Family gatherings can be such a bind. It's not just that they are often sombre occasions, such as funerals; even the happiest events — weddings, anniversaries, births — can be diminished by the fact that they are invariably celebrated in the back end of beyond. The journey turns the whole thing into a chore. This thought was with me as I stood uncomfortably in a US$40,000 grizzly bear coat holding the fossilised remains of a walrus penis.
The kind (and drunk) proprietor of an Alaskan restaurant in downtown Anchorage had insisted that her English guest posed for pictures with her father's antique fur. I wouldn't have minded so much, but I'd just eaten one of the worst meals of my life: soggy defrosted chicken with soggy defrosted corn on the cob, washed down with warm medium-dry wine. But guess what? I was having the time of my life, and it was about to get better.
The few people who make the long and arduous journey to Alaska usually come between May and September, when the weather is mild and the snow has all but disappeared save for the ice-bound mountains and the 100,000 or so glaciers that carve up this most spectacularly pristine corner of the United States.
PHOTO: AP
I was here for a reason, but it wasn't a chore. It was the baptism of my godson, Stephen, who was born in Argentina but whose American parents, Bill and Michelle Scannell, decided to bring him up in the Last Frontier.
The word "Alaska" carries a lot of stereotypical baggage, so what is truth and what is myth?
First, yes, in the winter it is unrelentingly, unimaginably cold. The sun can be shining (as it did for me for five days in February) but the temperature is still –30oC. I discovered this on my first morning when I strolled across the parking lot of the Dimond Center Hotel, on the edge of town, to buy provisions. I hadn't got 200m before I had to return to fetch my fleecy hat, the one in which I looked ridiculous, but the one that would stop my ears falling off.
PHOTO: AP
Second, it is also undeniable that Alaska, tucked up between northern Canada and western Siberia and twice the size of Texas and more than six times larger than Britain, is a place apart from the rest of the US. The people are fiercely independent and many only reluctantly identify with the rest of the US, which they refer to as "the Lower 48" — but they respect anyone who has made the effort to visit and outsiders are warmly welcomed.
But the image of the state as inhospitable and impenetrable is not wholly accurate. In summer, the countryside opens up for walking, canoeing, mountaineering and salmon fishing. And, believe it or not, in the interior temperatures can reach 25oC. Transport can be difficult — there is just one railway line, from the port of Seward to Fairbanks in the heart of the interior, and only a couple of major highways outside populated areas -- but there are ferries and plenty of reasonably priced short-hop flights.
My visit coincided with the annual fur "rondy" (rendezvous), which commemorates the days when fur trappers used to come into Anchorage to sell their wares, get drunk, blow their cash and then return to the wilderness. Today, it is marked by a carnival, dog-sled races, ice sculpture and generally more genteel pursuits.
PHOTO: AP
You can still buy furs if you want to. A wolverine pelt will set you back US$525, a lynx US$295. Hats of beaver will fetch US$215, blue fox US$225. Only your conscience can be your guide. John Sarvis, a 59-year- old former trapper and fur salesman, claims that only "excess animals" — those that would die anyway due to natural selection or a lack of food — are "harvested."
Anchorage is home to about 250,000 people, 42 percent of Alaska's population, and it is not a particularly attractive town. Nevertheless, it has some good hotels and restaurants, particularly if you are partial to fresh crab, cod, salmon and halibut. And there are plenty of bars, where the people might sometimes have the appearance of a death-cult militia, but where the kindness is enough to thaw your frozen extremities.
But enough of Anchorage. As well as his son's baptism, Bill had arranged another highlight: a journey to Talkeetna, the town on which the television series Northern Exposure was based (detested here for its twee inaccuracy). Ten of us chartered an air taxi to fly from there to Mt McKinley, at 6,193m the highest peak in North America.
PHOTO: AP
Why, apart from the fact that it's a great thing to do? Because we wanted to pick up some glacial ice for the drinks at the christening celebration the following day. And to do that, we would have to land on the Ruth glacier, in the shadow of Mt McKinley at 1,828m.
So, after a gargantuan breakfast at the fabulous Snow City Cafe at 4th and L Street in Anchorage, we boarded a bus to take us on the two-and-a-half-hour journey to Talkeetna. It had been supplied by the Magic Bus company, but surely there had been some mistake; they seemed to have sent us a passion wagon left over from some long- forgotten Rolling Stones tour. Leather sofas hugged the interior. There was a bar and a surround-sound video screen. But no drugs or groupies.
The journey whizzed by. We saw moose, bald eagles and caribou but not, sadly, any brown or black bears. The landscape was frozen tundra with snow-peaked mountains on every hazy horizon.
We made just one stop, at a lonely service station where, outside, there was a freezer selling ice cubes. It was –25oC and I wondered what would happen if I put my hand inside. Sure enough, it felt warm. The proprietor saw me and laughed. "Go ahead," he said. "Climb in and warm up." So I sat on the bags of ice, and, sure enough, it felt balmy in a joyful, ridiculous way.
Minutes later, Mt McKinley rose, harsh and foreboding and utterly beautiful. It is 50 percent higher than any other mountain in the Alaska range and it controls the region's weather patterns; thousands of tonnes of snow flowing from its peak form the raw material for the glaciers that weave between peaks like gigantic frozen rivers.
We arrived at the Talkeetna Air Taxi company and were briefed on our journey above the Ruth and Kahiltna glaciers to the Don Sheldon amphitheatre, a huge snowbound bowl cradled by mountain after stunning mountain. And it seemed impossible that an aircraft could land here.
Paul, our pilot, briefed us on our (1954!) DeHavilland Otter and its safety features (food, sleeping bags, blankets — I wanted to ask if he had lots that we could draw should we crash and have to start eating one other, but thought better of it).
Then we set off, the aircraft's skis launching us into the air in an unfeasibly short distance. And the views were breathtaking. Below, at first, were spruce, birch and alder forests and tundra, frozen creeks and the white-spaghetti tracks of trappers' snowmobiles. Then came the mouths of the glaciers, littered at the bottom with displaced rocks and trees and dirt.
But as they rose between the mountains and up to McKinley they became whiter than white, punctuated by aquamarine ice where shelves have collapsed and crevasses formed. For glacial ice, 100,000 years old, is blue. And here, below the surface of the Ruth glacier, it is several thousand meters thick.
After half an hour, we came in to land and it seemed we were heading straight for a mountain. But the Otter descended quickly, hit the snow and came to a smooth and fast halt. Visibility was seemingly endless and the silence truly moving. We climbed out and took in the view and it seemed inappropriate to break the peace with meaningless talk.
We had taken a bottle of vodka and mixed it with snow — just one to wet the baby's head. It was, after all, a celebration. But the glacial ice was too far beneath the snow and, even though there are millions of tonnes of it, we felt it would have been wrong to take even a bucketful.
Even with responsible winter gear, we began to freeze within minutes and it was time to go. Again, we rose steeply and in silence, awestruck.
The following day, the journey seemed to make the christening, and Bill's decision to bring up his children here, more poignant. It is a difficult place in which to live, but the air is clean, the inhabitants enjoy an unspoken collective togetherness and crime is almost non-existent.
And in a state with almost no major highways we must forgive them their use of aircraft and their carbon footprints. In every other respect, the people here fiercely guard their environment and constantly fight attempts to exploit its natural resources.
If you go, then, the principle of taking nothing but photographs and leaving nothing but footprints applies here as much as anywhere. And, anyway, your footprints will soon be covered in snow.
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