The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [197]
Hunter and Hill celebrated their successful flight and were greeted in Fairbanks with good cheer. The only problem was that they were snowed in for weeks. “We were two babes in a man’s world,” Hill recalled. “We were bored. We saw a posted sign that read ‘Skiing: Women Wanted.’ Well . . . I grew up in the snow and figured why not.”38
On a ski mountain, Hill met her future husband, Morton “Woody” Wood. A U.S. Army veteran of the famous Tenth Mountain Division, Wood had seen combat in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war Wood, an expert mountaineer, took classes at the University of Alaska. A forestry major at the University of California and later the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, he would eventually become a park manager at Mount McKinley National Park. “He asked me on a date to a downtown diner and dance,” she recalled. “All the guys around Fairbanks were rough. He was a gentleman. I was hooked. We got married and made Alaska our lives.”39 From the beginning of Ginny’s marriage, her life still included her best friend, Celia Hunter.
Ginny Hill and Celia Hunter fell head over heels in love with Alaska. Just as Ansel Adams wanted to share his photos of Mount McKinley with the world, Ginny recalled wanting to have all her good friends fly with her over the 20,000-foot peak. For a while Celia worked as a flight attendant on the first trips by Alaska Airlines to Kotzebue and Nome. Meanwhile, the newlywed Woods bought a used Cessna 170, believing that nature tourism would soon become a big business in Alaska. Woody worked for the U.S. Department of the Interior for a while, but the pay wasn’t good. He also earned his pilot’s license, with Ginny acting as instructor. Together they started taking people to Fairbanks on aerial tours of Alaska. “Ansel Adams had opened things up with his photography of Alaska,” Ginny recalled. “Everybody we took just couldn’t believe Denali from the air. There wasn’t anything like it in North America.”40
Influenced by Adams, American families started planning to spend summers in national parks like Mount McKinley and Glacier Bay. The Woods joined forces with Celia Hunter and opened Camp Denali in 1952, building their own rustic cabins not far from Wonder Lake and shipping in equipment from Fairbanks. Camp Denali was like a rustic Adirondacks village in the heart of frontier Alaska. “The connection with the land was important,” Morton Wood recalled. “It was important to us and important to our guests.”41
Camp Denali became a hit with tourists. Once Denali Highway opened in 1957, linking Richardson Highway to McKinley Park, a new wave of tourists came by automobile to see America’s tallest peak. The McKinley Park Station Hotel, which had opened in 1939, was more service-oriented, with picture-perfect window views by a communal fireplace. What the Woods and Hunter achieved at Camp Denali was an old-style log camp (right down to the cabin doors, with wood and leather pulls). It was a rustic retreat where Ansel Adams’s Mount McKinley at Wonder Lake could be seen for real. The combination of Adams and the WASPs opened up interior Alaska to tourists as never before; the money was in nature photographs, not the extraction industries.
Nobody before or since Adams has ever taken such luminous photographs of America’s treasured landscapes. His 1947 composition Moon and Mount McKinley has adorned numerous calendars and greeting cards. There is no such thing as a “dated” photograph of Alaska by Adams—his images are all flawless and eternal. It’s as if Adams had made himself part of the vast Denali wilderness. If you stayed in a cabin at Camp Denali long enough, you became part of the experience of the place. A new postwar generation was seeking to get away from the suburban doldrums and to discover America’s national parks. “You must be able to touch the living rock, drink the pure water, scan the great vistas, sleep under the stars, and