WONDER LAND
“CAN YOU SEE IT? The chairlift on the ridge?” Cody Barnhill steered the minivan north on Anchorage’s Glenn Highway. It was morning rush hour. The nondescript cityscape of an American suburb passed by the window: strip malls and pawn shops, dead trees that looked like skeletons, Vietnamese phở joints, beige one-story buildings with flat roofs and melting icicles. It was a view like any other neighborhood street, until you looked up. Beyond the city haze, dividing the streets from the clear sky, the front range of the Chugach cut across the horizon. Our destination, the chairlift Barnhill pointed to, was a local ski hill 15 miles outside the city. Hardly the extreme skiing paradise typically associated with Alaska, Arctic Valley offers 1,200 vertical feet of blue-collar cruising.
Anchorage is not a ski town. It is oil. It is military. It is diverse. Offices for BP, Exxon Mobil, and ConocoPhillips Alaska are located downtown; the latter is headquartered in the state’s tallest building at 22 stories. The 79,000-acre joint Air Force, National Guard, and Army base is home to more than 41,000 civilian and military personnel and their families. The Anchorage School District is among the most diverse in the country, with students speaking 100 different languages. And yet, Anchorage is also the capital of one of the world’s largest recreation destinations. Alaska is skiing’s mecca, a bucket-list item for those who can afford $10,000 heli trips to ski the fluted spines, miraculous snow, and steep vertical walls.
But I did not come to Alaska to go heli skiing. Nor to eat Alaskan king crab legs in a mountain lodge. I came here to find the real Alaska: isolated, cold, weird, enormous, and, caked with snow, land both extracted for wealth and preserved for enjoyment. People come to the 49th state to chase a dream or run away from something. I fell in with the latter—running from a cubicle in an office park. Alaska became my mantra. I fantasized about the wild beauty and
