mountain in North America at 20,320 feet.
Sigrid, Kim, and I got to the park and picked up our backcountry permit. It would allow us to leave the only road through the nearly ten-thousand-square-mile park and designated wilderness area. That road is ninety-two miles long.
Aside from a fall lottery that allows some lucky motorists to get a pass to drive into the park, most of it is strictly off limits to motorized vehicles of any kind. A yellow school bus, then and now, takes tourists on a long, slow ride through the park all the way to Wonder Lake.
The bus dropped us off at our designated camping area. To assure no disruption of the wildlife in the area—wolves, grizzly bears, and dozens of other types of animals—only so many backcountry passes are issued at any given time.
We felt lucky to get ours the moment we stepped off the bus. Shaggy tundra and bright wildflowers and rippling streams unrolled before us. The mountains we had traveled through on our way to the park suddenly looked like foothills beside massive Denali. There is no view like it on earth.
Our drop-off point was on a high ridge with a gentle slope that went down to a braided river. Carrying heavy backpacks, we easily descended the slope to the bottom of the river valley that runs through the park. We wore our hiking boots but had nothing waterproof for wading through the shallower parts of the river.
We walked up and down, leaping from sandbar to sandbar, as we made our way across. But at one point, there were no more areas we could jump over. We would have to wade across what seemed to be a nonthreatening and slow-flowing branch of the river.
We discussed our options: get our boots and clothes wet or go barefoot and, well, in our underwear. We hadn’t brought shorts of any kind, nor perhaps a dry change of pants.
With summer evening temperatures on the cool side, we opted to keep our clothing dry. We stripped off our boots and pants, threw them in our packs, and began to wade through the water.
I discovered, as anyone who has ever crossed rivers and streams in Alaska in summer knows, that the water was freezing cold. Bitterly cold. Painfully cold, as if you are being stabbed with a thousand knives. You feel you can’t breathe. You just might die.
Or, in our case, die of embarrassment. As we began our crossing, we turned to see that another park bus was stopped on the road high above us. The bus drivers usually stop to allow tourists to photograph wildlife. Using our binoculars, the three of us realized that the tourists all seemed to be looking in our direction.
We looked around. Could there be something nearby? A moose? A bear?
Nope.
We realized the tourists were looking at three teenage girls in their underwear crossing a small stream of water that turned out to be no higher than our knees.
Oh well, we figured. Not much we could do about it anyway, and besides, it was unlikely there was anybody on that bus who knew who we were. Once on the other side of the stream, we dressed and continued on our way.
We spotted a small hill where we decided to camp. As we approached, we saw something even more alarming than our earlier misadventure. A sign read: PRIME GRIZZLY BEAR RESTRICTED AREA. Or habitat. Or whatnot. The message was clear: our backcountry permit area was right next door to GRIZZLY BEAR HABITAT RESTRICTED AREA.
We knew this meant employing all the bear-deterrent camping rules we had learned from one of the park rangers. We had to prepare, eat, and store our food far from our tent and sleeping area. Somehow, we got the idea that we should also bury our food containers and eating utensils deep in the ground. (We thought this was safe. It didn’t seem to occur to us that bears have great noses and big claws for digging.) For extra measure, we decided to leave the clothes we wore that day with the buried food, which meant changing outside. For those who aren’t familiar with this kind of terrain, there are few to no trees.
We would have felt clever and prepared had we not forgotten two critical things: matches and, most important, mosquito repellant. The former meant we didn’t eat any cooked food that evening. The latter meant that we had to swat mosquitos madly while eating and burying and running to get inside the tent, followed by zipping up the door quickly and then frantically slapping and killing as many mosquitos as we could.
Aside from such moments, our camping spot was perfect. As with all of Denali National Park, the vistas are huge and the landscape epic, like one of those nineteenth-century wall-size paintings of the American West.
That night, as we settled into our sleeping bags, we devised our own bear-deterrent plan. If any of us awoke in the night, we were to peer outside and either yell “Bear!” if we saw one or yell anyway to scare anything in the near vicinity.
We all slept fitfully that night, being near the grizzly bear habitat restricted area. At one point in the middle of the night, I dreamed not of a bear but of a large spider, slowly descending from the top of our tent. I leaped up and slammed my hand down to kill it, yelling loudly.
Immediately, Kim popped up and cried, “Bear!” Then she lay back down and kept sleeping. Sigrid and I, now both awake, just looked at each other. Then we closed our eyes and also went back to sleep, or something like sleep, under the Alaska summer night sky that never gets dark. We hoped the bears next door would stay put.
IN THE SPRING of 1976, I graduated high school. At Steller, we made our own graduation gowns in the style of wizards’ robes, with hoods and long trumpet sleeves. They were made of beige or white cotton or gauze. We decorated our robes in everything from batik to applique. I tie-dyed mine.
About twenty students were in my class that year. Our graduation was held in the gym/cafeteria at Steller. I think we all spoke a few words; I remember saying only, “No more homework!”
My graduating class at Stellar Alternative School. (Photo courtesy of Alaska Dispatch News)
A photo of our graduating class, of young men and women in long, flowing hair and long, flowing robes, has always reminded me of a painting of Jesus’s apostles.
That, of course, may have been the point. We eschewed all things that were part of conventional and traditional high school life—sports, homecoming, and prom. The girls didn’t wear makeup, and the guys didn’t get haircuts and, in some cases, didn’t shave. I look at photos of me from this period of my life, my hair down to my waist, and think, Would someone please give that girl some hair care products?!
In a way, we were like the apostles that spring, minus a leader. Our figurehead was the entire state of Alaska and the outdoors.
The only time I ever engaged in vandalism was after a night of high school partying. A group of us drove out to South Anchorage, to the site of the first-ever overpass/on-/off-ramp constructed along the only highway south of town.
We sneered at this latest development. On the green sign next to the northbound on-ramp, one of our group jumped out and spray painted the word “Los” above the official “Anchorage.”
Los Anchorage, as in Los Angeles. One meager on-/off-ramp. Is there a statute of limitations on misdemeanors?
THIS WAS ALSO the era of garage rock bands and the worship of rock band musicians, and I was not immune. If a guy played guitar, had long hair, and even vaguely resembled, say, George Harrison, I was smitten.
For a while, about the time I graduated high school, I had a boyfriend who played bass. The more hippie-ish of my friends and I would go to hear bands in our standard rock concert outfit—long cotton skirts, hiking boots, and peasant blouses.
During those days I met two brothers who had come to Alaska from Rhode Island. One of them dubbed me and my friends “little pioneer women.” He once tried to describe what it was like coming to Alaska from the East Coast. At home, his idea of wilderness was the view from a hill above a freeway with nothing but forests or fields as far as the eye could see. But Alaska’s wilderness was almost beyond comprehension.
I wasn’t sure I understood,