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Outside Magazine May 2001

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Infinite Range (cont.)

"IS THAT HIM?"

"Nope. Floatplane."

"Y'spose he'll show today?"

"Dunno."

The Cessna is late. Twenty-five hours, 13 minutes late.

"You heard him say 'We'll see you Monday,' right?"

"I think so."

So it's Tuesday afternoon and the snow level has been creeping down for two nights, leaving ever deeper dustings on the hills around us. We've abandoned our hiking—the tussocks grow in big caps around here; it's like walking across a giant bumper-pool table—and focused on hooking fish. The bad news is, the boys ain't biting and it's getting colder by the hour. The good news: the cold's keeping the bugs down.

"Maybe it's engine trouble."

* "If it is, I don't want to know about it."

We are becoming accustomed to Wrangell time. A half-day wait for weather, an extra day in the bush—standard fare.

When Green shows up, it's no big deal. "Couldn't get out of McCarthy," he says. "How's the weather been here?" High and clear, which made the wait all the more frustrating. With so many big peaks, a clear sky in McCarthy can turn to heavy cotton a few miles away. A pilot may be able to get up but not down, or vice versa.

That night, after a hearty steak dinner at the McCarthy Lodge, I wander down to a one-room spruce cabin where George Herben and his wife, Pat, are reading by the light of a propane lantern. I'm itching to tell George about the mountains I've seen. He seems unfazed. "One day I sat down with an inch-to-the-mile map," he tells me. "And I started counting a 35-by-35-mile area. I counted 27 mountains over 10,000 feet. You know how many had names? Three."

Like a lot of longtime locals, Herben will worry your ear about how the old place has changed. McCarthy's not the same, the Wrangells aren't the same. More people, different attitudes. "I want the Alaska I had as a young punk, when it was still a territory," he tells me. A few years ago Herben published a book, Picture Journeys in Alaska's Wrangell-St. Elias, and since then he's had second thoughts about letting too much information slip into the outside world. "Sometimes I'd wonder if I was cutting my own throat, putting out a book like that."

I know the feeling, George.

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