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Ansel Adams’s flawless Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake (July 1947). This photograph has come to define the surreal beauty of the Denali wilderness. ANSEL ADAMS COLLECTION.

The artist, illustrator, and author Rockwell Kent, circa 1920. His outdoors manifesto Wilderness (1920) is considered the Alaskan equivalent of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. THE ROCKWELL KENT ESTATE.

Aldo Leopold, beloved author of A Sand County Almanac (1949), dedicated his life to protecting American forests, prairies, and open spaces. As cofounder of The Wilderness Society, Leopold promoted roadless land tracts. THE WILDERNESS SOCIETY.

William O. Douglas, a Supreme Court justice from 1939 to 1975, was a fierce advocate for saving the Brooks Range of Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. His memoir My Wilderness, published in 1960, promoted the value of preserving the Alaskan tundra. YAKIMA VALLEY MUSEUM.

Virginia “Ginny” Hill Wood, bush pilot, at age eighty-five, holding up a picture of herself as a young woman in the WASPs. Wood was a cofounder of the Alaska Conservation Society and helped save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 1960. VIRGINIA HILL WOOD PRIVATE COLLECTION.

Gary Snyder (left) and Allen Ginsberg (right) hiking together in the Sierras. As part of the beat generation, they promoted ecology in the 1950s and beyond. Snyder eventually wrote a cycle of poems about Alaska. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

The Atomic Energy Commission’s Project Chariot wanted to create an oil port in the Chukchi Sea by detonating five thermonuclear devices. Environmentalists such as William O. Douglas and Virginia Wood successfully derailed the plan. THE ALASKA CONSERVATION SOCIETY.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower (left) and Secretary of the Interior Fred Seaton (right) created the Arctic NWR on December 6, 1960. Seaton is among the most underrated secretaries of the interior in U.S. history. DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY.

The Tongass National Forest was established in 1907 by President Theodore Roosevelt. At close to 17 million acres—about the size of the state of West Virginia—the Tongass is the largest forest in the U.S. Forest Ser vice system. Approximately 70,000 people live in several dozen communities throughout the region, with commercial fishing and tourism driving the economy. After five decades of industrial-scale clear-cut logging in the Tongass since World War II, the U.S. Forest Ser vice is transitioning out of harvesting old-growth forest for timber. U.S. FOREST SERVICE. MAP DESIGN: ANI RUCKI.

Coastal temperate rain forests are rare, covering just one-thousandth of the Earth’s land surface. © AMY GULICK.

The Tongass National Forest contains nearly one-third of the world’s remaining old-growth coastal temperate rain forest, and the largest reserves of old-growth forest left in the United States. © AMY GULICK.

One of the world’s densest populations of black bears (Ursus americanus) lives on Kuiu Island in the Tongass, with three to five bears per square mile. © AMY GULICK.

About 40 percent of the Tongass National Forest is not forested, and consists of glacier ice fields, alpine tundra, wetlands, and water. © AMY GULICK.

Every spring, humpback whales migrate to southeast Alaska, where food is abundant. They come primarily from their calving and breeding waters in Hawaii, some 2,800 miles away. © AMY GULICK.

With more than 4,500 spawning streams, the Tongass National Forest supports all five species of Pacific salmon—chinook, coho, sockeye, chum, and pink. © AMY GULICK.

More than fifty species feed on salmon, including bald eagles, bears, wolves, sea lions, orcas, ravens, and people. The abundance of salmon in the Tongass supports some of the world’s highest densities of bald eagles, brown bears, and black bears. © AMY GULICK.

Owing to the bounty of both the forest and the sea, the Native peoples of the Tongass region developed one of the