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By Root 3092 0

(Numenius phaeopus), surfbird, least sandpiper (Calidris minutilla), Baird’s sandpiper (Calidris bairdii), Wilson’s snipe (Gallinago delicata), and red-necked phalarope (Phalaropus lobatus)? It wasn’t enough for Mardy and Olaus Murie merely to count caribou for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Arctic Alaska. They would have to fight to save the Arctic Range along the Beaufort Sea, as Bob Marshall had done with the Gates of the Arctic and as Leopold had done in the Gila wilderness. They needed to lobby the Department of the Interior not to build roads in the Arctic, because changes in drainage patterns adversely affected habitats.3

What Leopold most admired about Mardy Murie was her confidence that someday U.S. citizens would stand up and say no to the obsession of the “harassed world” with industrialization. While other conservationists grew discouraged by toxic smokestacks and coal-burning power plants, Murie continued to simply marvel at the unmarked Arctic, where the aurora borealis beamed forth hope.4 Her touchstone place was the 200-mile Sheenjek River, which flowed south to the Porcupine River from the highest peaks of the eastern Brooks Range, joining the Porcupine just northeast of Fort Yukon, Alaska. Anybody rafting down the smooth Sheenjek—which had only a few Class II rapids—had a good chance of seeing some of the 123,000-strong Porcupine caribou herd, because this herd often partly wintered in the Sheenjek valley. (The largest caribou herd was the 500,000-strong Western Arctic group, which ranged the National Petroleum Reserve.) Cradled by the Davidson Mountains, the Sheenjek was also the water’s edge for Dall sheep, grizzlies, moose, and beavers.

Among Olaus and Mardy Murie’s close friends, only Starker Leopold (Aldo Leopold’s son, a professor of zoology at the University of California), Lowell Sumner, and George Collins knew the Sheenjek River well. The Muries realized that Mardy herself would have to spread the word about it, as John Muir and Ansel Adams had done for Glacier Bay. Certainly, Alaska needed farms, paved highways, modern industries, and mineral development—but the wilderness that made the territory unique should also be protected. The Muries hoped that saving a vast portion of the Arctic along the Canadian border could be promoted by national conservation groups (the Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society, Audubon Society, Izaak Walton League, etc.) and by a new local nonprofit, the Alaska Conservation Society. The Muries felt that the Glacier Bay area was being overrun with tourists on cruise ships (which Mardy called “floating nursing homes”). The Arctic needed to be preserved for the Gwich’in people and for true “Leopoldian” outdoors types. “Thoughtful people both in and out of Alaska were concerned, for the Age of the Bulldozer had arrived,” Murie wrote in Two in the Far North. “Scientists like Starker Leopold, Lowell Sumner, F. Fraser Darling, and George Collins, who had recently traveled in Arctic Alaska, began writing and talking to Olaus.”5

II

Collins—taking advantage of the momentum created by the publication of Darling and Leopold’s Wildlife in Alaska—thought about how best to protect the Arctic from despoliation. His foot-numbing explorations in the region (frostbite was in fact a constant risk) weren’t holidays on the tundra, but despite the hardships he amassed reams of biological data for the Department of the Interior. Ideally, Collins concluded, the Gates of the Arctic area would become a national park. But the Arctic Range along the Canadian border—particularly the scenic Sheenjek River—should be designated a roadless wilderness where not even tourism would be promoted. There would be no gateway villages to the Arctic Refuge—nothing like Gatlinburg or Jackson Hole. The Wilderness Society’s concept of “roadlessness” would be established in Arctic Alaska. Otherwise, tracked vehicles would wreak havoc on the tundra.6 “While we were out in camp with Leopold and Darling, we had many discussions about this park idea,” Collins wrote to the Arctic archaeologist Louis Giddings.