Tales from the Alaskan Wilderness!

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“There is one word of advice and caution to be given those intending to visit Alaska...If you are old, go by all means, but if you are young, wait. The scenery of Alaska is much grander than anything else of its kind in the world, and it is not wise to dull one’s capacity for enjoyment by seeing the finest first”. (Henry Gannett, Harriman Alaska Expedition 1899)


If you choose to take a package holiday to Europe, people do not urge you to read ‘that book’ about the young man who died where you are going! Alaska is different. After much indecision, my husband Chris and I read “Into the Wild,” just before going into the Alaskan wilderness ourselves. However, we city slickers managed to survive the Alaskan Wilderness. We saw wolf, moose & even Harrison Ford - and celebrated the 4th of July!


We camped near McCarthy in the Wrangell / St Elias national Park in South East Alaska. McCarthy is a small town surrounded by mountains and glaciers at the end of 60 mile white knuckle drive along a dusty gravel road. Great fun in our convertible car! McCarthy has approximately 24 year round inhabitants, who brave the minus 50 winter temperatures. McCarthy looks like the film set of a classic Hollywood western. It also has a really peaceful vibe, perhaps because of the many dogs lazing in the sun. They seem to live like a town pack, which has a noticeable pecking order when the occasional scuffle breaks out amongst them!


Kennicott is another 5 miles up the gravel road, an old copper mining town, which now boasts one posh hotel and restaurant we couldn’t afford, plus two wilderness guide companies. The old tumble down mine buildings are all painted red, like something out of the set of a Clint Eastwood flim - “Welcome to hell!”


Another thrilling thing on the drive to McCarthy & Kennicott was that almost every road sign was riddled with bullet holes! One public toilet even had a sign inside “The windows in this restroom are bullet proof for your comfort!” This was right next to the window with the bullet holes in it!


This was the wild West!


We booked four wilderness trips during our 12 day stay, with recovery time scheduled in between. We chose Kennicott Wilderness Guides because they have an uncommercial feel and genuinely want to share their love of the wilderness, which indeed they did! The other guide service sported red jackets and looked far too ‘corporate’ for us. We had come to escape all that!


During our first hike with Guide Gabriel, my husband Chris learned that he never wanted to hike in crampons again and I learned that it wasn’t a good idea to bring salmon sandwiches for our lunch, as bears can smell their favourite food for miles!


All our guides told us that all the stuff on bear safety about double bagging your lunch and using bear bins doesn’t stop bears smelling food from many miles away. Hanging food 15 feet between two trees is also useless. They had seen pictures of these torn down by bears! All you can hope is that the bear is unfamiliar with and scared of humans, and wants to avoid you! Personally I think bears are over engineered for an animal that mainly eats berries. They are huge with large sharp claws, a grizzly can rip your head off with one swipe of his paw or gut you like a fish. Thankfully, we found only bear pooh on the ice, but no bears. Mummy bears like to teach their cubs about the glacier too!


We hiked across the glazier for several hours, bush wacked, and then clambered to a beautiful waterfall view on the side of a mountain where we had lunch. The return journey took over 8 hours in total. It was surprisingly warm on the glacier under a hot summer sun and cloudless deep blue sky. Gabriel told us many facts about the geography of the area, but the most amazing to us was about rivers. If you divide the length of a river as the crow flies by the actual length it travels as it winds to the sea, it always equals pi, for every river in the world!


Our second guide Betsy led us up the side of a glacier to a place called Erie Lake. This involved a four hour scramble over loose rocks on an often sliding slope. It was incredibly hard work, but we were encouraged when Betsy told us that we had done well. Indeed quicker than a 22 year old Texan she had taken previously. He had been so exhausted after just four hours that Betsy had to carry some of his kit back for him.


Erie lake lived up to its name. On this day the water was motionless and the colour of steel, and reflected huge hunks of ice which had broken off the nearby glacier. We decided to return via a different route with Betsy. This involved crossing a glacier to walk on the flatter moraine between two glaciers.


Glaciers have many beautiful features. They contain hills, valleys and crevices with a cheese grater surface, which slices skin! Some glacier ice is a rich blue colour, having become very dense from the build up of new ice over thousand of years, so that only the blue light of the spectrum is refracted. Glaciers contain beautiful ‘swimming’ pools of bright blue water. The summer melt also creates bright blue meandering streams of fast flowing water, which taste cold and sweet. There are circular swirling water falls like helter skelters descending deep inside the ice called moulins. We threw huge rocks into them, just to hear them thunder hundreds of feet down into the glacier.


Betsy our guide picked her way across rocks and ice as gracefully and sure footed as a Gazelle. I followed behind resembling a hippopotamus in Disney’s “Fantasia.” Sometimes I needed a hand from Betsy to help me up or down a particularly scary or steep bit, or sometimes Chris (my husband) pushed me upwards from behind with his hands on both buttocks! Betsy had been a Rugby player & rock climber. She was a tall, slim build of solid muscle. She instilled confidence and took my hand and led me across the edges of ice crevices I never would have believed I could walk. Chris said she looked so strong that he had no doubt if I had slipped towards a crevice, she would have held my weight. All our guides were in their 20s, it was a strange feeling being twice their age putting our lives in their hands, but they had a calm maturity and confidence about their skills in the wilderness that I never doubted them. Based upon many years hiking experience since childhood, they also knew more than we did ourselves about what we were capable of, and certainly helped me do things I never believed I could do.


The walk back via this route took another 6 hours, whilst it rained and got very cold. Hiking with crampons became exhausting. At one point I hit a wall and would have happily died of exhaustion. Its amazing what a few complex carbs can do to get you over this! Its so weird, at the end of the hike I felt a great sense of achievement. I did something of which I never thought I was capable, or fit enough to do, and quicker than some people half my age. I still don’t know if I enjoyed it, or whether it was torture! However, I’d do it again just to see the moulins.


At the end of our hike, Betsy cheerfully asked what our plans were that evening. I replied “surviving the night without dying of exhaustion!”.


For our third hike we were flown further into the wilderness (Skolai) by Gary Green our pilot from McCarthy Air. Gary owned a 1953 Cessner 180. The cockpit looked like the dash of our old 1969 E-type Jag! When I saw him “tickling” the carburetor, I thought “Oh my God, its like my old British bike engine, we’re going to die!” Luckily for us Gary was as cool as Steve McQueen. We barely noticed we’d taken off. His landing in the wilderness on a tiny bumpy grassy air strip was smoother than most we have experienced on tarmac.


In the same area we were hiking, a man had disappeared without a trace the previous Autumn. 25 people were involved in the land and air searches for him, but all they found was his kit...not even a bone. There is still no plausible explanation for what happened...


Betsy took us prospecting for gold and precious stones in the mountain streams. The volcanic landscape provided rocks of every colour imaginable. We filled the pockets of our rucksacks with those we couldn’t bear to part with. As we walked back to the air strip we saw a beautiful orange and white wolf. It saw us too, and ran. Its tail flowing behind it like a veil.


We wished we could have been stranded there for a few more days. Unfortunately, Gary arrived as planned.

“Are you the same weight as when you went out?” Gary asked.

“Yes we all are”, I thought, “but we have a few extra pounds of rocks!”

Luckily the plane still took off.


For our last hike we flew into a place called Fosse. Only 15 people had been there in the past year. Strangely, mobile phones worked in this area, so Chris our guide phoned in to report our safe arrival. He pretended that he had misunderstood his brief and informed his boss that he had left us in the wilderness and was walking back alone (we city slickers were five days walk from civilization and only accessible by air!) Just before he lost reception, Chris managed to reassure his panicking boss that he was joking!


We climbed the side of a steep grassy mountain. Again our guide instilled confidence in me I didn’t know I had. When we reached the top I told our guide that I was scared of heights and the last time I had been up a mountain (by chair lift), I'd had a panic attack.

"Perhaps I should have mentioned this before we had climbed up?!"

Chris just laughed and broke into “the hills are alive with the sound of music” as we followed him to his favourite spot for lunch. As we ate, the clouds cleared to reveal more snowcapped mountains scraping the skyline. I wondered why so many people prefer to look at the inside of a shopping mall?


We returned via a different route alongside a beautiful waterfall, which meandered down a rich green incline of moss sprinkled with wild flowers. As we kneeled to fill our water bottles the moss cradled our knees like sponge. We stood and marveled at this beautiful Eden within a mountainous wilderness. What a privilege.


Chris like our other guides told us the names of all the wild flowers and we sampled those which were edible. It was strange to hear our bearded guides gushing about nature and beautiful wild flowers. Alaskan men are often good home makers too. However, there is also a saying about Alaskan men: “The odds are good, but the goods are odd!”


We thought it would be great to be rescued by helicopter, so we debated whose leg we should break. Chris our guide thought he should break one of ours because it would be easier, because we were older (cheeky bugger!). We suggested his, because he was younger and it would heal quicker. In the end we couldn’t agree, so we waited for Gary (Steve McQueen) to arrive in his airplane. We boarded with yet more pounds of rocks hidden in our rucksacks!


When we landed, Gary told us that Harrison Ford had arrived in town flying his own airplane. My eyes popped out of my head.


“Well, McCarthy is a cool place”, Gary told us, looking rather cool himself in his white Stetson, leather flying Jacket, faded Levi’s and cowboy boots.


For 20 years I have received a Valentine's card from Harrison Ford, in what looks suspiciously like my husband's hand writing. This was my chance to confront Harrison and find out the truth...


Copyright 2008

Jules Aaron

All Rights Reserved

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