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snow-fed for part of the year, but then, about the time of the Douglases’ arrival, the waterways of summer would be fed either by springs or by rain runoff. The largest river in the Brooks Range—the Colville—was far to the northwest of the Last Lake camp. The Sheenjek was a south-side river that drained south into the mighty Yukon River. It was lined with black spruce, birch, and alder brush (as thick as bamboo). When Douglas caught grayling along the Sheenjek, he’d cook them at night with alder wood, perfect for smoking fish. “These grayling, which run up to three pounds or more, are not prospering,” he wrote. “Their small heads and broad-beamed bodies make them seem a bit awkward compared to our streamlined rainbows. But whatever they lack in grace they make up for in food. Their flesh is white and their thick steaks cook up into a sweeter and more delicious dish than any trout I have sampled.”21

Douglas understood that there was a thread that began with Theodore Roosevelt and ran to Charles Sheldon and the Muries in Alaska. Saving the Brooks Range and the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea aroused a kind of tribal passion in serious outdoors enthusiasts. They believed that this part of Alaska was the biological heart of North America. Although George L. Collins liked to use the term recreation, the word was inadequate to describe the hardiness and intensity of the Sheenjek expedition. All day long, well into the evening, the members kept busy identifying birds and wildflowers. Each party member believed deeply that Arctic Alaska belonged to the wildlife. Philosophically, the members were all aligned with the Gwich’in elders. As the Muries and the others set up base camps and collected bones and antlers among the caribou calves, the Arctic made them feel like little cogs in the huge machine of the modern world. The humbling effect of feeling small helped to develop character. Forget the judge’s black robe: Douglas was nothing more than a grain of sand or a falling leaf.

There is no transcript of the conversations that took place between Justice Douglas and the Muries when they camped together in the Arctic Range. But since everybody in the Sheenjek River party considered himself or herself a New Deal liberal, any banter about President Eisenhower couldn’t have been complimentary. After all, Eisenhower had meant it when he said on the campaign trail in 1952 that he planned to restore the Republican Party’s land policy in the West to help business. As president he had cleaned house, removing New Deal conservationists from the Department of the Interior. Without much concern about pension plans, he retired longtime employees of the National Park Service early. Friends of “big oil” and “big timber” were brought into the Forest Service. The attitude at both Interior and Agriculture favored leasing public lands. But new U.S. senators—like Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota—stepped into the picture, promising to give new lands protected status. Congressmen were defending wild places against an administration bent on helping the extraction industries in the West. Crunching across the tundra, putting on rubber boots to cross creeks, Douglas embodied the ethos of A Sand County Almanac. Getting an Arctic tan—neck-up, elbows-down—Douglas would talk, while hiking, about “man’s responsibility to the earth.”22 At least, the Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs—influenced by Bob Marshall’s Alaska Wilderness—urged Congress to create a “National Wilderness Preservation System.”23

Justice Douglas and the Muries were particularly disturbed that Douglas McKay, a Chevrolet dealer from Oregon, had been confirmed as secretary of the interior. He was called “Giveaway McKay.” In Alaska alone he had opened up the Tongass, the Chugach, and even TR’s federal bird reservations to oil and gas leasing. The Arctic, to McKay, was worthless except as an oil field. McKay had learned to be genial from selling Chevys to customers; but his undersecretary, Ralph Tudor, was ruthless and enamored of Joe McCarthy—a narrow-minded conservative who wanted to purge the