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By Root 3186 0

that Olaus and Mardy Murie needed local help with their campaign for the Arctic NWR, a group of activists in Fairbanks began a policy assault that continued throughout 1960—and worked. The goal of the ACS was to marshal local opinion for the Arctic NWR and thereby help Secretary of the Interior Seaton get the job done in Washington, D.C. The driving forces were Celia Hunter and Ginny Wood, the women who had been WASP pilots during World War II and who were now committed to what would come to be called ecotourism. If Costa Rica could attract tourists to its tropical rain forests, then, logically, Alaska could promote temperate rain forests. Spiritual reward, however, not profit from tourism, was the primary motivation for creating the ACS.

To Wood and Hunter, the Arctic was unlike any other place they had flown over in Alaska. The light, the sedge, and even the soil were different. When Hunter flew from Fairbanks to Kotzebue in late August and early September, the flaming yellow birch and aspen combined with reddish brown meadows and blue waterways to form a patchwork of dramatically mixed Arctic habitats. She would see hawks circling overhead, identifiable by the multibanded tail with a broad, blackish subterminal stripe. Ice fog would roll in for hours, causing strand bands.

The harsh country outside Fairbanks had always attracted women of fortitude, with an appreciative eye for the land’s expansiveness and courage enough to heed its summons, in sync with the power of the Alaskan wilderness. Both Wood and Hunter were part of this frontier tradition. On clear days, toiling at her desk in Fairbanks during the first months of 1960, Wood could see the distant mountains outside her kitchen window, through the towering birches. Since World War II, she had flown all over that range; she knew every peak like the palm of her hand. She had landed on runways and gravel bars. Along the way she had made a lot of friends in the North Slope.

The Alaska of the pioneer days was always part of Wood and Hunter’s consciousness—the Klondike gold rush, aviation in the 1920s, Mount McKinley and Gates of the Arctic, the salmon runs of Bristol Bay, and, stretched out north of Fairbanks, beyond the Arctic Divide, the Brooks Range, which Robert Marshall had written about in Alaskan Wilderness. Having organized tours from Camp Denali from 1954 to 1959, Hunter and Wood were determined to help create the Arctic NWR before President Eisenhower left the White House. Closing Denali Lodge for the winter season from October to May, Hunter and Wood, taking advantage of their freedom during the off-season, started to organize from Fairbanks on behalf of their beloved Arctic Range. Their headquarters was a birch log home in the Dogpatch area of Fairbanks (not far from the university), and the ACS was from the beginning a typical small, personal nonprofit organization. Aspens surrounded the handsome cabin; at their Dogpatch headquarters, Hunter and Wood felt at one with nature. An owl nesting box was hung in a nearby tree, to attract wisdom.

Because Camp Denali was a seasonal business, taking people to see Wonder Lake only from April to November, Hunter relocated the office mimeograph machine to Dogpatch, and installed it on the cabin’s second floor. At that time, the low-cost mimeograph, which worked by squirting ink through a stencil onto paper, was a common way to disseminate gossip and news. Ginny Wood, in fact, lived at the Dogpatch headquarters with her husband; she was always on call. Just one house over, down the dirt road, resided Celia Hunter. Both women were beloved in Fairbanks. Ginny emerged as the dauntless workhorse of the ACS, forming alliances and recruiting an impressive mélange of volunteers, networking all over the state to knit the conservation community together so that the Eisenhower administration would be forced to take the Arctic NWR seriously. Hunting guides, fishing charters, glacier tours, kayak retailers, outdoor gear shops, organic food stores—all joined the cause of the Arctic NWR because it promoted wild Alaska, the business