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By Root 3235 0

Muries were hoping that 8.9 million acres in the northeastern corner of Alaska would be declared the Arctic National Wildlife Range. (The name was changed to Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 1980. Within the U.S. Department of the Interior it was known as the Arctic NWR.) To The Wilderness Society, this huge range represented the only “undisturbed portion of the Arctic” that was “biologically self-sufficient.” When talking to Osborn and others, Olaus would rattle off all the mammals—grizzly, black, and polar bears; caribou; Dall sheep; moose; wolverines; and other fur-bearing creatures—that lived on the plain of the Beaufort Sea. With the Naval Petroleum Reserve occupying 23 million acres along the Arctic Ocean—to be developed as an oil field owned by the U.S. government—it seemed only fair for the Eisenhower administration to establish the Arctic Refuge. There, scientists could study an “undisturbed natural arctic environment” and outdoorsmen could hunt and fish.2

What Theodore Roosevelt had done for the Great Plains bison in South Dakota, Oklahoma, and Montana Murie was hoping to do with the caribou of the Brooks Range. Starting in 1920, he would work with the Biological Survey to make this happen. There were the Porcupine herd, whose calving ground was the coastal plain of what would become the Arctic NWR; the Western Arctic herd, a 500,000-head herd in what would become the National Petroleum Reserve (in an area known as the Utukok uplands), grazing atop 2 trillion tons of coal (9 percent of the world’s supply); and the Central Arctic herd of 30,000 to 60,000, which roamed between the Colville and Canning rivers. Murie, it seemed, had a vision of the Great Caribou Commons remaining intact along the Brooks Range so that future generations could experience its primordial grandeur.

The Muries had chosen well in making the Sheenjek River their symbol of Arctic Alaska. There were hundreds of valleys just as beautiful, but the Sheenjek had Last Lake—a good place for pontoon planes to land—and was among the last great wilderness areas in America. Because of the perpetual summer sun, a twelve-hour hike was possible, through some of the most impressive big country anywhere. Olaus told Osborn that their trip would be a “sample adventure,” a weeklong hike to see snowcapped mountains, blue lakes, and white spruces. Clucking ptarmigan, hungry bears, and gray wolves would be moving conspicuously through the landscape. Mardy believed that any decent person who spent a week on the Sheenjek during the summer months would be compelled to ask Congress to create a national park or ask President Eisenhower to sign an executive order offering permanent protection. “I sit here on this soft mossy slope above camp, writing. The writing has been very erratic because of those who live here,” Mardy wrote in her Sheenjek River diary on June 3, 1956. “I have watched a band of fifty caribou feeding back and forth on a flat a quarter mile away; ptarmigan soaring and cluck-clucking and giving their ratchety call, all about tree sparrows so close and unafraid; cliff swallows hurrying by; Wilson snipe and yellowlegs calling, grey-cheeked thrushes singing.”3

The Sheenjek expedition consisted of Mardy and Olaus Murie, Dr. Brina Kessel (an ornithologist at the University of Alaska), George Schaller (a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison), and H. Robert Krear (a postgraduate student at the University of Colorado). All the members agreed that banning mining or drilling in the Arctic Range was of the “utmost importance.”4 According to Schaller, the Sheenjek River was symbolic of everything The Wilderness Society stood for: good science, exploration, and conservation. “I’ve traveled in many parts of the world,” he said, “in the most remote wilderness, and I don’t think people in the United States realize what treasure they have, because there is very little remote wilderness left in the world.”5

The weather was unpredictable along the Sheenjek River during the short summer. When the Muries led the expedition in June, one day the temperature