Imagine you're in northern California, Oregon: lush green
rainforests, a rocky, rugged coastline. You travel north and
everything intensifies. The coastal mountains rise to awesome
heights. The offshore rocks become a maze of islands, salt fjords
and inlets. The signs of man are fewer, farther, wilder — a
rusted-out Cat tractor left to rot in a logging clearcut, the
weathered wood shacks of a long-abandoned mink farm, ribs of a boat
wreck washed up on the shore. You travel for hours seeing nothing at
all except forest and water, always water.
This is Southeast Alaska. In summer the sun stays
high till midnight and rises at three. The air is fresh and cool
with mist, and when the sun burns through it shimmers through the
air in double rainbows, sundogs. More often, though, it is a land of
moody rains, of shrouded mountains and twisting veils of mist combed
sideways through the crowns of pines.
The towns are so few that a place name on a map
may be five or six cabins huddled on the shoreline. Most of the
towns in Southeast are on islands; the roads, if they have them at
all, lead nowhere. The only access is by floatplane or by boat. It
is a region of extremes — a thousand different shades of blue
and green, a beauty as stark and changing as the sea's.
Actually, only a small minority of the human
race will ever consider primeval nature a basic source of
happiness... Mankind as a whole is too numerous for its problem of
happiness to be solved by the simple expedient of paradise.
- Robert Marshall, an early explorer of the
Brooks Range in Alaska
