and their presence on the land is so much more consumptive. Tho
se who are dependent on the land import far fewer resources—less fuel, fewer modern conveniences, less of everything. But the Alaska way of life, the age-old practice of living off the land, is bumping up against Lower Forty-eight values that say, ‘Watch the wolf, don’t trap it,’ and that changes the character of the experience entirely.”

  Bader is familiar with life in the bush. “I did my time,” he laughs, making light of his experience. “I did it, and I enjoyed it. However, I was one of those just playing at it. At no time was I dependent on the land. I wasn’t forced to shoot a moose or a caribou to stay alive. And I wasn’t dependent upon trapping for my income.” Bader lived outside of Eagle for a year, though by looking at him, it is hard to imagine him running a trapline at 40 below. I know better than to doubt him, though. “Harry can do just about anything,” Stu Pechek told me before I met with Harry at his office in Fairbanks. Nevertheless, Harry’s looks are deceiving. He is a small man and has the fine hands of a pianist or a jewelry maker. He is also very much an intellectual. He used to teach wildlife management and environmental courses at the university in Fairbanks, has his J.D. from Harvard, and is finishing up his Ph.D. in Forestry at Yale, making the trip to New Haven, Connecticut, twice a year.

  We turn our attention to a large map, where he shows me the land he administers, 45 million acres of the state’s 105 million total, a swath of country covering the crest of the Alaska Range north to the Arctic Ocean and stretching from Canada’s Yukon Territory border to the Bering Strait.

  Having heard about the DNR’s land dispersal programs, I get right to the point. “Among those 45 million acres is there anywhere a person could just jump off and build a cabin, replicating, say, the experience of the guys who came up in the 1970s?” Harry reflects on the question, turning a pencil in his fingers, and then answers. “The simple answer is no,” he says. “And I feel kind of awkward about that because that thing you’re talking about is the defining attribute of Alaska and Alaskan culture, and I don’t necessarily believe it’s a good thing it’s over. So, let me restate my answer. It’s not entirely impossible for us to see something similar again. But the current regulatory and statutory system forbids that sort of going out.”

  Harry points out that the DNR has two land-dispersal programs: a subdivision program of presurveyed parcels and one for remote residential parcels. Both are designed to get property in Alaska out of state hands and into the hands of individuals. Both also involve the purchase of land. Neither in any way resembles what the “back to nature” boys did in the 1970s. What’s closest to that perhaps is the DNR’s “Trapping Cabin Permit,” which allows a trapper to build and use a cabin on state land for temporary shelter while trapping. However, compared to the experience of guys like Heimo and Alex Tarnai, who simply picked a spot on the map, it is complicated, dispiriting. A trapper has to prove he uses the trapline on a regular basis. The trapline must also be long enough to warrant the building of a cabin. Additionally, a trapper must be able to provide tax returns reporting income from furs, receipts from fur buyers, and additional proof, such as receipts for tanning, if requested. Recently, very few people have taken advantage of this option.

  “Unofficially,” Harry says, “we have some trespassers, people who are living off the land on state land. We are trying to figure out how to allow them to stay, how to legitimize them through some sort of permit system. To me, to tolerate that handful of people—and that’s all we’re talking about—who are seriously trying to keep that way of life alive is well worth it. Thank God most of us don’t want to be on the land; it couldn’t sustain us. I’m glad it’s just a few, but I fear it’s too few. In ten years, I believe, we won’t have any more people out there.”

  Heimo and I are gathering summer blueberries for breakfast. Last night, Heimo promised us all pancakes. Edna does the dinners, but Heimo, he’s the breakfast man. It’s a role he’s grown accustomed to over the years. When he first brought Edna to the Coleen, she made one thing clear to him. She liked to sleep in later than 6:00 A.M., and she didn’t make breakfast.

  Strangely, I have a craving for pancakes this morning. I say “strange” because when I’m home I rarely eat them. Heimo told me it would happen. “You need carbos up here,” he said a week into my earlier winter visit. Now, as we pick berries, I realize that I’ve been looking forward to eating pancakes for days.

  After breakfast, Heimo and I pack for our hunting expedition. Though Heimo has been glassing Mummuck Mountain for the past several days, he hasn’t spotted a single caribou. “Maybe they’re down in the valleys north of Mummuck Mountain,” he says. “We’ll see. It don’t matter really. I’m just tired of doing nothing. Don’t get me wrong—I like sitting around as much as the next guy—but now I gotta move.”

  In early August, before the caribou come, there’s not much that needs doing, and life along the river takes on the characteristics of a summer vacation. The new roof is on, and Edna has finished the loads of laundry. So the Korths pick berries, fish, take short hikes, glass for caribou, sharpen tools, play volleyball, and sit around the fire at night and exchange stories. The pace is relaxed, leisurely.

  But today, Heimo is tired of relaxing. He needs to walk.

  At the river, we throw our gear into the canoe, strap on our life vests, and are about to shove off, when Edna comes running toward us.

  “What is it?” Heimo says, slightly annoyed.

  “I forgot to kiss you,” Edna answers. Heimo smiles now and they kiss. “Please be careful,” Edna entreats us when Heimo starts the motor.

  The idea of motoring upriver, though, is a fantasy; the water level is too low. A half mile up, we lay our paddles in the canoe and walk. We trade off lining. I begin, and while I line, Heimo studies the gravel bars, looking for tracks.

  I’m trying to navigate a long stretch of riffles, when Heimo yells. I can’t make out what he’s saying, and then he yells again, “Wolf tracks!”

  I clear the choppy water. “What’s all the excitement about?”

  “This time of year the wolves are following the caribou,” Heimo explains. “I don’t see any caribou tracks, but I bet we run into them up ahead.” Sure enough, on the next gravel bar, while Heimo is lining, I spot some and call out to him. Heimo pulls the canoe onto the sand.

  “A gob of tracks.” He smiles. “They must have passed through here yesterday. When the caribou are migrating, wolves eat like fiends. The wolverines eat well, too. They gobble up what’s left.”

  It is noon by the time we reach the base of Mummuck Mountain. We tie off the canoe and change from our hip boots into hiking boots.

  Before beginning our climb, we traverse a boggy area. In Alaska there are three types of tundra: wet, moist and alpine. Wet tundra is a morass of tussocks and stagnant pools. Moist tundra is a maze of tufts and tussocks minus the pools and the sloppy sogginess of wet tundra. The tussocks in this stretch of moist tundra get the best of me, and Heimo easily outdistances me. He is waiting on the other side of a bog when I finally make my way out.

  “Black-tipped groundsel,” he says, pointing to a pretty yellow flower at the bog’s edge. Panting, I consult my book.

  “Yup, black-tipped groundsel.” Yesterday Heimo and I identified the flower for the first time. I’m surprised that he’s already committed its name to memory.

  Now we begin our ascent through another long stretch of moist tundra. The walking is easier, though I still struggle to keep pace with Heimo. The moist tundra gives way to alpine, patchy areas of mosses, herbs, lichens, and shrubs, and then we ascend a series of benches. The underbrush turns to scree and large rocks are speckled with white, yellow, and black lichens. Heimo stops for a moment and kicks at the ground, scattering pellets. “Moose crap,” I say, though I can’t believe that a moose would be up this high.

  “No, musk-ox,” he answers. “I’ve never seen it up here.”

  The Inupiat call the musk-oxen umingmak, “the bearded ones.” In 1969 and 1970, sixty-three musk-oxen were shipped in woode
n crates from Nunivak Island in the Bering Sea to the North Slope of Alaska in an effort to reestablish the population. The total herd now numbers close to 400 animals. Twenty thousand years ago, musk-oxen roamed the Old World as far as southern France; cave paintings testify to their presence there.

  Glad for the rest, I look back in the direction of the cabin and notice for the first time that the leaves of the balsam poplar have already begun to turn yellow. Out of the north, where the trees that creep up the Coleen River valley give way to an ocean of russet-colored tundra, a dry wind blows. Heimo zips up his jacket. “Almost fall time,” he says. “Let’s keep moving.”

  What Heimo loves to do more than anything else in the world is walk. He calls it “coverin’ country.” He moves effortlessly, hardly winded, all the while naming rocks and birds as he goes. “That’s schist,” he says, naming a metamorphic rock. “See that? American golden plover. There’s a horned lark. And that one’s a harrier. You can tell by the white rump.” Skipping around a rock outcropping, he stops. “If I could come back as any animal, it’d be a Dall sheep. God, I love to hike in the mountains.”

  Fifteen minutes later, we reach the top of Mummuck Mountain, and Heimo takes off his pack and sits down near a benchmark erected by the U.S. Geological Survey in 1972. “We’ll stay here for a while and glass.” I sit down next to him. “Frigid arnica,” I say, pointing to a hardy yellow flower that hangs on for dear life between two large rocks, springing up out of a cupful of soil. But Heimo is no longer interested in flowers. He is glassing now, studying the mountains to the north and west, which look remarkably like the rugged moors of Scotland. “Sometimes,” he says, “there are caribou everywhere. I wish you could see that.”