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Outside Magazine May 2001

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Infinite Range
Get lost in Alaska's Wrangell--St. Elias: It's six Yellowstones' worth of icy lakes,anonymous meadows, and peaks you won't find on any map.

By Bruce Barcott


	Denali Jr.: fresh May snow below 18,008-foot Mount St. Elias. (Tom Bean/Corbis)

"MAYBE WE COULD get the pilot to stay over with us," Dad says, looking up from his copy of Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance. "I bet he'd have a gun."

The old man and I are careening down the McCarthy Road, a 61-mile stretch of chuckholes and dust (WORST ROAD IN ALASKA, boasts a local sign) that leads to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, the largest national park in the United States, and one of the least visited. At 13.2 million acres, Wrangell-St. Elias is less a park than a semiautonomous wilderness territory. To imagine its size, combine New Hampshire and Vermont and kick everybody out. Raise four mountain ranges, including the nation's second-highest peak—18,008-foot Mount St. Elias—and eight of the 16 next-highest mountains in the country. Sprinkle liberally with black bears, grizzlies, Dall sheep, and ravens. And add huge rivers of ice: the park's Malaspina Glacier is bigger than the state of Rhode Island.

The sheer vastness of Wrangell-St. Elias flusters even old Alaska hands. "The only way to see this place is to get a bush pilot to fly you," advises George Herben, a 70-year-old photographer and writer who's lived near the park for nearly half a century. "I'd start..." he says, then trails off in frustration. "Well, I don't know where you'd start. You could go stony broke flying around here."

My father and I were last in Alaska during the pipeline boom of the mid-1970s, when our family moved to Anchorage and I cross-country skied to elementary school. Back then Wrangell-St. Elias National Park didn't exist; Jimmy Carter created it in December 1980 as part of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. Combined with Glacier Bay National Park to the south, the Yukon's Kluane National Park to the east, and British Columbia's Tatshenshini-Alsek Wilderness Provincial Park to the southeast, this is the world's largest contiguous protected area—a total of 24 million acres. But while Denali and Glacier Bay attract busloads and boatloads of Lower 48ers, Wrangell-St. Elias has remained something of a locals' secret.

Some blame it on the name. "Sounds like an accounting firm, doesn't it?" says Bob Jacobs, the 49-year-old owner of St. Elias Alpine Guides, who's run his service out of an old copper-company electrical plant in the town of McCarthy for nearly 25 years. First ascents are his stock-in-trade. "When we came here in the late 1970s, there were hundreds of unclimbed peaks," he tells me. "We climbed most of the named mountains, then moved on to the unnamed ones. There're only a couple of us who know which named ones are still waiting for first ascents. And we're pretty tight-lipped."

Dad and I used the excuse of his 60th birthday to get back in touch with the land that got in our blood and never left. For both of us, those years in Alaska have become a touchstone, the greatest adventure of our family's middle-class suburban life. Five years ago, we took on Mount Rainier together. This time, I promised, no climbing. We picked a blank wet spot on the map—Upper Tebay Lake, in the Chugach Range, with no trail in or out—and arranged to have a bush pilot drop us off with camping gear, a couple of fishing poles, a compass, and a prayer for good weather.

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