The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [140]
Getting up at dawn, Marshall would camp around the Brooks Range with feelings of awe, disbelief, and tense excitement. He didn’t even mind the weather locals called “freeze-up.” Just as John Burroughs had the Catskills and John Muir the Sierra Nevada, Marshall now had the Brooks Range. With great preciseness he recorded every craggy ridge and glacier-carved valley in the notebook he always kept handy. Because so few outdoorsmen had actually lived in the Brooks Range, Marshall felt that he was discovering summits virgin to Euroamerican footprints. Being alone in the Brooks Range created a sense of total removal, a supernatural out-of-body experience, stripping his spirit from the body as in a Chagall painting. The Arctic terrain made him feel cosmically alone.19
Two imposing portals Marshall explored north of Wiseman—Frigid Crag and Boreal Mountain—soon became altars to him.20 Watching clouds clear off the summits seemed holier than a prayer. Incalculable geological forces had clearly been working here. Previously unexplored by conservationists, this unforgiving part of the Brooks Range had no equal in America for rugged beauty. It bore silent witness to a great cataclysm that geologists still didn’t quite understand. “His joy,” Marshall’s brother George recalled, “was complete when, standing on some peak, never before climbed, he beheld the magnificence of a wild timeless world extending the limit of sight filled with countless mountains and deep valleys previously unmapped, unnamed, and unknown.” Standing in a blowing wind, Marshall declared these towering portals the “Gates of the Arctic.” The name stuck. On December 1, 1978, Gates of the Arctic became a national monument. The four words—Gates of the Arctic—conveyed a sense of exploration, discovery, and freedom to conservationists all over the world. On December 1, 1980, 7.95 million acres of this majestic landscape were officially designated Gates of the Arctic National Park (the second largest in the U.S. system). In Gates of the Arctic country, Marshall said, an outdoorsman could “get away from the rat race.”21
Marshall’s intense explorations in the Gates of the Arctic region is legendary in Alaska. He saw the Brooks Range as unique among all recreational assets owned by the U.S. government because it was pristine wilderness, with scarcely an industrial imprint anywhere. All around were peaks and glaciers over 9,000 feet in elevation. Like Charles Sheldon before him, he tested himself against rising rivers, the midnight sun, and hungry bears. Wearing caribou-skin parkas, boots, socks, and mittens, he looked like a Nunamiut hunter. Hiking for Marshall became an aerobic endeavor that set his heart and lungs pumping. Caribou liver became his staple food, a marvelous source of iron and protein. He euphorically marveled at the abundance of Arctic birds such as the semipalmated plover (Charadrius semipalmatus) and spotted sandpiper (Actitus macularius). While Louis Marshall was in Switzerland leading an effort for Jews to resettle in Palestine, Marshall was discovering the Gates of the Arctic. And when word reached him that his seventy-three-year-old father had died in Zurich, he took the news stoically.
III
A few weeks after Louis Marshall’s death came Black Tuesday: the New York Stock Exchange crashed. America was in a panic. The Great Depression had begun. For Marshall, who had been moving toward socialism since his days at Syracuse University, the economic downturn was proof that capitalism was a flawed system. Companies such as Weyerhaeuser, Long Bell, and Pacific Lumber didn’t give a damn about working families. The Great Depression—like World War I—strained the resources of the U.S. Forest Service in the West. Starting in the fall of 1929 the Hoover administration had the deteriorating economy as an excuse