The savage wildness of Alaska felt ever present even before the wheels of my plane touched down in Juneau. For hundreds of miles, snowy, glaciated mountains rippled down into the Pacific Ocean like bare skin descending into bathwater.
Having arrived a day early to explore the town, Adam picked me up at the Juneau International Airport, pulled me close, and kissed me through our protective face masks. His hands hugged my hips tightly. My heartbeat quickened. “Mask kiss!” Adam’s voice sounded playful and more confident than usual, like the time apart had helped him gain some clarity. “Wanna go explore downtown for a bit before our next flight?”
We climbed onto a shuttle bus, and I soon realized that, in Juneau, bald eagles are like crows or pigeons in any other city. They liked to camp out near the salmon hatchery and perch atop streetlights and traffic signs, jonesing for a free meal or a passing garbage truck.
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I was in the middle of the capital of the largest state in the union and about to have as many wildlife sightings as I’d had during the past several months. If this was city life, I couldn’t wait to get out into the parks. We hopped off the bus at the humble Driftwood Hotel and walked a few blocks to the town’s main street, hoping to grab lunch. The strip was a ghost town.
Most summers, multiple five-thousand-person cruise ships disembark each week, turning the entire town into a frenzy of tourists shopping for gold nuggets and whale-themed novelty socks. In the age of COVID-19, that revenue stream had dropped to zero. Boat trips into Glacier Bay National Park—the way in for 99 percent of all visitors—had been canceled for the year, adding yet another pandemic hurdle to my sixty-two-park mission.
Plus, the small town of Gustavus that hosts the park’s campground and visitor center had made it clear to me, via email, that they did not want tourists making the trek up. So like any good overachiever, I dug my nose into a pile of internet research and came up with a path less traveled—we would fly into the small, artsy town of Haines and visit the park by chartering a bush plane over its enormous rivers of ice.
Once settled into our hotel, we purchased an ambitious quantity of groceries for our four-night stay and cooked up a lavish pasta dinner. The sun set late in the great north, and at nine thirty, magic hour was humming through the town. Adam and I went for a walk around the harbor as the sky beyond the mountains lit up in lilac, like an old neon sign.
Two men in their twenties passed us carrying a bucket of fresh crabs. “Hey! Did you just catch those yourself?” Adam was often more outgoing than I was around strangers.
“Yeah, man! You got a place to cook ’em?”
“Uhhhh . . .” Adam and I looked at each other and then back at the men. “I mean, our hotel has a fridge and a small stovetop.”
“Well, then, here you go. Enjoy!” And with that, they handed us two sets of enormous Dungeness crab legs.
We stood on the street corner for several minutes, half laughing, half gasping for air in disbelief. Is this what Alaska is going to be like? We traipsed back to the hotel as the sun sank, hearts open wide, as if we had just crossed the border into some wondrous new country.
Late the next morning, I had a planning call with our bush pilot, Peter, to plot out the best course of action for our day trip into Glacier Bay. Peter picked us up out front of the hotel and, for the entire drive, talked about grizzly bears in town and how dead the tourist economy had been that year. He was at once surly and kind, like many Alaskans we’d encountered.
“Do you guys want to see my pet eagle?” Peter grabbed a Tupperware full of yellow cheese cubes and began scattering them onto the tarmac. Sure enough, a female bald eagle swooped down out of a nearby tree and began gobbling them up.
She was joined by a conspiracy of ravens who crept around her frenetically, trying to nab a free meal. As Adam and I stood befuddled, Peter got to work, readying the plane and radioing various officials who needed to know we’d soon be taking up airspace.
There was a quick buzzing of the propeller to warm the engine, and we were off. The ground dropped away, putting us face-to-face with a series of spectacular hanging glaciers suspended in the rocky green mountains that surround Haines. Glowing white saucers of ice, like milk left out for some giant’s lost kitten. Two-thousand-foot-tall waterfalls cascaded off the Rainbow Glacier, iridescent in the afternoon sun as our tiny plane soared by.
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“It might get a little bumpy here going over the pass,” Peter said with the confidence of an NFL quarterback, “but don’t worry, I’ll get you kids back in one piece.” The vintage Beaver dipped and rocked as we soared above the Davidson Glacier, knocking us around. My stomach seized up. I was determined not to puke. When we reached the pass’s high point, we had officially entered Glacier Bay, park number thirty-three.
I shivered as the air inside the cockpit grew colder, the surroundings outside a blinding shade of white. We had gained altitude quickly to sail over the snow-filled mountain pass, floating above a river of dirty blue ice lacerated with three-hundred-foot-deep crevasses that stretched down into the shadowy underbelly of the earth. A dark maze of icy chaos.
“Have you noticed a lot of changes in the ice, since you’ve been up here flying for so many years?” I was anxious to hear the news of climate change from people in remote areas who were facing it head-on. “Oh yeah,” Peter said. “In just the thirty years that I’ve been up here, I’ve seen a dramatic reduction in the glaciers. A bunch of ’em used to touch the water and don’t anymore.”
Peter brought the plane around in a loop as dark storm clouds crept across the nearby mountains. Time to go home. Up, up, up through the bitter wind as we flew back across the barren icefields of the Davidson Glacier and landed safely again in Haines.
Anchorage was like so many other northern industrial cities we had passed through—big, flat warehouse buildings; trains passing in the night; drifters with loaded backpacks roaming the streets. I rented a tricked-out four-wheel-drive Suburban camper so we could brave the infamous washboard McCarthy Road into Wrangell–St. Elias National Park.
Upset that Adam didn’t have any trail recommendations or road-trip playlists or much of anything to say to me, I could feel myself nitpicking at him as we traveled deep into the Alaskan countryside. Though the landscape was growing more picturesque by the mile, Adam’s face had been buried in his phone for hours, coordinating with his maid, his house renters, and his friends back home.
After weeks of facing his relationship indecision and lack of planning when it came to our big
road trip together, I finally snapped. “It breaks my heart that you’re so focused on Airbnb,” I croaked. Adam looked up from his phone. “It breaks my heart because…because I think you’ve been done with this relationship in one way or another for at least two months now, maybe more, and you haven’t had the heart to tell me, so I’ve just been going mad over here wondering why I’m dating a completely different person than I was a year ago.”
The two of us remained silent as we drove across the head-banging McCarthy Road and sunset began to pour its violent orange light across the forest surrounding us. When I crawled into bed in the back of the dusty Suburban, it was nearly midnight. I pulled the covers over my face and collapsed into a fetal position, willing myself to sleep.
I had an early wake-up call the next morning, so I rushed through breakfast and shuffled across the McCarthy footbridge to meet my shuttle for a guided alpine hike. Adam stayed behind. My guide, Brendan,and I began our day hiking down a rocky trail that paralleled the miles-long Root Glacier as it spilled out of the strikingly blue Stairway Icefall, seven thousand feet overhead.
He made a sharp right up a steep, scree-filled gully and began slowly ascending a patch of late-season snow. I followed behind, panting as the morning gray lifted and the afternoon sun came out to greet us. Soon, the scree fell away, and the two of us were scrambling up a near-vertical rock face covered in moss and lichen.
Meanwhile, Adam had been on an adventure of his own all day, sleeping in and strolling around the abandoned mine buildings and the main drag of McCarthy. When I arrived back at camp, he was behaving shockingly normally, as though his world weren’t falling apart. He suggested we walk into town and check out The Potato for dinner.
One pulled pork sandwich, a beer, and a pile of hand-cut curly fries later, Adam and I strolled down the mile-long path back to our campsite. I decided to broach the elephant in the room. “Adam, I don’t want to get into a huge fight or sobbing conversation, but some pretty big stuff was said yesterday, and I need to ask you a few clarifying questions.”
“Okay.”
“In the past, when you’ve mentioned ‘not having your emotional needs met,’ what does that mean to you?”
“Well, there’s this, like, quality of deep listening and connection that I get with some friends but not often enough with you.” I bit my tongue in a valiant effort to let him finish.
“It’s reciprocal with lots of slow back-and-forth questions,” he continued. “The best phrase I can come up with for it is ‘holding space.’”
By now, we were back at camp, sitting at the wooden picnic table next to the tricked-out Suburban. “So you’re telling me that I don’t hold space well enough? That you don’t feel emotionally safe or connected enough around me because I listen to you, but I don’t listen in the exact right way that you want?”
“Yes.”
The world teetered like a cheap carnival ride as I tried to steady myself against the pockmarked picnic table, Mount Blackburn staring me down with her staircase of icy teeth. The words erupted from my mouth. “I think we should break up.”
We drove back to Anchorage two days later, trying to get some ground under our feet after breaking our world apart. Still, I wasn’t ready to say goodbye just yet. “Are you open to finishing up Alaska together?” Saying it out loud made me nervous. “You know, since we already have so much booked and are generally getting along right now, you know, as friends.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve always wanted to come here, and part of me feels like we might even get along better moving forward, now that the pressure is off.”
I laughed awkwardly. Arriving back in Anchorage, we commenced with the usual housekeeping of grocery shopping, repacking our bags, and cleaning up the rented vehicle. As soon as we were able, I set a course south toward Seward and my thirty-fifth national park.
“It’s called Kenai Fjords National Park, but it could just as well be called Harding Icefield National Park.” Our trail guide, Emma, was a whiz at sharing obscure knowledge and ecological factoids as we made our way up a series of steep stairs cut into the slope of a mountain bordering the crevasse-filled Exit Glacier.
At the top of the trail, our trio gazed over the immense Harding Icefield, a thick white blanket of ice the size of Maui that every glacier in the park tumbled out of. Rising temperatures once felt nebulous and foreign, but now, standing so near to their immediate victims, they felt heart-bruisingly personal.
The following day, Adam and I climbed aboard a small tour boat for a daylong kayaking excursion with six other guests. Steven, our guide, possessed more knowledge about local birds and mammals than anyone I had met that year, and as our vessel steered past islands cluttered with thousands of nesting seabirds, I felt like I was living inside an episode of Planet Earth.
“Look over there!” Steven pointed toward a shadowy dip in the rock face where a cluster of fat seals lay resting. “Steller’s sea lions. They’re fast becoming a threatened species. Oh! And to our left are a couple of tufted puffins. Did you know that a group of puffins is called a circus?”
As the ride continued, a pod of Dall’s porpoises surfed in the wake along the front of our ship. Steven darted to the starboard side. “Whale!” he shouted, just as the fluke of its tail dipped underwater. I could hardly contain my excitement. I had never seen a humpback whale before.
The boat idled its engine and floated about a hundred yards from where we had seen the beast descend into the sea. Several minutes later, the whale came up, took a breath, flapped its massive tail, and dove. “That right there is a humpback whale, ladies and gentlemen. One of the largest mammals on earth.”
By the time we got to Aialik Bay, a long, narrow inlet where we’d spend the next few hours kayaking, I already felt sated. I had seen every animal that I’d come on the tour to witness. What could top that?
Steven and the boat’s captain readied the kayaks along a rocky beach, setting out oars, spray skirts, and neoprene gloves for each of us and showing us how to properly climb inside. His voice dipped low, and he spoke with an uncommon seriousness.
“We are about to enter the literal birthplace of kayaking. Aleutian Indians have been paddling and fishing in these waters for thousands of years. Even the modern word ‘kayak’ comes from the Native word ‘qayak.’ These right here are sacred waters.” Adam and I strapped into a tandem kayak and began to paddle the three miles to the Aialik Glacier. We could hear the rumblings of something huge and monstrous. It sounded like a car crashing into the sea.
“White thunder,” Steven remarked. “That’s what they call the sound of the enormous hunks of ice calving into the water. Don’t worry, we’re still a decent ways out.” I paddled until my triceps burned and my chest pounded. Until I was eye to eye with shimmering, pearlescent icebergs floating away from the giant glacier.
Until the entire group was sickeningly close to a four-hundred-foot-tall cliff of vertical ice. We linked our oars together, forming a large bobbing raft for stability as we opened our dry bags and began to eat lunch. I looked up from my turkey sandwich for an instant and felt a twinge of terror fly across my chest. A skyscraper-sized column of ice splintered loudly, breaking away from the rest of the glacier and landing with a deafening splash.
Our entire crew started whooping and hollering. “That was one of the best calving events I have ever seen!” Steven shouted. The entire day was steeped in an untamed vastness that I couldn’t quite comprehend. As our tour boat steered toward town, I felt a soul-stirring truth emerging in my core. I looked out at the immense hanging glaciers, crumbling rock cliffs, and incredibly robust seabirds and started to realize that if there was one thing big enough and bold enough to heal me, it was this dynamic landscape, right here, right now.
Like a pair of old friends who knew how and when to set their egos aside, Adam and I spent our remaining days in Alaska getting along. Dare I say we even had fun.
Getting to Gates of the Arctic and Kobuk Valley—two of the most remote national parks—would be nearly impossible without a private guiding service. After spending hours on the internet researching what would fit my budget, I ultimately decided to have a company build out a splurgy, custom five-night backpacking itinerary for us.
I flew to Fairbanks with Adam by my side and checked into a quirky, castle-shaped hotel. The owner of the guiding company soon picked us up and took us to his warehouse, a mecca for wilderness diehards that housed every piece of outdoor equipment one could ever dream of. There we met our guide, Erica. About my age and from the Midwest, she seemed to have a permanent relaxed smile on her face.
The small plane jolted from side to side as we neared the Arrigetch Valley, a steep gorge of granitic rock set high in the far-north Brooks Range. Instead of clenching my muscles in pinned anxiety, I tried to relax my insides and simply let the rocking be. It actually helped. We landed on a thick strip of gravel wash on the bank of the Alatna River. This was it. Gates of the Arctic.
The three of us would be alone for the next four nights with only the stuff we could strap to our bodies. In the middle of fucking nowhere. The farthest I’d ever been from civilization. We heaved our tremendous packs onto our shoulders, buckled our bear spray belts, and started hiking uphill and off trail with only a vague idea of where to go.
We zigzagged across uneven ground as we passed through a forest dotted with conifers and soapberry bushes. We laughed as our boots trampolined against an earth that was spongy with mosses and reindeer lichen. We sat in patches of tangerine-hued shrubs and ate our snacks. Then came the tussocks. The tussocks, which are tricky to walk on and even trickier to walk between, seemed built to sprain or break an ankle. These solid, foot-high lumps of grass and muck soon dominated the once pleasant tundra as we ascended higher into the valley.
By the time we made it to camp and pitched our tents on an uneven bed of squishy moss, we were all starving. Erica fired up her little stove and boiled water for herbal tea so that we could warm our insides before feasting on pesto pasta and falling wearily into our sleeping bags.
The next day came and went in a similar manner, the far-off spires of frosted white peaks growing tantalizingly closer the more we hiked. We passed a dollop of grizzly bear scat on the side of the trail that made my nerves do somersaults. We soaked our boots again on a perilous
stream crossing. When we arrived at our tents, pitched in a quiet meadow, Adam and I built a fire while Erica boiled water for macaroni and steeped herbal tea to warm our tired bones.
I fell asleep sated and blissed out. When I awoke, I felt terrible. My tonsils had swollen in the night like two enraged golf balls, and it hurt like hell to swallow. My body was harboring a high fever that ibuprofen couldn’t even dent. Is this the onset of COVID? I immediately feared for everyone’s safety. At least we were out in the open air. I spent much of the day shuffling between the kitchen tent and my sleeping bag, asking Adam and Erica to take turns bringing me tea and soup as a freezing rain pelted our base camp and low-hanging clouds rolled in.
When we got to the plane, I had a decision to make. Because I had no cough, we were pretty certain I hadn’t contracted the coronavirus. Our original plan had been to fly west to Kobuk Valley, the most remote and the last on my list of Alaskan parks. “I know you’re feeling pretty awful, but we can get you there if you want.”
Up we flew over the sharp fingernails of the Arrigetch. I slumped in the back seat as we soared over the vast, unspoiled Alaskan tundra. Jesse landed the small bush plane right onto the honey-colored sand of the Great Kobuk Dunes as the lingering northern sunset began its
hours-long slide into darkness. I could barely move. I hunched my way over to a suitable tent site, helped Adam secure the thin nylon structure, and flopped over onto my sleeping bag.
I had done it. I had visited all eight of the Alaskan national parks, and I felt like my life and my body were crumbling. Apart from a brief photo outing at sunset, I didn’t move for the rest of the evening. When dinnertime came, Adam brought me a bowl of noodle soup, and we watched half a movie on my phone while I slurped up what I could.
Sleep refused to come, and in the chilly expanse of the largest Arctic sand dunes, I listened as my bedfellow rustled his way out of the tent to pee in the middle of the night. “Emily! Get out here quick!” I wrestled my puffy jacket on at the speed of a mollusk, wondering what on earth could be so important.
A faint, ghostly arch hung high in the sky to the left of our tent, framing the northern edge of the horizon like a glowing white halo. Then, as if by magic, the haze began to flash and move, undulating like the apparition of a giant serpent. The northern lights.
Adam and I embraced under a full moon as the lights danced and whirled over our heads. Though our great northern adventure was coming to an end, I believed the earth was winking at us one last time, making sure we knew that things were going to be all right.
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This article is an edited excerpt from travel writer Emily Pennington’s book Feral, detailing her one-year journey to visit all U.S. National Parks. Follow her on Instagram.