Semifinalist
Terrain.org 15th Annual Nonfiction Contest
We have come here to stretch ourselves as big as the landscape while being reminded of our smallness.
From a distance, the ghost town of Kennecott looks vulnerable. Its barn-red buildings, perched at the bottom of a dramatic slope, huddle together as if for mutual protection. The Wrangell Mountains appear to curl over the town like a collapsing wave. The surrounding forest threatens to swallow it whole. Even in summer, the assaults of an Alaskan winter are not hard to imagine.
Despite its long neglect amid a harsh environment, many of Kennecott’s features still stand erect, almost defiant, in this distant corner of the continent. The 14-story mill, spruce and aspen at its shoulder, immediately draws the eye. Its steeply gabled roof echoes the shape of the peaks above, reducing their complex geology to architecture. It is ultimately the geometry of Kennecott that stands out against the wilderness.
Once among the most productive copper mines on earth, Kennecott is now a historic site of rare remoteness. To reach it, my wife and I undertake a journey relatively arduous by modern standards. From our home in Anchorage we follow the two-lane highway east through the tectonic seam between the Chugach and Talkeetna Mountains, then south along the Copper River as it bends toward the Gulf of Alaska. After crossing the mile-wide Copper at Chitina, we enter the national park and negotiate 60 miles of potholed gravel road to its dead end at the Kennicott River, across a narrow footbridge from the outpost of McCarthy.
Nowhere in the Lower 48 can one travel such a distance and encounter so few signs of human habitation. Two or three gas stations, a handful of cabins, an occasional lodge, over seven hours. Otherwise, it is just us and the Great Land. Out here, the reassurance of the road, like the safety of one’s car, takes on palpable significance.
In 1900, there were no highways to lead prospectors to the rumored site of a prodigious copper deposit. No rail lines through the forest, no planes with which to bypass it. Aside from Ahtna trails, riverbeds were the land’s only continuous openings—and even these were unreliable. The routes and flows of glacier-fed rivers change not only from year to year, season to season, but over the course of a single summer day, as the circling sun wrings more and more meltwater out of the exposed glaciers. Established trails all but disappear in a green tangle that grows at the speed of a time-lapse video in 20 hours of daylight. Meadows and other clearings become swampy with snowmelt. So it is not difficult to recognize the powerful motivation of the copper-seekers as they penetrated this capricious landscape for the flickering hope of mineral wealth.
Surely, such men would have been puzzled at the motivation driving CC and I into the heart of the Wrangell Mountains. Our plan—load our packs in Kennecott, hike to and then across a glacier, camp alone in a basin dense with bears, all for the pleasure of the trip—may have struck them as unwise, even unhinged. Perhaps there is truth to that assessment. For people of that era, the character of wilderness was not something one searched for. There was no need. Their lives were already full of physical hardship, open spaces abundant with wild animals, and extended periods without technological distraction. They could not have foreseen how rare, and, in turn, how precious, those things would become. If we truly are unhinged, I would counter, it is only because our world has made us so.
For all its quaintness, the people of McCarthy do not lead a simple life. The town is legitimately off the grid; all electricity is produced locally, either by diesel generator or solar array, and the primary heating source is the wood stove. Water, though abundant, must be pumped untreated from local creeks or wells. The nearest grocery store is in Valdez, 180 miles away by road. Living under these circumstances demands a level of effort that is burdensome in summer, overwhelming in winter. As a result, few property owners live here year-round. Most, like us, are summer visitors. On our first night in McCarthy, CC and I sit down for dinner at one of the town’s two humble restaurants. Seated on the porch, we can observe the unplanned interactions—shouts of recognition and greeting, invitations to pull up a chair—of a community that does not depend on text messages, email calendars, or formal plans to rendezvous. Everyone, it seems, is simply here; sooner or later their paths inevitably cross. That such encounters often occur in the middle of a dirt road, where people linger without concern for vehicle traffic, evokes what is in most places a bygone era. A time when physical proximity reflected community closeness.
McCarthy’s dogs share a similar rapport. They run together in a motley pack, dispersing to beg for food and attention from visitors and neighbors alike. A young husky wanders up to our table, whining for a moment before lying down at our feet. Clearly a local. “That’s Hercules,” explains a woman at a nearby table. “And this is Zeus,” she says, indicating an older husky resting stoically on the deck. “Zeus is Hercules’ grandpa.”
It begins to feel as though McCarthy is as remarkable for what it promotes as for what it excludes: a loosening of the boundaries that stifle friendship; attentiveness to what is happening around us, rather than to the events depicted or described on our manifold devices; an unusual intimacy among neighbors. Behind this openness I detect an unspoken message—if you made the effort to come all this way, you must be here for the same reasons I am. Even tourists can start to feel like they belong.
The reason people are here, one can sense, is the setting. The land. Its towering fragments of ancient seafloor. Its frozen remnants of the ice age. Its endless boreal vistas. Its untamed inhabitants. These are, at least, the things my wife and I have come to seek and to see, to be in the presence of. The features that define a wilderness.
After dinner we return to our one-room cabin, a mile walk from town. The cabin has no running water or electricity, but we are content that its spruce log walls keep the mosquitos at bay. We prepare for bed by the light of a sun that follows a nearly horizontal path across the northern sky. It is still glowing as we succumb to sleep.
We are up early the next morning, hours after dawn. The day feels swollen with possibility. We finish packing, arranging in our enormous backpacks everything we will need for three days in the backcountry. Once again we cross the footbridge and walk to McCarthy, where we wait for a shuttle—an old van, it turns out—to ferry us five miles up the former railroad grade to Kennecott.A feeling of absolute animal necessity overwhelms me. Each step is the most essential thing I have ever done.
The shuttle driver is a character, a local historian of sorts. He explains to us and our fellow passengers that because alcohol, gambling, and brothels were proscribed in the company town of Kennecott, McCarthy originated as a place where mine workers could pursue these vices. He leaves unsaid any contemporary implications of this fact. Passing a string of cabins wedged into the mountainside, he points out where last winter an avalanche sheared off a chunk of one of them. Its lone inhabitant, a longtime year-round resident now in her 80s, was evidently unhurt and unfazed. We also learn that she just killed a grizzly bear investigating her chicken coop.
The shuttle lets us off at the edge of Kennecott. After pausing for a moment—we can see McCarthy ensconced in woods in the valley below—we shoulder our packs and begin. As in McCarthy, we walk with total ease in the absence of cars. Lining either side of the gravel road are wooden buildings painted red with white trim, faded to various shades (reflecting the gradual progress of the Park Service’s restoration efforts). Some, renovated and repurposed as educational exhibits, look just as they did in 1915. Others show the toll of abandonment. A few are in such an obvious state of near or partial collapse that the prominent warning signs are superfluous. Through the gaps between them we can see the enduring mountains, not impervious to the forces of decay but far more resilient than anything man can construct.
Walking here must once have been deafening. Hunks of rock containing copper ore, hewn from the mountainside, were crushed into smithereens under thousands of pounds of steel. Steam trains rumbled and rattled along the route we now stroll, transporting the concentrated copper 200 miles south to the port of Cordova. Building construction and maintenance, essential given the unsparing elements, would have produced a constant din.
Now, peace prevails. Streams once dammed for hydropower run freely down the hillsides. Alders grow right up to the edges of buildings. Visitors are few in number, respectful in manner. They converse in hushed tones, taking it all in. Awed, as we are, by the magnitude of this place. Looking north we can see the stairway icefall, a cascade of solid ice descending more than a vertical mile from the crest of the mountains. And below it, the glacier we intend to cross.
The town fades and the road narrows to a trail. My thoughts turn to the dangers of our imminent endeavor. I have walked on glaciers before and on one occasion, near Valdez, found the experience unsettling. The steepness of the underlying mountain left only a narrow shelf of glacier flat enough to walk over. Though the ice was largely hidden by rocky fragments of moraine, CC and I could almost feel it dwindling beneath our feet in the heat of afternoon; a torrent of meltwater pouring out from underneath confirmed that it was. After a few minutes our initial elation gave way to nervousness and we scrambled off, half-expecting the glacier to collapse in our wake. A year later, we read that a boulder had fallen from the glacier and killed a boy walking below.
This time we are more prepared, with crampons for confident footing and ice axes to arrest momentum in case we fall. We are armed, too, with a better grasp of the perils of backcountry travel in Alaska. Through our own encounters and the stories of others we have become familiar not only with many of the particular hazards of such expeditions but, perhaps more crucially, with the larger truth that this landscape is uniquely temperamental. Moving through it safely demands maximum attention.
Admittedly, the danger of the backcountry is inseparable from its allure. But we are no thrill seekers, no adrenaline junkies. We have come here to stretch ourselves as big as the landscape while being reminded of our smallness. It is the freedom, not the danger, that draws us in. The sense of being limited only by the extent of our physical endurance. The conviction that we have everything we need, nothing more. And the resulting feeling of belonging and contentment—at home in the wild.
However one defines it, this place is wilderness. The trail leads us through birch and spruce woods, across plunging creeks, along rocky ledges. Wildflowers and berries are brushstrokes of color against a deep green canvas. The specter of brown bears is a constant presence, fearsome and mysterious. Were we to continue on this northerly bearing, it would be just short of 100 miles as the raven flies—over the 15,000 foot uplift of the Wrangells and their deserts of permanent ice—to the nearest highway. An all but impossible journey.
Our aim is substantially less ambitious but hardly easy. Its chief difficulty is the absence of a trail across the glacier, which the shifting nature of ice precludes. Due to melting over time, the surface of the glacier now sits well below the level of the trail. As we approach, we scan for a clear route across. None appears. We will have to figure it out as we go.
The slope we descend is barren, only recently released from the oppression of ice. Its scree surface is loose, unstable. Small polygons of rock tumble downhill at our boots’ inadvertent nudging. We follow them down toward the lip of the glacier.
It has been threatening to rain all day. The clouds deprive the glacier of the glimmer bestowed by sunlight, but its resemblance to pearl is striking. Up close, the ice appears thickly white with hints of blue, particularly in the gullies and depressions where water flows. We sit a few yards away on the scree slope, eating lunch. Leaning against our packs, we watch a young couple, a man and woman, step tepidly onto the ice. With great care they inch up the modest incline. Other visitors, some led by guides, are scattered across the nearest quarter mile of the glacier, exploring the frozen terrain. Their amazement is evident in their posture, in the movement of their arms.
Before getting up we strap our gaiters and crampons on over our boots, untie our ice axes, secure our packs. Now we are ready. Along the fringed edge of the ice runs a stream of meltwater a foot wide. Making its way downhill in the direction of McCarthy, it will merge with the river, pass under the footbridge, and move steadily toward the Pacific. Someday, this entire glacier will flow into the sea.
The ice is as slick as one would expect in air temperatures of more than 30 degrees above freezing. Though our initial strides are uncertain we gain confidence with each one. Reaching the crest of the first rise, the full panorama comes into view. A few yards to the north, the ice drops off into a shallow canyon. On its opposite wall an ice climber slowly ascends. Beyond, in all directions, pleated ice stretches to the base of mountains—a distance of miles. Glaciers emerge from hidden valleys, melding to form yet larger masses of ice, like inlets flowing into the sea. A glacial sea lapping at the mountainous shore.
On a warm day like this, the glacier occupies a transitory state between solid and liquid. Streams, cascades, trickles, rivulets—there are only so many words to describe the various forms water takes as it travels over land. That vocabulary feels insufficient to cover the number and variety of distinct channels in which meltwater is presently flowing across the glacier. Released from decades, even centuries as solid ice (the glacier itself is much older), it moves as if to make up for lost time. Water so clear it’s invisible. It takes stepping into multiple unseen pools to conclude I should avoid any kind of dip or depression if I want my boots to stay dry. Each thread cuts imperceptibly into the ice, leaving unmistakable evidence. I am reminded of the sculpted sandstone of the Southwest, where strange landforms record the historic movement of water. The glacier swirls like a water slide, plunges into narrow chutes. Pits and moulins—holes with the profile of an open mine shaft—reveal a glowing blue core, as though there is a bright light deep within.
Walking on the glacier feels like swimming out into a lake and waving to a friend onshore. Near enough to converse, we are nonetheless in different worlds. Subject to differing relationships with our physical environment. Accounting for the lack of friction—a bizarre sensation—makes movement across the glacier as a much a mental challenge as a physical one. Each step necessitates forecasting the next three or four, an exercise in route finding that evokes horizontal rock climbing.
The route we follow is not linear. When it dead ends at a small cliff or crevasse, we must turn around and proceed a different way. Modest leaps are occasionally required. By moving slowly, methodically, we make gradual progress. With increasing detail we can see our destination, although the forested basin appears more like a plateau—raised above the level of the sinking glacier. A bare earthen slope, perhaps 300 feet in height, separates the trees from the ice.
The sun finally pulls away from the clouds, instantly revealing a luminous new world. The white light reflecting off the ice is like that which in movies precedes the appearance of angels. Light penetrates the glacier’s depths, rendering its finest contours in bright relief. Looking into transparent pools with no discernible bottom, I am filled with a deep, alien dread. It is sublime in the Romantic sense of the word—frightening in its otherworldly beauty.
As the sun dispenses unexpected warmth, I perceive an intensifying in the flow of water across the ice. Its gentle music becomes louder, more overwhelming. Rushing, verging on roaring. The usually abstract threat posed by climate change becomes suddenly real—a threat, however exaggerated by fear, to my immediate survival. Recalling Valdez, I try to remain calm. But I have a familiar urge to get off the ice.
We chart a course toward the waterfall that marks the best place to exit, according to our waiter at last night’s restaurant. He’d said he made the trip earlier this summer, so it seemed like he should know. But as we near the glacier’s edge, we are starting to doubt him. The waterfall—a ribbon of whitewater plunging from the trees—lies south across a broad divide. Even if we could get across, the slope on the other side appears steeper than elsewhere along the escarpment. Perhaps we misunderstood. Maybe he said don’t get off by the waterfall—but why would he say only that? The questions create a rising unease.
Scanning the escarpment, we confirm there is no established trail. Nor are there any other hikers either to query or follow. We have not seen anyone but each other in more than an hour. The slope to the north of the waterfall looks easier to climb, if only somewhat. A tilted slab of exposed earth, daunting but probably no worse than climbs we have managed before. A dogged scramble up to the trees, maybe ten or 15 minutes, and we’ll be home free. We can find the lake, set up camp. Crack open a beer. Just need to get up that slope.
One step and we are off the glacier. The hillside is looser than it looks, spongy from recent rains. With a few lunging strides we reach a small shelf, a reprieve from the gravity of the climb. We decide to take a break; snacks are retrieved and savored. Looking down at the glacier, I notice something strange. A trickle of mud runs down the slope behind us, as though we’d triggered a tiny mudslide. It lasts only a few seconds. We strategize our next move. Rather than continue straight uphill, we decide to take the slope at an angle. It may take longer but should minimize the pressure we put on the unstable hillside—a sudden priority. Ten straight days of rain—enough to break longstanding records—has surely contributed to the conditions. We identify our next rendezvous point, 30 yards to the north, slightly uphill. I will go first.
It is immediately clear that the slope is in far worse shape than we understood. With each step my boots sink deeper into the sodden earth, but I push forward. Surely it will stabilize. But it does not. The hillside is pure mud. I am not going to make it to the rendezvous point. I turn back, realizing with panic that the hillside is coming down around me. Mud is up to my knees and quickly getting higher. CC is screaming. She is only 15 yards away but appears safe on the shelf. She is screaming at what’s happening to me.
It takes every last ounce of strength to pull each leg free from the rising muck, one then the other. One, then the other. Without gaiters my boots would be sucked right off my feet. A feeling of absolute animal necessity overwhelms me. Each step is the most essential thing I have ever done. I close the distance with CC, never so relieved to embrace her. We stand in the safety of the shelf and watch a river of earth run down to the glacier.
The decision to go back is an easy one, if crushing. We scramble down to the glacier and begin to retrace our steps across it. Our pace is faster this time because we know the route, and because we are tired of being on the ice. We walk in silence for long stretches, grimly navigating a familiar sequence of obstacles. The sky closes up again, like a poppy at dusk, and rain begins to fall. We flee the glacier in a downpour that feels like a fitting conclusion to the day. By the time we lie down in our tent, on a bluff overlooking the glacier, we are soaked, exhausted, defeated. But we are safe.
As we explore what remains of the mining town the following day, learning of its history through exhibits, artifacts, and printed materials, I find it difficult not to feel a level of disgust toward the work of the miners and their employers. The exploitative nature of their enterprise is just so plain. They came, they took, they left. The result of 200 million years of geological processes, gone in less than a human lifetime.
The endeavor earned its owners and shareholders in excess of $200 million in profit (far more when adjusted for inflation). For all this success, no royalties were paid to the government, nor to the American people on whose behalf it had owned the land. The law did not—and still does not—require them. It almost goes without saying that nothing was shared with the Ahtna, the land’s longstanding residents.
The departing miners did not even bother to clean up. Scrap metal was salvaged and sold, everything else largely left where it stood. The wooden structures, they reasoned, were now somebody else’s responsibility. Far below the gravel walkway, we notice a vast pile of century-old debris—steel drums, pipe segments, tire rims, sheet metal—rusting in a ravine exposed by the retreating glacier. Left there by the Park Service, a ranger explains to us, in an effort to honestly portray the practices of the era (and because its precarious location would make recovery dangerous). Indeed, this place offers warnings to heed, as enthusiasm for a new wave of mineral mines spreads across Alaska. It feels relevant to note, for one, that the continued cleanup of Kennecott occurs entirely on the taxpayer dime.
It would be dishonest, of course, to deny that Kennecott was a response to need as well as greed. The copper mined here electrified America, enabling a widespread improvement in living conditions from which we still reap the benefits. Copper wiring powered breakthroughs in technology and medicine. It powered the lights by which my great-grandparents raised their children. Much of what Kennecott produced remains in use, transmitting electricity that charges our laptops and cell phones. In that sense, all of us mined these mountains.
Pondering the relics, I find myself wondering how those who lived and toiled here felt about the wilderness that surrounded them. Warding off frostbite in the depths of winter, rebuilding bridges swept away once again by spring floods, straining against the defiance of solid rock, it is easy to imagine that at times they hated it. Perhaps at others—the rare day off, a summer evening spent beneath a sky still blue at midnight—they felt a fleeting affection for it. Most of the time, I suspect it was nothing more than a workplace, where they made their hardscrabble living. An industrial operation as remote as a deepwater oil rig.
What seems clear from the evidence they left behind is that the men of Kennecott did not regard themselves on equal footing with the land. They did not seriously consider the notion that the mine should be at all constrained by concern for its impacts on the nearby animals, water bodies, plant life, even the people. The indifference with which they littered the landscape, polluted its waters, dispatched wildlife, and disregarded the Ahtna speaks to an arrogance typical for the time. Our activities here, these acts seemed to say, are paramount. Nothing else warrants consideration. To the extent the land is animate, it is an enemy to be overcome. Otherwise it is merely a repository of resources, an unfeeling and invulnerable backdrop. A stage for the feats of men.
This attitude is hard for us to swallow, even at a century’s remove. Like our fellow visitors, CC and I came here to admire and appreciate the wildness of this place. That it harbors natural forces so far beyond our control, humbling us with the scale of its ecology, is the entire purpose of our being here. Early this morning, CC and I watched a black bear forage on a hill above our campsite. We could see its twitching nose and powerful, curious mind working to sort through the undergrowth for its ideal breakfast. To treat such a creature as a nuisance—or a river as something to tame, a forest as merely a resource to exploit—would seem to require a heart hardened beyond recognition. To come here simply to take, to profit, is not a mindset we can understand.
And yet we are not, in some ways, so different from the men of Kennecott. We, too, are products of our time; limited by an incomplete understanding of the natural world, reluctant to see the consequences of many ordinary activities we undertake—outdoor recreation, in our case, which disrupts the lives of wildlife to a degree science is just beginning to understand, and material consumption, whose ugly costs are largely hidden from view. Before I can judge those responsible for Kennecott, I must acknowledge that my own reasons for coming to this place are not quite so pure, not so innocent, as I would like to believe.
The truth is, everyone who comes here wants something from the land. For some, photographs will suffice. Perhaps a handful of brilliant stones, mementos of a life-altering trip. Others find themselves wanting more. The residents of McCarthy love this place with such fervor they acquired their own little piece of it, an acre or two of birch woods on which to build a cabin. The imperatives of residence—the noise and pollution of diesel generators, the killing of a grizzly in self-defense—are for them regrettable compromises in their relationship with the land. Local outfitters, providing bush flights and guide services to backpackers and hunters, desire only a modest income. A subtle commercialization of the wilderness. The purposes for which the Park Service wanted this land—to preserve and protect, to educate—may have been laudable, but were achieved only after it had been taken from the Ahtna.
In this light, the Kennecott Corporation and its employees may have been only the most obvious, the most literal, in their taking from the land. Different in degree, rather than in kind. That CC and I wanted something for ourselves—a weekend of absolute solitude in a timeless landscape, our own temporary home in the wilderness—became fully clear only once we were unable to attain it. That we were denied it by the land itself made me wonder if we had sought too much.
What we all have in common, it seems to me, is an unacknowledged faith that the land can absorb whatever we want to do to it; that it can spare whatever we choose to take from it. But whether it can truly afford to do so suddenly feels like a question we should be asking. One that only the land itself can answer.
CC and I wander the remains of Kennecott until late in the afternoon. The warmth of the northward drifting sun, the immediate presence of history, and the silvery shimmering of cottonwood grant the day a drowsy, dream-like quality. It feels strange to remember that only yesterday, just a few miles from here, we experienced something much closer to a nightmare. We periodically talk about what happened, trying to understand what we may have done wrong. Then the urgency of that analysis fades, to revisit another day.
We retrieve our backpacks from beneath the porch of the old general store and walk to the shuttle pick-up. The ride back to McCarthy feels more pleasant than it should. The van rattles over the unpaved road, trailed by a vapor of dust. Seated by the window, I observe that only a sliver of roadway separates us from a sudden drop. I am too tired to be concerned.
When we arrive in McCarthy, it is just beginning to bustle. Maybe we’ll return later for a beer and a meal. Shouldering our packs one last time, we head back toward the car on foot. We go across the creek and down the dirt road, aspen groves our only company. Then back over the footbridge and across the glacial river.
Tonight we will camp here, beside the river. It is not as secluded as the basin would have been—there are other cars and campers spread across the sandy floodplain, and we can see travelers cross occasionally over the footbridge. But perhaps it is the more appropriate place for us to be. In the distance, the remnants of Kennecott rise above the trees.
Nicholas Crane Moore is a writer and environmental attorney in Anchorage, Alaska. His work centers on the relationship between human endeavors and the natural world.
Header photo of Wrangell Mountains by Nicholas Crane Moore.
