Alaska - The Final American Frontier*

3^rd August 2016

March 24, 1989, 12:27 A.M.: “We’ve fetched up hard aground…evidently we’re leaking some oil, and we’re going to be here for a while” – Exxon Valdez Captain Joseph Hazlewood to the U.S. Coastguard

The end of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline at Valdez

*Alaska is known as America’s final frontier. A Google search of the term “frontier” yields the following definition:

“The extreme limit of settled land beyond which lies wilderness…”

I have spent the past couple of weeks traversing some of the state of Alaska. I have wandered to the northernmost land within U.S. territory at Barrow, and I am currently waiting in Haines to take a ferry to Prince Rupert in British Columbia, marking the end of my Alaska adventure. In between, I have visited Fairbanks, Anchorage, Denali, Kenai, Coldfoot and Valdez, a fraction of the largest state in the United States of America. I have seen vast areas of wild lands, all of which have been impacted, to some degree, by humanity. We are at a place in human history where a new definition of frontier is needed.

Satellite dishes on the tundra at Barrow, the northernmost land in the United States

My intention is not to denigrate the incomparable value of Alaska’s natural areas. I have traveled across the globe, and I have never before experienced such vast wild landscapes. Alaska has one of the most commendable protected areas networks on Earth, with 104,000,000 acres put into conservation, an area approximately the same size as the state of California. Outside the two cities of Anchorage and Fairbanks and a few scattered towns, most Alaskan land areas are unmarred by visible signs of human development, as far as the eye can see. From the airplane window enroute from Anchorage to Barrow, the never-ending vista of mountain, forest and tundra is awe-inspiring.

Wilderness in the Denali National Park

Frontier was once the edge of civilization, beyond which the wilds represented an unknown, untamed and unpredictable force. Nature no longer has any impenetrable boundaries. In Alaska, bowhead whale populations in the far reaches of the Arctic Ocean were hunted for oil and baleen to the brink of extinction. Sea otter populations were annihilated for the sin of their luxurious fur, recovered, and then were decimated again by the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Oil rigs, in one of the most remote areas on earth, supply at least 20% of the U.S. supply, pumping billions of gallons of crude 800 miles down a pipeline, across the Alaskan wilderness from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. During my visit to Barrow, no sea ice graced the Arctic seas. 

An iceless Arctic Ocean at midnight in Barrow, Alaska

On 24^th March 1989, just after midnight, the largest oil spill in history (at that time), poured millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Alaska, killing hundreds of thousands of seabirds and other wildlife. Crude oil can still be detected in the sediments, and toxins are present in the tissues of sea animals in the region, more than 28 years later.

Seabirds feeding in the Gulf of Alaska

Denali National Park is larger than the country of Wales. The combined protected area, which includes the Wrengell-Saint Ellias National Park, Glacier Bay National Park and Kluane National Park (Canada), represents the largest internationally protected area on Earth. Within Alaska's protected areas grizzly bears, moose, caribou, eagles, sea otters, bowhead whales and thousands of other species of flora and fauna can recover from human impact, thrive and live, for the most part, in accordance with their own natural histories. Outside Alaska’s protected areas, even in apparent wilderness, wildlife is rare. Alaska’s wilderness continues to exist because of man’s consent, not in spite of it.

Sea otter in the Kenai Fjords National Park

My brain is now attempting to process the overload of stimuli it received during my Alaska experience. Over the next several days, I will try to compile the data into succinct pieces and post them, based on each location I visited.

Humpback whale and seabirds in the Kenai Fjords National Park

Alaska Highway Mile 613 - Wilderness at last, and the last wilderness

14th and 15th July 2016

A few short miles from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, the seemingly never-ending patchwork of human altered landscapes finally gives way to wilderness. The road is the only anthropogenic structure as far as the eye can see, and as many as 100 kilometers of wild space stretch between small roadside towns, where one can possibly, although not definitely, get some gas.

As soon as exploited land gives way to nature, the original inhabitants on the land begin to make an appearance. Over a few short miles, I see bears, mule deer, white-tailed deer, bald eagles, a porcupine, moose and bison.

The oppressive sense of gloom and doom that has overshadowed much of my journey is erased, but my exultation at breathing in clean air and being able to feast my eyes on sweeping vistas of unspoiled natural beauty is accented by a trace of fear. I am traveling alone on a highway into the wilderness, with other humans few and far between. I am completely dependent on the reliability of my vehicle and the probability of available gasoline and food every 400 miles or so. The wilderness is awesome, in the true sense of the word, but it is filled with myriad beasts that could effortlessly render me into prime rib and chops. I have a sense that, in spite of the feelings of unbounded mental and physical freedom the wilderness inspires, I do not belong here. I am completely and utterly helpless. My tools for survival in this wild reality are pathetically limited. I have a bit of knowledge of herbal lore and a can of bear spray.

My religious views in no way trend towards the conventional, but I am still a product of Judeo-Christian culture. For thousands of years, most of the people from which I have descended have been driven by a purported divine mandate to, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ (Gen.1:28)." I realize now that the Biblical creed to control nature must have originally arisen from fear: fear of the unknown, fear of not having control, fear of death. Nature is the antagonist for all these human frailties.

Western Civilization's earliest known written myth, The Epic of Gilgamesh, tells the tale of a legendary hero. Gilgamesh tames a wild man, clear-cuts forests, vanquishes lions and dams a great river, among several other feats of subordinating nature, but he fails to escape his own mortality. Gilgamesh ultimately learns that the cycle of birth and mortality is unavoidable and that humans are better served by enjoying the gifts that life has to offer, rather than trying to escape death. Unfortunately, we have failed to heed Gilgamesh's advice and are futilely still engaged in attempting to avoid our own mortality via the control of nature.

Other cultures managed to avoid the Judeo-Christian solution to the fear of mortality. I understand now why early settlers to the Americas fiercely clung to religious extremism when they arrived here. Native Americans, lived within the wilderness, rather than apart from it. Such an attitude towards nature was entirely unknown to the Puritans. Such humans would have seemed like wild animals, or "savages"  to a people who had been imprinted from time immemorial, on the necessity of subduing nature and then praying to an unseen god for immortal salvation. Faced with brutal natural reality and a complete inability to cope in the wilderness, the Puritans clung desperately to their dogma. They are the forebears of North America's current baseline.

An informational sign along the highway advises that the vast wilderness I am passing through is actually a protected, albeit "managed" natural resource, meaning that when humans feel the need for the fossil fuels, lumber and other minerals found here, they will take them. The wilderness cannot be seen to be left to its own devices. The reality I am coming to terms with is that there is no true wilderness left on Earth. I mourn for the loss of what could have been. My four-times grandmother was a Mohawk. I wonder what this place would be like the ideologies of her and her kin had succeeded in the clash of cultures that took place here centuries ago. Unfortunately, we will never know the answer to this. Instead, the humans of Earth, like myself, are now destined to separateness, a separation, which ironically leads not to immortality, but to death.

Fossilized Dinosaur Footprints at Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia