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Contemplating Alaska's wild after 50 years of the Wilderness Act

The Wilderness Act turned 50 this week in a state that has more wilderness today than it did 100 years ago. This strange dichotomy is cause for some contemplation.

I ran north from Minnesota in 1973, planning to escape into the wild. A summer of living largely on snowshoe hares and grayling quickly taught me life in the wilderness isn't an idyllic as it might look from the far-off perspective of comfortable civilization.

And so I spent a life on the edge of the wilderness, first in Fairbanks, then Juneau and finally Anchorage. Sometimes I still miss the Juneau years, spent on a sailboat that made wilderness unbelievably accessible.

When it comes to finding a great way to start a day, it's hard to beat pulling a crab pot full of Dungies from Hood Bay deep in the quiet and deserted Kootznoowoo Wilderness of the Admiralty Island National Monument.

Admiralty's Hood Bay happens to be one of those places gone back to the wilderness. Once there was a bustling cannery there and a couple Native villages. The cannery, then owned by the Native community of Angoon, burned down in 1961. It was never rebuilt. Most everybody moved back to Angoon or west to Sitka or north to Juneau.

People still come back to visit. This may be the story of modern Alaska. The state has become more wild even as it has become more populated. The wilderness has taken back a lot of Alaska over the years, and keeping it wild is really as easy as the late Bob DeArmond of Juneau once told me: "Just ban the internal combustion engine," or maybe he said "infernal combustion engine." It was a long time ago, but DeArmond was right.

Fewer than 350,000 people lived in Alaska in 1973, and wilderness was a place where a fair number of them lived. When your main means of transport was a slow-moving Grumman freight canoe with a 5-horsepower motor on the Kuskokwim River, you couldn't very well commute from Bethel, or anywhere else, to hunt and fish.

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Bethel was home to about 2,500 people back then. It's now two and a half times that size. Served by jet aircraft along a river buzzing with high-power riverboats, it's a microcosm of a state where people have retreated to the major cities and regional hubs, while wilderness has become a place to visit, not live.

Anyone who has traveled the Iditarod Trail from Skwentna in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough north to Nome knows how things have changed. A vast stretch of the Interior between the Kuskokwim and Yukon rivers has become a ghost territory. Thousands once lived there in what was known as "the Inland Empire."

Now, because the area remains so far beyond easy or economical means of transport, it is so empty you feel it in your bones. Large sections of Alaska are like this. The country has changed in step with the ways peoples' lives have changed.

Most Americans lived rural in 1900. Eighty percent of them live in metropolitan areas these days. Alaska is no different. About 53 percent of the 732,000 Alaskans live in Anchorage and the neighboring Mat-Su Borough. Nor is the rest of the world. "For the first time in history, more people worldwide live in cities than outside them," Governing.com noted in a series of stories on America's rural/urban divide.

People who live in the wilderness think differently than those who visit the wilderness. Alaskans know this well.

When you compete with wolves for food, you're a lot more likely to want to "manage" wolves than when all you want out of life is to see a wolf. And the only way to "manage" wolves, of course, is to kill them. Enter one of those Alaska political debates that isn't going away anytime soon, though it is destined to become increasingly influenced by urbanites, both those who live in Alaska and those from Outside.

The Wilderness Act gave the latter more influence in the future of Alaska than they ever had in the past. Even if they've never been here, even if they never intend to visit here, they still get to lobby federal land managers on how to manage the wilderness.

Today there are just under 110 million acres of federally protected wilderness in the nation. More than half of that acreage is in Alaska. It is, in many ways, a blessing.

Wilderness has helped tourism to flourish in Denali National Park and Preserve; though it is worth noting that most of the wilderness driving business there is road-accessible wilderness. It's not much different at the other big park attractions in the state -- Glacier Bay in Southeast and Kenai Fjords out of Seward, where the attraction is boat-accessible wilderness.

Americans have changed more than the wilderness since the Wilderness Act passed. I'm not going to say they've gone lazy, but if you get out in the real wilds of Alaska these days, you won't see many people. In fact, if you get a mile off a road or trail in Alaska, you won't see many people -- even during the summer.

Maybe people just like to stay close to their amenities. Maybe they just want to be able to retreat to their motor home or cabin to check in with the computer every night. If you're a lover of wilderness, you could argue this is a good thing, too. It is in many ways easier to find Alaska wilderness today than it was a generation ago.

Good lord, we've had a whole generation grow up thinking some guy who died in a bus along a road north of Denali was in the wilderness. Obviously, it doesn't take much for a place to qualify for wilderness these days even if it isn't federally recognized.

And if it is federally recognized?

Well, I can confess to hours spent sitting on a mountain in the Andrew Simons Wilderness Unit of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. Look down from that perch to see the sprawl of Kenai-Soldotna development to the west and the contrails of jets in the sky overhead.

So what is wilderness these days? Has it become an artificial construct? Is it just some imaginary place where we want to believe man has never set foot?

Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaksadispatch.com

The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.

Craig Medred

Craig Medred is a former writer for the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Dispatch and Alaska Dispatch News. He left the ADN in 2015.

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