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the twelve-mile Iliamna portage, where they met a local man, Fred Phillips. With relative ease they then crossed the seventy-mile Iliamna Lake in a canoe (towed behind Hans Seversen’s gas boat). They soon reached the lower Newhalen River. They put their canoe in the upper part of the river, which was twenty-two miles long, and paddled hard to Sixmile Lake and on to Lake Clark. Having become friends through CFCA, they were ready to explore Lake Clark. They kept diary notes tracing their route from Cook Inlet to Lake Clark: Iliamna Bay, Iliamna Portage, Old Iliamna Village (on the Iliamna River), Iliamna Lake, Seversen’s Roadhouse, the upper Newhalen River, Sixmile River, Lake Clark itself, and at last Tanalian Point on Lake Clark.

What most startled Vreeland about the Lake Clark–Lake Iliamna region was the shortage of visible wildlife. “This has every evidence of having been once a good game country,” Vreeland reported in a long letter to E. A. Preble of the Biological Survey. “But at present every native is armed with a high-powered rifle and kills everything that he sees with the result that there is very little game left except in inaccessible places. Grouse and Ptarmigan however quite plentiful.”44

The Lake Clark country had some of the prettiest meadows in America, soft grass sloping up hillsides, fringed by forest; the whole panorama was one of stunning mountains and creeks, with no settlements in sight. Sometimes a sudden, absolute silence made it seem sacrilegious to talk on the trail. The rivers in the region—Beluga, Chakachatna, McArthur, Drift, Tuxedni, and Big—created the tidal flats of Cook Inlet. These rivers, as Muir knew, had been born from the huge glaciers located northwest on the Chigmit and Tordrillo mountains.45 The largest tributary of the Cook Inlet—the Susitna River—was here. Iliamna Lake—the largest body of freshwater in Alaska—was enormous, covering 1,000 square miles; it was seventy-eight miles long, twenty-two miles wide, and as much as 1,192 feet deep.46

Photographic Insert 1

At 19.2 million acres, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge supports the greatest variety of plant and animal life of any park or refuge in the circumpolar Arctic and is a crown jewel among Alaska’s wilderness areas. On December 16, 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the original 8.9 million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Range. Twenty years later, President Jimmy Carter more than doubled its size, and established the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The coastal plain “1002 area” remains unprotected. Repeated attempts to open this area to oil drilling have been narrowly defeated.

Hulahula River valley, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. © ART WOLFE.

Pacific loon nesting on the coastal plain. More than 180 species of birds migrate to the Arctic coast from six continents and all fifty states to feed on abundant insect life, and breed and raise young before returning to their native winter grounds. © SUBHANKAR BANERJEE.

Because large herds of Porcupine caribou converge on the coastal plain to calve each spring, the region is known as the “American Serengeti.” © FLORIAN SCHULZ.

The once-endangered musk ox is a relic of the ice age, and lives year-round on the Arctic Refuge coastal plain. Musk oxen give birth to their young between mid-April and mid-May, when the region is still fully covered in snow. The original Alaska musk oxen were exterminated in the late 1800s, but through conservation efforts beginning in the 1930s, the species is being gradually reestablished. © ART WOLFE.

A buff-breasted sandpiper engages in a courtship dance on the coastal plain, Jago River. These sandpipers migrate each year from Argentina to the Arctic Refuge to nest and rear their young. The species has a small world population estimated at only 15,000 birds, and has been identified as one of the top five species at greatest risk if there is oil development on the Arctic Refuge coastal plain. © SUBHANKAR BANERJEE.

Arctic wolf tracks appear overnight on the banks of the Canning River. © DAVE SHREFFLER.