June – September, 1984. Inspired by UCSC college friends working summers for fishing exploits in Alaska, my boyfriend Eric and I purchased one-way tickets to Anchorage. We had hoped to have a summer of backpacking and adventure. Off the tarmac, we stuck out our thumbs and were lucky to catch a ride with 20 something living in town with her parents. We had been joined by Eric’s cousin James, just back from a reggae extravaganza called Sunsplash in Jamaica. His tan, sandy hair, and pearly whites charmed our new friend, and she invited us to stay a few days. When her parents came home later that day, she made up a story about knowing each other in college. During our few day visit, she gave us a ride around town, introducing us to the neighborhood and taking us to see the Portage glacier. Mostly, we hung out at her place and talked.

A few days later, Eric and I thanked her and left. James stayed for a few more days. True to form, Eric decided he needed space and left me. Feeling bereft and abandoned, I decided to head out of Anchorage. I assumed I wouldn’t be seeing Eric again, especially being the days before cell phones. I stuck my thumb out only to be picked up by Bob Childers, a UCSC alumni and former environmental studies major like me. As we talked I learned that he had worked on the porcupine caribou treaty between Alaska and Canada. I asked if he knew Dick Cooley, one of my favorite environmental studies profs who had served in the US Department of the Interior and had helped to craft ANCSA. Not only did Bob know him, but he was still in close contact. To add to my surprise, upon arriving at his home (he’d invited me to stay and help with his campaign for state assembly), I met Karen Brewster, a friend and fellow student in environmental studies at UCSC. What serendipity! I felt like the stars had aligned in my favor. Maybe they knew I needed some support after Eric dumped me.

I stayed for a week and experienced a few firsts at Bob’s. I smoked pot for the first time, getting so high I was certain I had figured out the configuration of the universe. This as I lay on the kitchen floor laughing at everything Bob and Karen said. I worked on a political campaign, a first (and only). And I experienced the kindness of strangers, finding out that I was more connected to the world than I knew.

It was healing for me to hang out with Bob and Karen. I realized I needed to find some sort of work, as I only had enough money for the plane fare and hoped to spend the summer here. Bob recommended a temp agency. I went and easily found a job on the slime line at Kenai Packers. I didn’t want to leave, but didn’t want to overstay my welcome either. So I bid my friends goodbye and headed to Kenai by bus. And who should I run into, but Eric, who had also been looking for work. Meeting him again was surreal. I felt buoyed by my time with Karen and Bob. The time with them had affirmed my worth. Maybe Eric felt that, because he was no longer distant. Maybe he just needed to stretch his wings. Whatever it was, we ended up traveling together the rest of the summer.

Speaking of surreal, I started working the next day at 4am. I walked into the fish processing warehouse, blood and guts all over the floor, cold water spraying, the cold smell of fish, and frigid temperatures. I didn’t think I’d last long. I’d been told this work was great money. It wasn’t. It paid minimum wage, and the only good part about it was that you could work 12 hours days. After 8 hours you got time and a half. Perhaps the foreman liked me, because he made me a “box girl”. No blood and guts, standing in cold water and cutting fish all day long. Instead, I was in the attic with another girl assembling boxes. We would line them up in rows, pushing them down a shoot to the slime line below. We had some raucous conversations, Janette and I. And when I was done with work, I walked back into the forest to my tent. Cannery workers slept on a bluff overlooking Kenai fjords. I would watch bald eagles swooping down to pull fish out of purse siene nets below. The work was monotonous but I felt lucky to have someone to talk to. And we would sometimes eat cookies in the break room. One night, another cannery worker snuck a fish head out, and we roasted it over a campfire, eating the rich cheek meat. On a few occasions we would head to the McDonald’s in the nearby town, raiding the dumpsters for the meals that had been tossed after sitting too long. Hamburgers rewarmed on an open fire. Yum.

Turns out I lasted 10 days. Eric and I left, thumbing our way to Homer at the base of the peninsula. I’d left my hiking boots at camp, planning to pick them up on my way back. Unfortunately, what I didn’t know was that standard policy was: abandoned items were up for grabs. When I returned a few days later, my boots were gone. So I ended up hiking through the tundra of Denali in tennis shoes. Needless to say, my feet were soaked the entire time there. In Homer, we’d camped on the spit, the stretch of land that stuck out into the ocean, and had made fires on the beach. Little did we know that the dark lumps we thought were charcoal were actually lumps of coal. Naturally occurring coal covered the beach. Boy did those fires smoke, burning my eyes and nose. Noxious.

From Homer, we hitched to Fairbanks, where I saw the Northern Lights for the first time. What colors and patterns, weaving and glistening like glitter in the sky. We spent a few days wandering around the working class town, and were lucky enough to take a look at the university. On our way south from there to Denali, we detoured to one of the many hot springs scattered around Southeast Alaska. We set up our tents nearby and partook of the waters at night. Looking up at the stars, it felt like the fanciest resort imagineable. Not that I’d ever experienced one. After a few days of taking the waters, we headed to our main destination, Denali National Park (still called McKinley at the time). We set up our tents, explored the area, and headed to the nearby pub for bar food. In the bar, we met a charismatic fellow who seemed unusually interested in me. While he was witty and charming, something felt off. I wasn’t sure why. Having had my share of traumatic incidents as a kid, I pay attention when a sixth sense is activated. We ended up talking for over an hour. Heading back to our tents, I suddenly stiffened as I saw the guy rifling through my tent in the dark. I instantly hunkered down and shushed Eric before the guy could see us. I motioned Eric to follow me and ran through the woods in the opposite direction. After about 10 minutes we came to the main highway, where a temporary hotel complex made primarily of converted Alaska Railroad cars had been created after a massive fire destroyed the original McKinley Park Hotel in 1972. I explained the situation and the hotel operator gave us a room in one of the cars. It was a cool place to bunk, and I was grateful to feel safe.

The next day we returned to our tents and gathered up our belongings. I was relieved not to run into the guy and find that nothing had been taken. Quickly, we packed and headed to the only transportation in the park. We planned to do a several day backpacking trip, getting dropped off half way to the route’s terminus in Wonder Lake. The trip was amazing. Despite hard seats and uncomfortable ride (it was a retired school bus), we saw moose, grizzly bear, and amazing scenery. After a few hours, the bus driver stopped and let us know this was our stop. Such as it was, given that there was nothing around for miles. In fact, after getting out and hiking along the road for a few minutes a vehicle stopped to tell us that 3 grizzlies were just around the bend and coming this way. Great. Not waiting for confirmation, we loped off the road into the deep tundra, my tennis shoes squishing with every step. And, just to make matters worse, I had my period. Some helpful person had mentioned that blood attracts grizzlies, and said I should carry a rifle. I would not and said as much. That I’d rather be eaten than shoot a grizzly. The idea of carrying a rifle was a culture shock to a vegetarian wild animal loving hippy college kid.

When Eric heard about grizzlies and blood, he suggested I pitch my tent far from his. I wondered with friends like that, who needs enemies? We had been drilled about making a triangle between where we slept (upwind), cooked and ate (downwind), so that we didn’t attract grizzly bears to our tents when they smelled food. Yikes. I was not looking forward to the possibility of confronting one in the back country. At least I had seen spectacular scenery before a possible untimely end. It was a bit comforting. Lucky for me, we didn’t run into any bears, grizzly or otherwise, on our 3 day back country hike. On the third day, we ate a nice breakfast and then hiked the 7 or so miles back to the road. It’s amazing what map and compass made possible in the days before GPS.

Exhausted but happy, we took the bus back to the entrance of the park and stuck our thumbs out, yet again. This time we were picked up by 2 men hunting moose. We stood in the open truck bed, praying that they wouldn’t capture a moose. Talk about culture shock! The idea of being crammed in the back with a dead moose was too much for me to imagine. I did soften my stance toward hunting though. Over the course of the trip, I had conversations with hunters whose game filled their larders. These folks were staunchly against trophy hunting, and made great efforts to hunt ethically, often out in the backcountry. One told me how he would quarter the elk and carry the pieces back to the road on foot and horseback. By the end of my time in Alaska, I realized that developing a set of ethics around meat-eating was complex, and that buying meat in the grocery store had its own set of problems.

After our close call with a potential moose carcass, we ended up on a stretch of road where it seemed no one drove. It took us two days to hitch a ride out. Turns out White Horse is a hole that lots of rambling folk never make their way out of. Good thing we didn’t drink. We might not have been able to extract ourselves.

Howard Moseman, another UCSC colleague (an affable big fellow and mean mountain biker) invited us to visit him at Wrangell St Elias Park. So we took a detour down a small dirt road east of the main highway on our way to Valdez. The mosquitos were unstoppable. In fact, the only thing that worked was thick rubberized raingear and head nets. We suited up like fishing crew and struggled through the swarms of insects as we slogged our way down the muddy road. We hitched a ride from a man who had a sound system like a movie theater. I’d never heard anything like it (remember, this was 1984). He cranked up the volume as the piece got to an apex. It was a classical piece, perhaps Mozart or Hayden. He was affable and generous, on his way back from his monthly grocery run. Maybe because the weather there is inclement, people were very generous and helped one another. It made a lasting impression.

He dropped me off at his destination, the town of McCarthy. There we met a kindly man named Art, who had an art gallery (go figure) and was in the middle of hanging a show. We volunteered to help, and ended up staying with him for a few days. He had built a sauna from scrap wood, and said it really helped him survive the long winter nights. He also built a light box, something I’d never heard of before. It helped him with seasonal depression during the short daylight hours of winter. Art was a kind soul. He told us about what living in Alaska was like, at least for him. I felt grateful for his hospitality.

We pressed on. The terrain became increasingly more rugged. At one point we arrived at the bank of roiling rapids and had to pull ourselves across, hand over hand, while sitting in a metal basket. Good thing I was strong. Mid-way, my basket was inches above the churning glacial melt, roaring so loud I could hear nothing else. Grateful to have made it in one piece, I hopped out on to discover the remains of the Kennicott Mine, a copper zinc mine which virtually closed overnight when the bottom fell out of the copper market. We walked through rickety buildings that looked more like scaffold, surveying cups still on desks and invoices scattered on the floor. It was eery. I thought about the wage slavery that so many miners have been forced to accept. We found out later that miners had been told the last train would leave later that day. Then nothing. So I can imagine them scrambling to get their pertinent belongings and making their way to the platform. Being stuck without electricity would be a death sentence in this place.

After wandering around what was left of this ghost town, we crossed the stream (further up river it was narrower), and walked along the glacier. This was the second glacier of the trip, first being the Portage Glacier just outside of Anchorage. That glacier had been a few miles outside of town. When I went back in 2004, it had receded ten miles. It was interesting walking on a glacier. I had tennis shoes, no ice axe or rope between Eric and I – bad form. We were lucky that it was relatively cold and no crevasses were exposed. After a few hours, we hiked back to the treacherous river crossing, and then a few miles to the park headquarters where we found Howard. He was surprised to see us and invited us to throw our sleeping bags down for the night, after a long an fun recounting of our travels. He told us about working for the park, and we met one of his colleagues, who amused us with stories of life in rugged Alaska. After storytelling and tall tales, we crawled into bed, grateful to have a warm dry place to sleep.

In the morning, Howard showed us the main parts of the park that were his purview, and we enjoyed the immense mountains and stark landscape. After mid day he hailed a friend to take us back to the main highway, and we bid him goodbye. On the road again. Back at the highway, his friend turned north. We thanked him and hitched a ride south to Valdez. Eric was a big swimmer and had convinced me to start swimming daily too. A mile a day in fact. So imagine our surprise when we discovered a free indoor public pool in Valdez. Wow! One of the positive uses of all that oil money. We spent a couple of days availing ourselves of the pool and eating peanut butter sandwiches. It’s amazing how hungry you can get hiking in the backcountry. We had a strategy. Every year, on September 15, the price of the ferry from Haines to Prince George was discounted 50 percent. Our kind of deal. We headed to Haines and bought a ticket, and eagerly found a deck chair and set up our tents on the main deck. At that time you could do that. All the college kids who’d worked in Alaska and were heading home would do that.

So we had a few days of rest, watching as the inland passage slipped by. On the way, we met a nice man with a camper who agreed to give us a ride from the port of Prince Rupert to Prince George, where we would have to turn south toward Vancouver and home. Once off the boat, we camped with him for a couple of days. The first night we saw northern lights. My second time! They were as spectacular as those I’d seen in Fairbanks, and I felt grateful. We finally got to Prince George, bid him farewell, and hitchhiked to Seattle. The days before you needed a passport to cross the Canadian/US border. In Seattle, we found the Green Tortoise, a cool hippy bus with no seats (just space for your sleeping bag), and had an adventure-filled 2 day trip home to San Francisco. The trip included an inner tube ride down the Klamath River and a pancake breakfast. Talk about coming home in style!