Bellingham is barely out of view when I realize Global Warming has arrived in Alaska. “Our first winter was cold, but I knew it was not that cold,” the young man in a frayed baseball cap says. He, his wife and six-year-old son had been living in a remote village on the Bering Sea, just south of the Arctic Circle. “The elders will tell you all sorts of changes happening in their lifetime,” he says. “Being in Alaska has made me believer about Global Warming.”
The couple next to him, nod. Nearly forty years his seniors, they too had lived in Alaska. The gentleman, a lifelong employee of Standard Oil, first came to Alaska in 1948. A curmudgeon, he says little, while his wife warmly chats up the young family. She explains that she has noticed a difference from when she lived in Anchorage (“before the earthquake”), and now. After a long pause, the gentleman raises his hoary Texan voice, “The average temperature is four degrees warmer than it was when I lived there,” he says. Even in Alaska, oil men can see it happening.
I had not been looking for Global Warming when I booked my passage on the ferry. While I have been to the Interior both for work and pleasure, I was after a greater sense of the “Alaskan Frontier”, which has remained a cornerstone of American identity. Via train, ferry and car from San Francisco to Mt. McKinley, I sought to understand its significance today.
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It takes three days to get from the shores of Bellingham to the heart of the Inside Passage. Along the way we encounter fleets of cruise ships docked in Ketchikan, Sitka, and Juneau; interrupt the solitude of remote towns named Klemtu, Bella Bella, and Wrangell; see patches of forests, carved by logging, and phantom stands of yellow cedar, dead from warming winter temperatures: We pass islands - once mountains - and glide above fathomless channels carved by glaciers and sunk by melting ice sheets - ice sheets which once covered most of the continent. Every conversation about the weather is qualified by “the way it use to be” without any need of explanation.
With its primeval landscape of ice, rock and snow, a glacier is the best place to witness Global Warming. “You can see all sorts of rocks that you never could before,” says Daniel Humphrey, the prehistoric silence broken by three hundred barking dogs. We are standing middle of a dog sled camp, high on the Mendenhall Glacier, where Humphrey is a manager. Everyday tourists are helicoptered up at a hefty expense to visit the camp and go on a dogsled ride.
During his eight years at the company, Humphrey has noticed significant changes. Pointing to a chunk of cerulean blue ice clinging to a rock face, he says, “When I first started here, that glacier use to come all the way down, now it is just a little fragment.” More worrisome is the sister camp on the Denver Glacier just outside of Skagway. Drier than Juneau, the Skagway location had to close early because by mid August last year, it was already sitting on blue ice.
For two days I stay on the glacier, feeding dogs, shoveling shit and moving tents and dog houses skewed by melting snow. On the third day, we make it off the glacier. Below us is tens of thousands of years E. Linhart Money - 3 Read More...