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...