The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [187]
Like many conservationists in the Pacific Northwest, Douglas viewed Alaska as an extension of Washington state. The Tongass and Chugach were sacred national places, steeped in Teddy Roosevelt’s and Gifford Pinchot’s lore, which weren’t going to be destroyed for the benefit of the extraction industries. Douglas was never going to let them be ruined—any man who could overcome polio could surely square off against polluters. The fact that Douglas had refused the post of secretary of the interior didn’t mean that he had relinquished his Muirian duty to protect America’s natural heritage. Never would he let Alaska become Chicago.56
Chapter Fifteen - Ansel Adams, Wonder Lake, and the Lady Bush Pilots
I
Visitors to Alaska arrived by plane in record numbers in the early years of the cold war, some of them understandably apprehensive about flying over the seemingly endless procession of Alaskan mountain ridges. Lower Forty-Eighters felt minuscule at an altitude of 10,000 feet, peering through their little windows at clouds larger than lakes. Madcap turbulence often caused the planes to rattle and rumble like storm-tossed ships on a vertiginous sea. Then there was the memory of Will Rogers, who had been killed in a plane crash in Alaska. Although the photographer Ansel Adams didn’t care for aviation—having lost a few close friends to crashes—he wasn’t afflicted by acrophobia. Adams knew that flying was the only way to hopscotch around Alaska’s immense area and to be enlightened and awed by its extremes. Because Alaska’s road system in the late 1940s was confined to populated places, air travel was the only feasible mode of transportation. Adams wrote that while flying was an “unnatural environment for man,” it was, in truth, the only “practical way” to “visit many of the areas I wanted to photograph.”1
In 1942, Adams had traveled in the Pacific Northwest, photographing the rocky alpine slopes and glacier-capped summits of the Olympic Mountains towering upward from greater Seattle against the Pacific sky. This majestic panorama, fresh with the smell of rain, inspired some of Adams’s best photography. He shot ocean waves smashing into cliffsides and Piper’s bellflowers growing in the crevices of rock outcroppings. However, while Adams recognized the Hoh and Quinault rain forests of the Olympics as botanical wonders, he craved glaciers and taller peaks. His intuition told him that Glacier Bay and Mount McKinley were the places to be. He also craved the light of the far northern skies. The Olympics were too low—foothills, compared with the Alaska Range. None of the major peaks in the Olympics were higher than 8,000 feet. “Imaginatively inclined,” Adams recalled in An Autobiography, “I felt Alaska might be close to the wilderness perfection I continuously sought.”2
Sometimes dreams come true. Alaska exceeded all of Adams’s expectations. His excursions in 1947 and 1949 left him with cherished memories and enduring photographs (even though the weather had fluctuated between bad and awful). Building on the artistic photos Edward Curtis had taken of Alaskan landscapes during the Harriman Expedition of 1899, Adams used airplanes, helicopters, snowmobiles, jeeps, boats, canoes, and hiking boots as a means to a keeper shot; he was able to capture places like Mount McKinley and Glacier Bay in dramatic light.
Born in 1902 to upper-class parents in San Francisco, Adams became committed to photographing wild America after hiking in Yosemite National Park as a fourteen-year-old. Adams was flabbergasted to learn that tectonic plates had once pushed up piles of rocks that were now called the Sierra Nevada. “The splendor of Yosemite burst