The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [215]
The Crislers were smart to focus on Arctic wildlife. For unlike redwoods or oaks, waterlogged muskeg depressions, filled with mats of decayed vegetation and moss, hadn’t yet found defenders. While botanists might marvel about large areas of Arctic ground displaying arrays of geometric shapes called ice wedge polygons, it wasn’t the sort of ecosystem that garden clubs held raffles to help protect. While a few photographers snapped close-ups of birdlife along the Beaufort Sea, aerial shots of the Arctic showed that endless cycles of freezing and thawing had caused the ground to crack in patterns similar to dried mud. Clearly, in the “big cold” decomposition had outraced accumulation. While caribou roamed the valleys and arctic grayling overwintered in deep pools, it was the stillness that was the real natural attraction. North of the Yukon River was like Washington and Oregon combined, without many human footprints. And there were a lot of thermals in the ever-changing sky.
The bond that kept all the Arctic Alaskan activists together was Olaus Murie—and he was very sick. In 1954 he was diagnosed with miliary tuberculosis (the disease his brother Martin had died of in 1922). Olaus headed to National Jewish Hospital in Denver—the best hospital in America for respiratory illnesses. For fifteen months he underwent experimental antibiotic treatment, determined to breathe without tubes. Never financially well off, constantly living hand-to-mouth, Mardy found employment as the secretary of the Denver office of the Izaak Walton League.31
All the pharmaceuticals in the world didn’t offer the curative power of fresh air. Once the Muries returned to Moose, Wyoming, they reconnected with friends in The Wilderness Society for a conference at Rainy Lake, Minnesota. They became preoccupied with protecting Arctic Alaska. Coughing constantly, clearing his throat of phlegm, Olaus believed that he had one great act left in him and that, with death knocking on his door, cautious activism no longer made sense. He also started looking for young recruits. The Muries now were going to help Herb and Lois Crisler get their “white wilderness” preservationist message to college students. Furthermore, the Muries would help organize expeditions to Arctic Alaska with employees of the Department of the Interior. Olaus believed that if U.S. politicians actually spent a week in Arctic Alaska in late summer, when the blueberries were ripe and the fireweed was blooming, camped along a gravel bar or in a field of wildflowers, they would never dream of opening up the Brooks Range or coastal plain along the Beaufort Sea for development by the extraction industries. The Muries’ ideals about the wilderness were now being translated into direct action as never before. And the Muries had the spirit of Aldo Leopold to bolster them.
Chapter Eighteen - The Sheenjek Expedition of 1956
I
Throughout the late 1950s, the Muries were lobbying intensely on behalf of the Arctic Refuge. When they approached Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the New York Zoological Society and Conservation Fund, about helping them organize an expedition to the Sheenjek River in 1956, he funded it at once. Ever since Theodore Roosevelt had helped found the New York Zoological Society in 1895 it had probably worked harder and more thoughtfully than any other organization on protecting North American big game. In Arctic Alaska the great caribou herds were threatened, so Osborn was more than ready to finance the expedition. If time allowed, Osborn wanted to come along and explore the limestone peaks and narrow side valleys along the Sheenjek. In addition to the New York Zoological Society and Conservation Fund, the Arctic expedition was sponsored in collaboration with The Wilderness Society and the University of Alaska–Fairbanks.1
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