Archive of posts with tag 'Alaska'

A Vast Wilderness

January 27, 2019 • #

I picked up John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country this week. You could think of it like a biography of Alaska: the region pre- and post-statehood, its people, the wilderness, wildlife, and its vastness.

Woven throughout are reminders of just how massive the untouched wilderness is in Alaska, and how far you really are from civilization out in the flatlands or up in the Brooks Range.

Early in the book he and his companions are traveling up the Salmon River, in the Kobuk Valley National Park (still not designated in 1977 at the time of...

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Alaska's Dalton Highway →

November 7, 2015 • #

Alan Feuer drives one of the continent’s most isolated roads over Alaska’s Brooks Range, from Livengood (population: 13) to the industrial oil camp of Deadhorse:

It was with these thoughts that I finally got to Deadhorse, which may rank as the most horrific place on planet Earth. If Stalin had built a gulag in the cargo area of Kennedy Airport, it would probably look like Deadhorse. The town, if you can call it that, is the apotheosis of petrochemical dismalness: a wasteland of oil tanks, acetylene fires, heavy-machine repair shops and spill-abatement companies that is drenched in freezing...

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