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Outside Magazine May 2001

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Infinite Range (cont.)

AFTER AN eight-hour drive from Anchorage (the last three hours of it on the McCarthy Road), Dad and I finally arrive in McCarthy to find the trees hunched under a low dishwater sky. "We're socked in," says Gary Green, the proprietor, pilot, and chief mechanic of McCarthy Air. "Nobody's going anywhere for a while." Dad and I drop our packs and wander into town.

As Alaskan bush towns go, McCarthy makes the old Northern Exposure burg of Cicely look like Normal Junction, Iowa. The town's summer population of 75 dwindles to a core of about ten hardy souls in winter, when the mercury plunges to 35 degrees below zero. In high season (late May through August), temperatures climb into the sixties and McCarthy fills with globe-trotting mountaineers, world-renowned ecologists, groovy Park Service seasonals, European backpackers, stoic bush pilots, and, of course, your run-of-the-mill Alaskan eccentrics. When the season ends, in September, it really ends: The town—a handful of buildings, including three restaurants but nary a gas station—virtually shuts down after Labor Day

Only when we reach cruising altitude does the scale of the park and the folly of our fallback plan to hike out should something go wrong with our scheduled pickup in three days become apparent.

By early afternoon, the lid has lifted, and we load our gear into Green's silver Cessna 180. Only when we reach cruising altitude does the scale of the park and the folly of our fallback plan—to hike out should something go wrong with our scheduled pickup in three days—become apparent. Between the two Tebay Lakes and McCarthy winds the Chitina River, wild and milk-silty, braiding uncrossable channels across a half-mile-wide bed, with eerie pools of turquoise and antifreeze green. The country in between is scrubby and wet, sequined with hundreds of ponds too small for the map. There will be no hiking out of here for us.

Green lands the Cessna on an open meadow at the western edge of Upper Tebay Lake. "Should we be worried about bears?" Dad asks him as we dump our gear.

"Nah," says Green. "They'll be too busy eating berries to be concerned with you."

We are worried about bears.

The moment the plane takes off, turning us into food-chain silver medalists, we take a survey of our surroundings and then set up our tent in the dead-smack center of the widest open field within five miles. Granted, we're pounding stakes into a meadow of blueberries and mossberries—camping, in essence, in the middle of Big Boy's dinner plate. But at least we'll see him coming.

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