WHERE THE WILDERNESS IS
THERE’S A CERTAIN KIND OF GLACIER. It is photographed from below, always from below, with an almost pornographic eye. The glacier is statuesque, its icy blue contours and grandiose architectural detail on display. If you didn’t know better, you’d think the gleaming thing was built of crystal and gemstones, platinum and pearls. From the usual photographer’s vantage—on the shore of an otherworldly lake or the deck of a boat on a frigid bay—you see building-size chunks of frozen river peel away, leaving jagged crevices as they calve and crash into the water below. It’s spectacular and breath-stopping and beautiful in that way that’s a little too good to be true. But you go along with it. Because what kind of monster casts a skeptical eye on an imperiled beauty?
From their surface, though, glaciers—at least my glacier, the Chitina, where I was delivered onto crunchy, dirty ice on my first full day in Alaska’s Wrangell–St. Elias National Park—aren’t picturesque. They’re covered in ridges and mounds of upturned rock that are every bit as ugly as the man-made ruin of gravel mines. They plow through mountains, carving U-shaped valleys that run with muddy rivers of sediment and bizarre, marblelike pools in mineral hues of sapphire, aquamarine, and tarnished copper green. There’s incredible beauty here, to be sure, but it’s not the prettiness of a National Geographic centerfold. It’s something else. Something primal. It is creation and destruction.
The Wrangell-St. Elias is not only the largest national park you’ve never heard of, it’s the largest national park in the country.
