OPINION: 50 years ago, coming home to Alaska

Here’s a curious fact, given my half-century romance with Alaska: Until the final months of graduate school, I had never fantasized about traveling to America’s “Last Frontier.” At age 24, I knew almost nothing about Alaska except the usual stereotypes: that it was a land of polar bears, vast wilderness and the continent’s highest mountain. Then, a few weeks from completing my studies, Tom Andrews popped the question.

His question was a simple, straightforward one, yet it held far deeper implications that I could have imagined in the spring of 1974: “Would you like to work in Alaska this summer?”

Tom had worked seasonally in Alaska before, searching the northern landscape for mineral deposits that might be developed into mines. Now, about to get an M.S. degree in economic geology, he’d been hired full-time by an Anchorage company. His first assignment: round up summer help. A friend and classmate of Tom’s at the University of Arizona, I happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Back then, I would have considered this to be a happy coincidence. Now I’m not so sure. The older I get, the less I believe in the notion of coincidences. Things happen for a reason, I like to tell friends. There are no accidents, I say, though I’m not certain I fully believe that either.

Whatever put me at the University of Arizona in 1974 — fate, chance, some guiding spirit or grand plan — I answered Tom with an emphatic “Yes!” And with that response I took an unexpected fork in the trail and I headed down a path that I wish to celebrate here, 50 years later.

In replying yes, I consciously knew only one thing for sure: A great adventure lay ahead. Now I suspect that some deeper, wiser part of me knew a portal was opening to more than a summer’s adventure. In some curious and inexplicable way, I would be coming home, to a place whose wild spirit would touch my own like no other had since my boyhood days in Connecticut.

After a brief, whirlwind stop in Anchorage, I joined my crewmates on a flight north to the central Brooks Range, a place made famous by wilderness advocate Robert Marshall, author of the northern classic “Alaska Wilderness.” Over the next few months, both the mountains and Marshall’s passionate prose would nudge me toward the new life that awaited.

Looking back, that summer’s work was mostly a blur of collecting and hauling stream sediment samples, hammering rocks and compiling field data. Much more exciting to me were the wildlife — particularly my first encounters with Dall sheep, grizzly bears and wolves — and the landscape. The mountains where we worked weren’t spectacular, at least in the way most people use that word. In fact, by Alaskan standards, they were rather ordinary hills. Most topped out below 5,000 feet, and their comparatively gentle slopes could be hiked without any technical gear. But that was part of their appeal.

In midsummer, you could walk among the range’s high places in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt without worrying about avalanches or crevasses or falling off cliffs. And from the top of almost any mountain, you could spin your body 360 degrees and see nothing but other mountains and river valleys, stretching to the horizon without end. I had never experienced — or imagined — such vast, open spaces with an acutely primordial feel, as if I had been transported to a distant epoch before machines and cities, pencils and maps. Before humans.

Since leaving the profession decades ago, I have often thought that geology’s chief gift to me was the opportunity to immerse myself in some of Alaska’s grandest wild places, especially the Brooks Range, and in doing so to discover firsthand the glories and fragility of this and other wilderness landscapes. Much like a first kiss, I got a taste of something that stirred new — or perhaps renewed — passions that first summer in the Arctic. Many more would follow.

For all of the Brooks Range’s allure, by the end of my first summer, it had become apparent that my attitude toward geology — and especially mineral exploration — was considerably different from that of my friends and co-workers. For one thing, I clearly lacked their passion for the work. For another, nearly all, that I could tell, had nothing good to say about “environmentalists.”

At 24, my green ethic was largely unformed, a vaporous thing still years away from taking solid shape. But I did know this: Sierra Clubbers and other conservationists were not my enemies. It wasn’t a perspective I could openly share with my co-workers, even those who were good friends. This difference created a tension, one that would build in my second season.

The doubts and tensions were in a way crystallized on a midsummer day’s traverse through the western Brooks Range’s Ambler River Valley, where my crew had made a base camp and which, over the course of several weeks, I’d come to treasure. I have written in detail about that day in my book “Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness.” Here I will simply say I found some hints of copper mineralization that initially excited me. But that excitement eventually turned to worry. What if, against all odds, I’d found a “motherlode” of copper ore, rich enough to be mined and, consequently, this glorious valley were torn apart?

My mind filled with darkening thoughts, I realized with a clarity that approached the Ambler’s sparkling waters, just how special this river and its valley had become to me. It was a remarkable place, even a holy place, whose purity was held and reflected by those clear, pure rushing waters.

I felt a clash of values, more strongly than ever before.

I wasn’t yet ready to go over to “the other side,” the one inhabited by Sierra Clubbers and their kind, the one Robert Marshall had chosen several decades earlier, when he sought to “keep northern Alaska largely a wilderness.” Actually I wasn’t sure I had a side. I was somewhere in between, a kind of limbo.

But it was only a matter of time. The following winter, I helped compile data and write the company’s annual report. My bosses were happy enough with my work to offer me a permanent position. But that only fed my mounting insecurities. Besides, my heart wasn’t in my job. Other things were bothering me too, outside of work. I felt unfulfilled and unhappy. Only in my mid-20s, I plunged into something resembling a midlife crisis.

Hoping to escape the gloom, I moved to Southern California. In six years I never learned to love the Los Angeles megalopolis. But some crucial personal changes occurred there, both internal and external. Among them: I changed careers and became a journalist.

I vowed that someday I would return to Alaska. I did so in 1982, reincarnated as a sportswriter, to work for the Anchorage Times. Three years later, I became the newspaper’s outdoors writer. It was then that my green side began to blossom.

The transformation from geologist to journalist, then essayist, author and wilderness/wildlife advocate has been gradual, occurring in bits and pieces over many years. Alaska has been at the heart of all those changes, particularly the central Brooks Range, which put me on a new and more fulfilling and Earth-friendly path a half-century ago, and for that I feel both amazed and filled with deep gratitude.

Anchorage nature writer and wildlife/wildlands advocate Bill Sherwonit is a widely published essayist and the author of more than a dozen books, including “Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness " and “Animal Stories: Encounters with Alaska’s Wildlife.”

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