The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (48 page)

That night I stayed up late with the captain, the married astrophysicist, the gynecologic pathologist and his wife, and a couple from China. Together in the ship's lounge, we talked excitedly about ideas the way we had when we were in college, when we were young, when we had forever. We talked about the Big Bang, about what came before the beginning, about what came before that, and before that . . . “You don't want to end up alone,” I remembered my mother saying. But there, alone among the over-70 set, it dawned on me: I've seen the end, and it's not so bad. I adjusted my vintage turban and leaned into the conversation. So what if electrons come in pairs? The Higgs boson, that special thing that took almost 40 years to find, goes it alone.

CHRISTOPHER SOLOMON

FROM
Outside

J
IMMY'S STORE IN
Port Heiden, population 102, stocks all the staples of Alaskan bush life, at bush prices: $14 cans of Folgers, $7.50 packs of sunflower spits, something called the Jerky Master. And on the wall, hanging from a nail: very large steel leg traps, without price or explanation.

“You're goin' up there today?” Jimmy asks from behind the counter, in what passes for a formal greeting. Jimmy's gaze trails across the ample gray acreage of his sweatshirt and settles on the window, where right now a slasher-film fog is sticking to what little scenery presents itself. Tundra. Truck. Still more tundra, unspooling to a horizon so unbroken by man or mountain range that the sky would start at your shoelaces if only you could see them. Welcome to July on the Alaska Peninsula.

Twenty minutes ago, our bush plane nosed down into the soup and left us on a gravel airstrip, where we hitched a ride to Jimmy's along with the mail sacks in the back of a gutted eighties Econoline van.
QUAYANA
(Thank you), the door read.
NO PETS
.

Jimmy Christensen is half Aleut, and like many of the native Aleut here, he's broad, quiet, and kind and in possession of his people's sly, dry sense of humor. The way everybody is always asking Jimmy for advice or to borrow his dozer until next Friday, he seems to run his hometown. He's sort of the gentle Tony Soprano of Port Heiden. There's not much new here for a man like Jimmy, and our sudden appearance and determination seem to amuse him. He sells us a gallon of white gas and offers to drive us to the road's end.

Grabbing his keys, Jimmy says we're the first backpackers he's seen in weeks. This doesn't surprise us. Nobody comes to the Alaska Peninsula by accident. Even fewer come here for fun. The peninsula marks the start of the Aleutian island chain, the 1,400-mile tail that wags west toward Kamchatka. It's a slim, Vermont-sized piece of nearly trackless green with a population of fewer than 3,000 residents, almost all of whom live in just a few villages that sit uneasily on the map, as if nature might evict them at any time. Naknek. South Naknek. Port Heiden. It's a tortured landscape, pummeled by unrelenting storms and warted with semiactive volcanoes. In a state grinning with superlatives, this is one of the wildest, rowdiest, most remote places around. It remains a question mark to even the most sporting Alaskans.

Which is exactly why we're bouncing in the back of Jimmy's king cab. I'm obsessed with blank spots on the map, the places nobody goes. I've learned to follow my cell phone like a reverse Geiger counter: the poorer the coverage, the more enticing the destination. For 10 years, I've tried without luck to visit the most promising one of all, the one that now lurks out there in the murk: Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve, the least visited of the entire 401-unit national park system.

Already it has taken my companions—guide Dan Oberlatz and photographer Gabe Rogel—and me three flights from Seattle to reach Port Heiden, which sits about 450 miles southwest of Anchorage. Our plan is to backpack 22 miles into the monument's centerpiece, an ancient and massive crater, and then float 38 miles to the Pacific using ultralight, stowable rafts crammed deep in our packs. From there we hope to hoof and paddle nearly 80 miles down the coast to the native community of Chignik Lagoon, where the closest airstrip awaits.

Inconvenience is the least of the obstacles that Aniakchak throws up for the would-be visitor. The central peninsula is home to one of the largest concentrations of the biggest brown bears on earth. Then there are the man-eating vegetables, alder jungles that swallow bushwhackers, and cow parsnip with poison leaves that blister the skin. Add routinely nasty meteorology—“This is where a lot of the weather is made for the rest of the country,” a guide once told me—and the challenge we face is pretty stark.

We're not even out of sight of Port Heiden's last house when Jimmy starts in on his version of Alaska's familiar “out of the car, into the food chain” axiom. “Just remember there's a bear up here, he's about twelve foot,” Jimmy says. “The worst thing up here, though, are the wolves,” he adds. “They've been hanging out now in packs of forty.” The leg traps suddenly make sense. In 2010, wolves in Chignik Lake killed a petite schoolteacher while she was out for a run. The incident was only the fourth documented account in North America of unhabituated wolves killing a human being.

The truck stops where the muddy track meets a creek, and we pile out.

“What kind of gun you got?” Jimmy asks.

Dan introduces Jimmy to Pepe, his handgun and the fourth member of our group. Pepe is a brawny, confident-looking .44 Magnum. Dirty Harry's gun. I liked Pepe the moment I met him in Anchorage—a fondness that grew once Dan discouraged me from bringing my bear spray, explaining that not only is bear Mace unpredictable, it's also not allowed on commercial planes.

Feeding Pepe ammo at the trailhead, Dan suddenly seems apologetic. “Probably won't do more than piss off a twelve-footer,” he says to Jimmy.

The Aleut's silence is a verdict. Jimmy then says that he prefers to carry a shotgun with slugs, the Alaska-approved way to stop 1,000 pounds of charging meat.

Before we shoulder our packs, Jimmy pauses to offer some parting native wisdom. “What you gotta do is file the tip of the sight off,” he says, eyeing Pepe. “So it won't hurt so much when the bear shoves it up your ass.”

In 2012, 9.7 million visitors drove through the gates of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the country's busiest. That's nearly 19 people per minute. Meanwhile, 19 people stopped by Aniakchak all year. This isn't because Aniakchak lacks merit; it may be the coolest place you've never heard of. Around the time the Egyptians were at the height of their powers, a 7,000-foot stratovolcano blew its top with a force equal to 10,000 nuclear bombs. Bowels emptied, the peak collapsed on itself, leaving a 6-mile-wide crater with walls rising as much as 2,500 feet from the floor. For the next few thousand years, it sat resting in near anonymity. Then, in 1930, the Glacier Priest arrived.

Father Bernard Hubbard was a Jack London character sprung to life—a self-promoting Jesuit and peripatetic head of the geology department at California's Santa Clara University who was as quick with a bear-felling shot as he was with a Hail Mary. Hubbard's scrambles all over pre-statehood Alaska, sometimes accompanied by a crew of strapping Santa Clara footballers who wore their leather helmets for protection, made the Glacier Priest a household name at a time when a depressed nation hungered for heroes. His exploits appeared in the
Saturday Evening Post
and
National Geographic
; for a time, he was said to be one of the top-paid speakers on the planet. “The world's most daring explorer,” one magazine declared.

Hubbard's visit to unknown Aniakchak, though, really shot the Glacier Priest to fame. Inside the “great moon crater,” as he called the long-quiet caldera, his crew discovered “paradise found . . . a world within a mountain,” where orchids bloomed in the volcanically warmed soil and the rabbits were so guileless that the padre and his crew felt guilty eating them (but did anyway).

Then Aniakchak erupted again, in the spring of 1931. When the holy man returned that summer and peered over the crater's edge, he likened himself to Dante on the edge of the Inferno. “It was the abomination of desolation . . . the prelude of hell,” he wrote in his book
Mush, You Malemutes!
“Black walls, black floor, black water, deep black holes and black vents; it fairly agonized the eye to look at it.” Hubbard's Eden had been obliterated, replaced by a Hieronymus Bosch canvas of cauldrons bubbling with sulfurous yellows and greens and fumaroles hot enough to cook his crew's beans.

Eighty years later, Aniakchak is a quiescent member of the Pacific's volcanic Ring of Fire but is considered “potentially active” by the Alaska Volcano Observatory. The crater and surrounding areas have started to recover. So why does nobody come? Access, for one. No roads reach Aniakchak. The aforementioned nasty weather, for another. Stuck between the raging Bering Sea and North Pacific Ocean, the Alaska Peninsula is forever buffeted by storms like a beleaguered referee trying to separate heavyweights. Skies are cloudy 300 days a year, with low ceilings. Flying here is akin to navigating inside an old gym sock. Parties can wait days to get in or out.

Then there are the brown bears Jimmy warned us about. “The Alaska Peninsula has, if not the highest density in the world, then close to it,” Dave Crowley, a biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game who manages the area's bears, told me before I left. Recent studies have found up to 400 brown bears per 1,000 square kilometers. (By comparison, it's estimated that just 718 of the famous, feared Yellowstone grizzlies are sprinkled across 72,500 square kilometers in the greater park area.) The peninsula's bears are genetically similar to the famed Kodiak brown bears, which along with polar bears are the largest bears on earth.

If you do manage to reach Aniakchak, you will find no broad-brimmed park rangers. No Winnebagos. Not a single marked trail. As the National Park Service's website for Aniakchak puts it, “No lines, no waiting!”

“We gotta get up and outta this shit,” Dan says as he climbs back into the tent on the second morning. He's soaked. After our group left Jimmy yesterday afternoon, we squished southward for 7 miles across tundra and through low grasses that felt like someone's overwatered lawn. Just a dozen miles from the grumpy Bering Sea, the landscape almost cowered; bent beneath our 65-pound packs, we were still the tallest things for miles. We eventually pitched camp in what felt like the inside of a milk jug. Now we can't see 50 feet. I thought back to two days ago, when we'd stood in the airport departure lounge in sunny, 75-degree Anchorage before a mural highlighting marquee destinations like Lake Clark National Park and Katmai that read
GATEWAY TO ALASKA'S SOUTHWESTERN WILDLANDS
. Aniakchak wasn't on the mural.

If this trip is a fool's errand, I can't think of better fools-in-travel than my companions. Dan, 45, is a smart-ass native of Northern California with sharp blue eyes behind his geek-chic horn-rimmed eyeglasses. A ball cap that hides a backpedaling hairline advertises Alaska Alpine Adventures, his 16-year-old company that guides trips ranging from ski-touring from a yacht to climbing in the Brooks Range and then floating to the Arctic Ocean in inflatable canoes. A few years ago, Dan also launched Adventure Appetites, a gourmet backcountry food company that has supplied the fare for our trip. Gabe, 37, from Washington, is an up-for-anything photographer whose goofiness makes it easy to forget that he's a former mountain guide who has worked everywhere from the top of 8,000-meter Shishapangma to the unclimbed vertical walls of Ethiopia.

“Chimps in the mist,” Dan dubs us after breakfast as we hunch under our packs and trudge into the never-ending whiteout. The land rises almost imperceptibly in a long, green, mossy ramp that, the map tells, is the volcano's flank. We see bear tracks. We see caribou tracks. We see wolf tracks that stalk the caribou tracks.

The fog machine is on full. We steer by GPS. Condensation drools from Dan's hat brim and from Pepe's barrel, which rides holstered within easy reach on his hip. Gabe and I are jittery in the spooky murk. Wolves appear at the corners of our vision, only to resolve themselves into shrubs. Bruins become boulders. “Alaskan rock bear,” Dan says after I yelp at one. With no bear spray to comfort me, I calm myself by recalling what bear expert Crowley had told me: Aniakchak bears live at the largest buffet table on earth—berries, salmon, moose. They're so well fed they “tend to be fat and lazy,” he said; he'd watched bears catch salmon and only lick them, they were so full. “If you don't do anything stupid, you'll be all right.” I repeat the words
buffet table
like a mantra.

Eventually the moss gives way to black-pebbled plains and ash piles and rivers of pumice. There is no wind, no birdsong, as if even sound itself has abandoned us.

“This place is so otherworldly,” says Dan. “Dead. Not a thing alive.”

Up and up, we chimps walk through the monochrome for hours. Finally a black line materializes from the white mist: the crater lip. Now the wind rouses, as if Aniakchak has awakened to the trespass. It roars, grabs backpacks, lifts us like bright bits of cloth and practically tosses us over the rim, sending us running down the steep pumice ramp into the crater.

Inside the caldera, the wind relents. The clouds lift. The sun shines. Finally we can see where we've arrived.

“Oh, my God,” I say, looking at Gabe.

“Oh, my God,” says Gabe, looking at Dan.

“Oh, my God,” says Dan, looking everywhere.

A “bewitched stadium” is how Hubbard described the crater the first time he stepped inside. My initial thought is less poetic. It feels like we've stumbled into a gargantuan gopher hole. Inside it's sunny and dry: an ash-filled bowl more than 6 miles across whose floor is so large—nearly 30 square miles—that Manhattan could easily fit inside. Before us spreads a scene that's
Land of the Lost
meets nuclear holocaust. Eighty years on, the ground underfoot still looks charred. A few sprigs of dwarf fireweed flower bravely in the dry ash. Cinder cones pimple the crater floor, and all around us queer volcanic monuments pepper the landscape. To our left is a huge scoop in the earth called Half Cone, remnant of some bygone blowout. Behind us lies a scab of hardened lava the size of a neighborhood that oozed up during the 1931 eruption. As if the scene lacked for drama, high above us fog pours over the crater rim in spectacular cascades that shred and evaporate on the descent. “Cloud Niagaras,” Hubbard called them.