transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] A trip through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the crown jewel of America's wildlife preserves, reveals a stunning primeval world under constant threat of becoming a national sacrifice. I'm Dan Flores, and this is The American West. Where the Primeval West abides. What wakes me is a sound I've never heard. Or to be truer to the actual experience, two sounds to which my memory banks cannot assign cause. One is a soft, gentle sort of chuffing. Coming awake to the slanting light out the tent door, I register this one first, an auditory accompaniment to the angled light, which lands in my foggy consciousness as a kind of language I cannot translate. The other sound is almost as delicate, but more percussive. It appears to reach from the far away to the nearby, a tinkling with a thousand source points. It's June the 22nd, the day after summer solstice 2019, and with my wife Sarah and eight of our friends, we're waking in what could well be primeval America. We're in Alaska above the Arctic Circle at nearly 70 degrees north latitude, and on summer solstice that far up the curve of planet Earth, we're experiencing a new cosmic reality. There's a powerful sense of being slightly off the apex of a gigantic sphere, a sphere that's spinning underneath a light source that never switches off. No matter how late you go to bed or how early you wake up, the light source is there, throwing the same fingers of dawn, sunlight and shadowing throughout the day and night. To be geographically specific, from our put-in high up in the Brooks Range, we've now spent nine days descending the Hula Hula River. The Hula Hula is named by, or for, an Hawaiian Islander who was either on a whaling ship or a ship pursuing wealth and furs here two centuries ago. Nine days from this smallish stream's headwaters, we're now out of the mountains and in the vast coastal plain of America's wildlife crown jewel, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And we've been living with these oblique light angles the whole trip. But this far away nearby tinkling sound and its chuff, chuff, chuff accompaniment are new. Both those sounds, it turns out, are emanating from thousands upon thousands of caribou, who have been migrating out of mountains filled with denning wolves to gather in the relative safety of the Arctic Plain, where they're coming to drop their calves. Herd after herd is passing by within a hundred feet of our camp this morning, conversing in a murmur that audibly rises above the flow of the nearby hula hula. That's the chuffing I'm hearing. It's quiet caribou road trip conversation. Pulling the tent fabric aside to hear better, my first guess is that the tinkling is the clicking of caribou hooves passing through the stiff 8-inch high willows blanketing the riverside tundra. But the more acutely I listen, well, what it actually sounds like is an almost deliberate popping in their leg joints as they walk past. The truth is, we've been paddling downriver among caribou herds for days now, but not in these numbers. Now, everywhere we look, they're the only upright things in an otherwise horizontal world. Tan and white bodies rocking along in a kind of slow motion parade. They seem aimed towards an indistinct assortment of white blocks miles out that we've been seeing for the past couple of days, and I'm now starting to suspect are icebergs in the Arctic Ocean elevated by mirage above the flatness of the plain. But the caribou pulled me away from that thought. On the opposite river bank, only yards away, herd males with antlers and faces black as squid ink, clack over the rocks. There are pregnant cows also with antlers and posses of adolescents. We've already seen wolves, most of them black, along with grizzly bears and doll sheep, but the real wildlife miracle here is in the vast numbers of caribou. I noticed that some herds with brand-new calves, the little guys jetting and pogoing across the tundra, have finally abandoned their relentless march northward from the mountains. They've arrived. Ten days earlier, in Arctic Village on the other side of the Brooks Range, Gwich'in tribal elder Sarah James had told us that the porcupine caribou herd is 300,000 strong these days. Seventy-five-year-old Sarah, with her long, silver-streaked hair, was funny and eloquent and committed. She travels the world fighting to keep oil drilling out of the refuge, a looming threat in 2019 and an even more frightening possibility in 2026. Sarah's got the bonafides for that kind of activism. That tribal name means people of the caribou. Sarah and her people are the modern American equivalent of the Bison Indians of the 19th century and earlier. The caribou are in our hearts, and we are in theirs, she told us. Now, standing by my tent, surrounded by thousands of caribou moving slowly through a vast grassy landscape in a scene reminiscent of the 19th century Great Plains or maybe East Africa, I'm as gobsmacked as I've ever been in my life. For the first time, I'm experiencing a version of original America, the continent humanized first marveled over more than 20,000 years ago. This must be what it was like to experience bison herds to the horizon, her passenger pigeons streaming overhead and daylong flights that blocked out the sun. Now a quarter of the way through the 21st century, what's required for a primal experience of the natural planet is being in one of Africa's grand game parks and parts of the Amazon are in some wildly remote piece of North America like this Arctic plain up at the roof of the world. In the United States of our present century, this wild coastal plain in sight of Arctic waters is one of the last continental places to preserve a tantalizing echo of wild America as it waited across the millennia for its destiny to play out. Here are my firsthand experiences of this place as kept in my daily journal. June 15, 2019, Arctic Village, Alaska. Sarah James, who travels the world advocating for the Arctic Wildlife Refuge and the Native Way of Life, rides up on her Honda four-wheeler to meet us on the airport tarmac where our group has just de-planned. There are 10 of us lower 48ers. Our two guides who do this float trip repeatedly when Brooks Range snowmelt raises waters in the rivers high enough to do it are from Arizona and Colorado. With one exception, the remaining eight of us are from Santa Fe, New Mexico, most of us longtime friends, several of us writers. Sarah, who is addressing us from the seat of her Honda, looks to be 15 years younger than her actual age, and she is naturally easygoing and personable. As she starts to talk, I noticed with some curiosity that of her fellow villagers, I can see everyone is also moving about the airstrip and the village streets on Four Wheelers. As we blink in the bright high-latitude sunlight and swat at the occasional mosquito, Sarah is telling us about her people's situation. I jot down a few notes. Minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit used to be our normal winters here, she's telling us, but this last winter, minus 40 was the coldest it got, although the snow was really deep. Their village, whose name in their language translates to Village with High Banks, was founded on this spot because of the nearby tree line and the caribou migrations, she says. They follow the caribou migrations from towers they've built around their country, which stretches from the highest place in the Brooks Range to as far as we can see, she adds. The caribou migrations are changing, but they still come to this valley and to old crow flats, places with lots of lakes and food sources. We call our herd the porcupine caribou, and we've always hunted them. We cease to hunt in June when the new embryos form in them and wait until the training of the calves is finished before we resume, she tells us. At one point, the porcupine herd dropped to as low as 120,000, but now it's almost back to its normal size of 300,000. There are plenty of predators other than us, she says, a great many wolves and also plenty of grizzlies. And there are lynx and wolverines too, everything living to some extent on the caribou presence. While native people have hunted the refuge long before its official designation, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, dates to 1960, when the Eisenhower administration set aside 8.9 million acres of the Brooks Range and the coastal plain as the Arctic National Wildlife Range. When the epic Alaska Lands Bill passed in 1980, the Carter administration upgraded the range to a full refuge, expanded to a whopping 19.6 million acres, four times the size of Yellowstone National Park. It overnight became the crown jeweled wildlife preserve of the entire 75-year-old system, a true Yellowstone of America's wildlife refuges. Ecologist Olaus Murie and his wife Marty were famous early advocates for Anwar's creation and for wilderness designation of nearly 40% of it. But the Alaska Lands Bill left the one and a half million acre coastal plain, the so-called 10-02, open to potential oil and gas exploration. That opening and the threat it's posed to wildlife, to the caribou and to the Gwich'in way of life is what's motivated Sarah's activism. I think of myself as an educator protecting my way of life, not as an activist, she insists to us. Recycle, reuse and refuse is my motto. I first went to the Plains Indian people because of their history with Buffalo to get resolutions to support us in stopping oil and gas in Anwar, she tells us. The National Congress of American Indians has supported the protection of Anwar with a standing resolution. But other native people surrounding the refuge, the Koyukon, the Crees and the people of Cactovic Village in the Beaufort Sea have supported drilling and development. Coastal plain people are in tougher conditions, she says. Still, we all breathe the same air. We need to help one another. The Republican Congress and Trump administration is really hard, but if we keep working on our goal for seven generations, we'll finally win. We can educate the world in a good way, and they'll get it. June 16, 2019. It's a stunning morning at our first camp on the Hula Hula. We arrived here by bush plane around noon yesterday, after what well may be the grandest plane ride of my life, from Arctic Village North through the serrated peaks and defiles of the Brooks Range, flying through valleys with knife edge peaks looming far above us on a perfect blue sky day. No wonder Olaus and Marty Murry, Sigurd Olsen and William O. Douglas were so bewitched by this country. As for me, it's entirely revising my conception of wild America. The view of our river, the Hula Hula from the air, a silver thread bisecting an immense mountain valley carpeted in tundra was as alluring a scene as I've ever witnessed. Looking down on it, the thought repeatedly formed my mind, holy shit, we get to travel down that, through this? A cold wind blowing from the north of Arctic sea ice, last night belied the bright welcoming sunshine of our arrival in the afternoon. But today is both sunny and quiet. Basically, it's a perfect day for a river trip into the wild unknown. This is our first day of travel on the river, so we got the bare talk from our guides last night with accounts of blonde grizzlies that know nothing of humans and especially of polar bears that see you and come knocking on the door. Polar bears mean business and these days they come inland. We're just a couple of days away from where other Anwar travelers have had exciting experiences with polar bears. From this put-in camp near the Bush Plain landing strip, which is little more than a level couple of hundred yards of river cobbles cleared of willows, we've so far seen a red fox trotting along the opposite cut bank from us and eight, nine, doll sheep on the green tundra slopes of the surrounding mountains. From our guides, Arizona and Krista Sadler, with whom I've rafted the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, and Kevin Thursey McDermott, a burly and likeable 50-something West Slope Coloradan, we're hearing accounts of caribou herds, herds in the thousands, the many thousands, down river. Later on June 16th, in Evening Camp, the river float commenced today, not just with doll sheep, but also a wolf pack on the slopes above camp as we were preparing to set off. The sheep had been in bunches of 10 to 15. One of the flocks was above us as we launched our rafts. Another was near us at noon. A group of backpackers who were also dropped off yesterday and camp nearby, though, came to our tents before we shoved off this morning with a one word announcement, wolf. It pulled up everyone in camp. I got about 10 seconds of glass time of a black wolf maybe half a mile away through my binoculars, then nothing. But following a lapse of 20 minutes, again came the cry, wolf, and this time we picked up four. This pack included a black wolf that traveled second in line behind a lead brown animal. A silver gray wolf, hard to pick out against the gray talus slopes, moved in and out of the line, occupying various positions, but sometimes going its own way. Another brown wolf trotted at the rear, usually some distance behind. The group appeared to be moving, stalking would not accurately express their actions, closer and closer to a grazing flock of white doll sheep, but always a hundred yards or so below them, prompting the sheep to move up mountain, always maintaining the same distance from the wolves. This pack howled several times, a faint peeling of canine expressiveness. While it was not my situation, having lived in Montana during and after wolf recovery there, several of our group had never in their lives seen wolves nor heard real wolves howl in the wild. Sadly, that's the case for most modern Americans on a continent where wolves were once the commonest of keystone predators, present here for more than five million years. That's how anomalous the last hundred years of wolf absence has been. This is a paddle trip down the Hula Hula. We're traveling the country in two rafts, a guide manning the rudders of each, with four of us providing the paddle power for each raft. The river is shallow, rarely deeper than three feet, and fast with snowmelt, with numerous braided channels. Looking down at the cobbles in its bed as we slip through its waters, the sight is of a shimmering transparency. But seen from the banks, the Hula Hula's waters take on a mesmerizing green turquoise hue. From water's edge to the crest of the Brooks Range peaks surrounding us, we're above timberline. The country that rolls up the slopes is pure tundra. This evening, we're in a fine camp among low willows along the West Bank. Caribou tracks in the mud are in some profusion, only feet from Sarah's and my tent. But we've not actually seen a caribou, at least not yet. I should add that evening is pretty much an artificial construction here above the Arctic Circle a week from summer solstice. The sun circumnavigates our sky at a kind of inclined angle, highest at noon when the sun is due south, lowest at midnight when it's due north, but it never sets. So this is a trip that's actually taking place over a nearly 300-hour-long single day. At least we can tell whether it's morning or afternoon, by which side of this mountain valley the sun is in. Mornings, it skims the peaks on the east side of the valley. Afternoons, it dodges in and out of the mountains that confine the hula hula to our west. June 17, 2019. We're about to leave this caribou camp, which we've named such because as we slept, caribou herds began to migrate past us. It didn't take long to get among the caribou. And just now, a single black wolf is on the slope above the path the herds have been taking. There was considerable rain in the night, and this morning clouds top all the mountains around us. The days so far have been in the 70s, but without the sun, it's cold enough to put on our Healy Hansen wetsuits today, over four or five layers of smart wool and our everyday footwear, mid-calf rubber boots. Thirsty tells us this morning that the wolves den in these mountains, which is why the caribou migrate out to the coastal plain to drop their calves. Wolf dens are commonly on high overlooks, so the wolves can spot caribou below. He says he's seen a pack stampede of herd over a cut bank in a move very similar to a bison jump. He also told us that in summer, musk ox descend to the edges of the rivers to sleep and cool off in the shade of the big chunks of permafrost we see everywhere sluying off the cut banks in the summer warmth. Today is a cold gray day with a north wind blowing steadily up the river and in our face this feels like Alaska in the Brooks Range up near the Continental Divide. Nothing for it but to paddle and look forward to camp and warm sleeping bags. June the 18th. It's after 7 p.m. of an absolutely gorgeous day in the foothills of the Brooks Range and we're just down from 7 hours of hiking up to a ridge line high above the green valley of the Hula Hula. Since we've been making good time, this was a layover day and we got to watch caribou herds heading north through the valley during much of the morning. We made this camp late yesterday after many miles descending the river and are now in sight of the final canyon and the only cataract rapids on the Hula Hula, which will run tomorrow. A successful run through those rapids will take us out of the mountains and onto the coastal plain. Yesterday was a big descent of many hours of paddling under overcast skies and a cold wind. Aaron, our only Californian, and at 25, the youngest member of our party, got tossed from our raft in a boulder garden rapid late in the day. It required nearly two hours after that mishap to find a suitable camp for the evening, but Aaron was an absolute trooper about staying wet for so long. Yesterday was also a two wolf day, both wolves black and solitary. The second, a strapping big animal that ran effortlessly across the hummocky tundra before spotting us and squaring up three to four times to look directly at us from only a couple of hundred yards away. We've not seen a bear yet, but watching caribou herds cross this open country produces an emotion that's difficult to put into words. Timeless keeps coming to mind, but you shudder a little bit at that one. As gray and cold as yesterday was, today has been a sunny blank blue sky delight. The clouds still wrapped the peaks as we rose and had coffee, but by the time breakfast was done, the mist had lifted and arctic sunlight flooded the mountains. June 20th. It's 10 in the evening in the arctic wilderness, and Sarah and I are celebrating our fifth anniversary with tequila and uncontrolled substances and now Earl Grey tea too hot to drink almost. The past two days have unspooled in a country of such unblemished natural qualities that I'm realizing I've lived a kind of emasculated existence for much of my life. Primeval America is what this is. We've so far seen one native hunting camp, three or four bush planes arcing overhead, and the occasional jet flying from JFK to Tokyo. Otherwise, we're traveling through the world of our hominin origins, or at least one hell of an approximation of it. Today's our third straight day of gorgeous sunshine, which means we ran the canyon and its rapids in beautiful bright light yesterday. The rapids, including the Hula Hoop rapid, we slipped through in good morning high water. Other than sticking our raft on a boulder, we had no incidents and took a long lunch on a sunny flowery hilltop where the Brooks Range opened suddenly into low green foothills speckled with caribou antler sheds. That setting once we were underway after lunch was the scene of our most exciting wildlife experience yet. I was in the front of our lead raft, so got the first glimpse of a bulky furred form rolling along up the right bank of the river. It was a familiar hump shape, a grizzly, which with a couple of bounds was out of sight. As we paddled a riverbed towards where it disappeared, the sound of our voices must have bounced off the low cut bank where the bear had headed. The result was that our raft was in the direct line of fire when the grizzly came galloping through the willows to water's edge straight for us. It looked for all the world like a charge, except I could tell the bear had not really seen us. Just as bear paws hit the river's edge, Thirsty muttered something about not wanting to share a river with a bear and loosed a piercing whistle. The small black eyes in the grizzly's lovely symmetrical face suddenly locked on to us. There was a split second, what the fuck, on his face. Then a studied almost slow turn to his right, like a nonchalant, damn it, I think I may have left the burner on back home. Then like a quarter horse under quirk, he was boundering through the willows at escape velocity, directly away from us. It was a supreme sensory moment. We had been privileged to see a gorgeous grizzly bear at a distance of maybe 35 feet. We camped yesterday and still are today at a spot below Kengat Hill, which we climbed today through increasingly larger caribou herds, all steadily pulled northward as if by some throbbing magnet. From here, you could see the next river valley to the west, the valley of the Saddle Roachit Mountains, and behind us, the Hula Hula's exit through its canyon out of the Brooks Range. This afternoon, another grizzly grazed past our camp barely a hundred yards away. Wolf tracks are on the beach behind me as I scribble this. June 21st, summer solstice in the High Arctic. We're now in sight of the Arctic Ocean from a camp where the Hula Hula's banks have begun to ice up. Far out on the coastal plain of Anwar, far into the famous 10-02, the part of the refuge that's long been a target of drill baby drill politicians. And to be fair of some of the local natives and Alaskans who see money as an ultimate value. Looking across this vast tundra, a plain that's bursting with the life of primeval America, the middle picture of drill baby drill here is akin to imagining the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone Park festooned with oil derricks, tank batteries, pumping units and litter line two tracks. Try to hold that image in your mind. See if it doesn't fly to escape screaming. We made big miles, last foothills to pass the ice today. We're way ahead of schedule thanks to great weather that's warm enough to keep snowmelt surging in the river. And glory be despite temperatures in the 60s and 70s, the mosquito hatch has not yet developed. Two big moments today. The first was pulling over for lunch and mounting the cut bank to find the biggest single caribou herd yet on the opposite bank, something around 600 of them. We're also in muskox and polar bear country now, although we've seen neither. There's something very powerful, though, about watching big herds of ungulates in open country. If our genes preserve memories, this has to be a visual trigger to that. This is the kind of world we human beings evolved in and where we blinked into consciousness, then lived surrounded by big animals and big herds for 40,000 generations of our existence. No wonder it's so moving on such a grandly sensuous level. The other wow piece of the day was rafting through the ice, a section of the river where ice as thick as 10 feet makes up at least one bank for a mile or more. We stopped and goofed around on blue dripping ice packs for half an hour in sunny t-shirt temperatures. June 22nd. Only three days of river and ocean travel are left to take us to the island airstrip that will be our takeout, and much of that will involve portaging to an adjacent river to get a straight shot at the island that will then wade to a mile or so out across the Beaufort Sea. Weather continues near perfect, 61 degrees on the high tundra just now. Several of us stayed up till midnight last night to watch the sun circle the horizon and to dance its progress on summer solstice. Caribou herds are now in sight constantly, with a vast herd migrating past camp this morning, an entirely Africa kind of scene. The Brooks Range where we started this journey is still in view, although a little smoke shrouded for the past three days. We've now been eight days without seeing any humans except ourselves. June 23rd, within sight of the ocean, this morning we finally made it to the Caribou's final destination, their calving grounds. And now there are little ones scampering wildly, unjoyously across the tundra and nearby snow banks. Caribou herds presently occupy 90 degrees of our views south of the river. June 24th, this afternoon, we're in a camp amongst sand dunes a mile from the ocean, having left the hula hula after portaging our rafts and gear across about a quarter mile of tundra to this camp. It was a day of paddling, a last stretch of a widely braided, cobble-filled hula hula with Caribou perpetually in sight. On a midnight hike last night, some of us saw what we estimated was 10,000 Caribou from one overlook. Now we'll do two nights here while we portage all our gear and rafts over to the Opilic River just east of us for a straight shot at the island and its bush plane landing strip. We saw our third grizzly yesterday evening, a bear that was probably three-quarters of a mile away, but in the open plain was clearly visible to the naked eye as a dark lump nosing through the tundra. Through our glasses, this bear was a glossy blonde behemoth. Turning sideways in the low sun, its fur rolled and glistened with shades of chestnut and a silvery yellow. It was hard to stop watching. With a weather front hitting, it's now down to 45 degrees inside the tent, which is rattling in the wind like laundry on a clothesline. June 25th, 2019. Tonight, our final camp is situated on the shore of the Beaufort Sea. Walls and chunks of white ice inhabited by harbor seals are in view. It's a thing you never think you'll see. The day was another form of adventurous ordeal. We'd been captured in the tents for 24 hours, while a freeze held up water from flowing down the Oak Pillock. Its final two miles became a wide mud maze that required portaging our raft, while a barefoot crista dragged the other raft through the mud with a rope line. It was a cold, hardworking day, but tomorrow we exit the river and wade across to the island, a long strip of sand and ice out in front of us. We saw no caribou today, but there were long-tailed jaegers and huge and noisy trumpeter swans constantly overhead. This was the final camp of our 12-day passage through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and on this our last night, our guide Thirsty stood and made an unexpected, impassioned speech. Thirsty's granddad was a hard rock miner in Colorado. He's married to Darla, his high school sweetheart. His education ended with high school, but simply and directly, he begged us to do whatever was in our powers to save this place from despoilation. Long before we arrived on the scene, the ages had been at work on it, he said. Nothing we could do here would improve it. A present day coda. In October 2025, as part of his American Energy Dominance agenda, President Trump proclaimed that he would reinstate seven oil leases owned by the state of Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and was now taking bids for future drilling contracts in the refuge's coastal plain. Because of fear of public backlash, oil companies have so far been uneasy about bidding on leases in Anwar. But Trump's Secretary of Interior, Doug Burgum, has proclaimed that with this announcement, Alaska is open for business. Petroleum geologists estimated that total reserves beneath Anwar might satisfy America's thirst for oil for perhaps one and a half to two years.

Speaker 2:
[35:47] So, Dan, in this script, you're tracking this float trip through essentially the North Slope Anwar. And it brought to mind a question that I wanted to ask you sort of about your scholarship more generally. You made your, you really made your name with the Buffalo article in the Journal of American History. And I was thinking about it. That's probably one of the few pieces I've read from you, where you don't have, you don't mix your historical analysis with some story from your own life about being on the landscape yourself. Yeah. And clearly it's, it's, that shapes your thinking as a historian. So I wonder if you can talk for a little bit about the relationship between your research and writing and your adventures, for lack of a better term, across the West.

Speaker 1:
[36:47] Yeah. Well, I think one of the reasons that I've done a good bit of, of writing where I appear usually fairly briefly, but at least some as a character in some of these stories, probably harkens back to the fact that I got my start as a magazine writer. And I did that. I wrote for magazines for six or seven years before I ever got a PhD, and ended up getting professorships and, and began writing for academic journals, like the Journal of American History or writing books for university presses. And so, I mean, one of the things that I think probably has, has made a podcast like this and scripts like this possible, is the fact that when I retired from the University of Montana 10 years ago, I kind of reverted back to that sort of writing and the books I've written since, American Serengeti, Coyote America, Wild New World, things like that, have all been sort of moving more back to the sort of writing that I did before I became an academic. I mean, I think with something like that Buffalo piece in the Journal of American History, you know, I mean, historians don't do that kind of writing very much. They tend to do more the social science kind of, the author stands back as a disinterested observer.

Speaker 2:
[38:30] Yeah, you're not, you don't really take a clinical approach to your subject.

Speaker 1:
[38:35] Yeah, yeah, so it's that kind of, so I mean, I think probably what I've done is for a venue like that and for the sort of audience that I knew that the Journal of American History had, you know, I wrote a piece that I was not involved in at all, other than as a sort of stand back and let the evidence show what this story was. But I think it's probably for a different kind of audience, for a more general audience, it's maybe useful to do this kind of writing where the author at least appears some because it provides kind of eyes and feet for the reader to be able to see the world. I mean, I try not to do this too much, but I generally try to get at least a story or two into any given piece where I'm actually trying to translate the points I want to make into being on the ground and seeing this play out in the world.

Speaker 2:
[39:36] Yeah. But it's clear that that sort of deep experiential process shapes how you think about these places.

Speaker 1:
[39:45] Yeah, it does. I mean, and so that still goes into whether I tell a story of my own presence walking through bad lands or floating down the Hula Hula River through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, whether I tell that story through my own eyes or not, there's no question because I'm sort of one of these people who has always liked to be out on the ground and out in the world, not just in a library. Those experiences very definitely have played a role in what I've written.

Speaker 2:
[40:21] One of the key threads throughout this piece is sort of this looming threat of energy extraction on the North Slope. And I think one of the things that you point out several times is that it's not simply a story of outside interests coming in and extracting oil and gas. But there are people, there's disagreement among Native people. And you highlight that a couple of times, that it's not just Native people are the guardians of this place, and outside interests are trying to take advantage essentially of their resources. But there's disagreements between different communities over how this landscape should be managed, which I think highlights a thread we see again and again in Western history, that Native people aren't some monolithic block. And that's true, as true as it was 200, 300 years ago, as it is today when we're talking about Anwar.

Speaker 1:
[41:27] Yeah, and that's just the reality of the world we live in. I mean, some people have a take on how the world should be used where the idea is we need to exploit it and help our own communities raise their standard of living, participate more in the sort of global economic world. And there are plenty of Native people around Anwar who expressed that particular sentiment. I mean, when, as I described in the account of this, when we arrived at Arctic Village, which was the spot where we were taking our bush planes into the headwaters of the Hula Hula and the Brooks Range, one of the people who we had already decided we wanted to hear from was Sarah James, this woman who is a spokesperson for the Gwich'in people, the people of the Caribou, who have, for thousands of years, hunted Caribou and sort of feel about themselves. And I think I feel about them this way too. They're the modern analogs of the Buffalo people of the 19th century. And so we wanted to hear what she had to say. And she met us on the tarmac when we flew into Arctic Village and talked to us for about half an hour or so about the concerns that she had. But she was also quick to point out that this was not the universal position on the part of Native people in this part of the world. And it's not. And so that's something I think, as you pointed out, Randall, and you're exactly right about this, this is true in the past as well. And you can't think of Native people as just sort of everyone uniformly has this particular kind of idea about how things should play out. So Arctic, the National Arctic, I mean, the ANWR is kind of a perfect modern day example of something that's been going on in the West for a long time.

Speaker 2:
[43:44] Yeah. You point out several times that this is sort of primordial, it's a primordial landscape. And it feels like sort of the most ancient landscape that you've been on in North America. And it occurs to me that this is the first, it's one of those places where if I'm lucky, I'll get to see that place as an American, but this is the first America that anyone saw really.

Speaker 1:
[44:12] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[44:13] So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how Alaska has fits into the environmental story, the environmental history of the United States. We sort of see it at the beginning of our narrative of the West when we talk about peopling this continent, and then it sort of seems like it bubbles up again with Russian colonization and extraction, and then we kind of lose it until Jimmy Carter and the lands bill, right? Can you tell me a little bit about how you think of Alaska as part of the Western story?

Speaker 1:
[44:50] Well, there's no question that Alaska is central to the Western story because as you point out, this is the first part of the world in North America that humans got to. So it's the first place on the continent that human eyes are going to see. And because of its location, as far North as it is, it's ended up kind of doing a disappearing act from time to time. And I think one of the reasons I wanted to tell this particular story is I wanted to remind people interested in the West that Alaska still probably preserves more of the frontier Old West character than any other part of America. I mean, Montana makes a good stab at it. Wyoming makes a stab at it. There are some other parts of the lower 48 to be sure that begin to look something like what you imagine the frontier did. But Alaska, there's no question. I mean, the last frontier is, it's Alaska. And it's the place that I think in the mind of Alaskans, they believe this and they think of the place that way. But with something like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, I mean, you really do have an opportunity if you, I mean, and should be sure, this is a rare thing to get to do. Not many Americans are going to get to go to the, to Anwar and see this kind of world. I mean, we floated for 12 days down the Hula Hula River. We never saw another party. We saw one native hunting camp just as we emerged out of the Brooks Range. But other than a group of backpackers who flew in the same time we did and headed off in a different direction, we never saw anybody else. And that was the first day we were there. So it's a thing that is not an easy adventure to have. But on the other hand, when you do it, you can't help but come away with this kind of feeling that you've been privileged to see something of original America, that this is what the continent looked like. And that, I think, when you see it, instills in you a kind of a horror that something like what happened to the southern high plains might happen to this particular part of the west. I mean, Anwar is four times the size of Yellowstone National Park. It's almost 20 million acres. It is a gigantic landscape. And you just don't have the opportunity to be in places like that in the modern age very often. I mean, it was the wildest place I've ever been. And it's probably an experience in my life that is right up there in the top one or two or three of the things that I've ever gotten to do was to see that particular part of America.

Speaker 2:
[48:16] In this piece, you mentioned the Meareys and their work in Alaska. And I feel like the Meareys are sort of overlooked as a first family of American conservation. I wonder if you can give the audience a little bit more context around, you know, Olaus and Adolf and trying to remember his wife's name. Marty.

Speaker 1:
[48:42] Marty Meary.

Speaker 2:
[48:43] Marty Meary.

Speaker 1:
[48:44] Yeah. So, Olaus and Adolf were the brothers, both trained as biologists. And, I mean, I've talked about them in some of the recent episodes, particularly the one on wolves a couple of episodes back, where these two guys in the 1930s were, I mean, one of them was working for the Park Service, Adolf, and Olaus Meary was working for the Bureau of Biological Survey. And they both got sent to do the first scientific studies anyone had done about coyotes, and then in Adolf's case, about wolves. And so Adolf is the first of the two brothers to get the visit to Alaska. He goes to Mount McKinley National Park in 1939, and spends about three years there studying wolves, and of course writes that great book, The Wolves of Mount McKinley. And so these two guys, I mean, they really were, along with Aldo Leopold, I think, the premier ecologist and conservation minded ecologist of the middle of the 20th century. Both of them ended up leaving the services that they worked for, and primarily worked for the wilderness society for most of their lives. And Olas and Marty, of course, became figures who were, I mean, they're all over the West. They're in Jackson Hole, they're in Yellowstone, where they obviously play a huge role in getting this particular place set aside, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is designated by the Eisenhower administration. And they also played a role in getting much of it, about 40% of it, designated as wilderness. I mean, they, Olas Murray is the primary mover behind the Charles Russell Wildlife Refuge in Montana on the Missouri River. So yeah, these are people, and I keep looking for somebody to write a major sort of book, kind of like Doug Brinkley did about Teddy Roosevelt a few years ago, Wilderness Warrior. Someone needs to do a book about the Muries and the role they've played in the American West.

Speaker 2:
[51:03] Yeah, I feel the same way. I feel like whenever I read about wildlife and wild places in the 20th century, their names are gonna mix in somehow, and the Craighead Brothers as well. There are these sort of undersung heroes of 20th century conservation that are behind the scenes oftentimes, that don't maybe get their time in the spotlight.

Speaker 1:
[51:27] Yeah, and they should.

Speaker 2:
[51:28] Yeah. Well, Dan, I appreciate it.

Speaker 1:
[51:30] Thank you, Randall.

Speaker 2:
[51:31] Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[51:31] Great fun.