The Adventurer's Son(14)
After my first year at APU and during our first full summer back home, I set off with our son to explore Umnak, a remote Aleutian island of geysers, glaciers, and fog. We’d moved back for just this sort of experience and I was eager to get started.
Chapter 7
Umnak
Cody, sixth birthday, 1993.
Courtesy of the author
Hand in hand in late summer 1993, six-year-old Cody and I walked off a jet into wind-blown mist and brash gusts of rain. The wet air smelled of beached kelp and diesel. Round green hills of tall grass and broken cliffs rose above a bay lined with sheet-metal warehouses and filled with boats of all sizes. We’d landed in Dutch Harbor among the Aleutian Islands, far south of mainland Alaska. It felt warm for mid-August, when autumn lurks just around the corner in most of the rest of the state. Dutch seemed too small to be the richest fishing port on earth, where crab boats, trawlers, and other vessels deliver their catch for the world’s seafood markets.
Among the three hundred islands of the Aleutian chain, I had settled on Umnak—just west of Dutch Harbor—because of its geysers and history. The ruins of Fort Glenn, a secret American military base from World War Two, sprawl across one end, while the Aleut village of Nikolski nestles in a bay on the other. Between these two sites of human habitation stretches a verdant wilderness of rolling hills, black rocks, and volcanoes with tongue-twisting names like Vsevidof and Recheshnoi. Umnak’s geysers, the only ones north of Yellowstone, were the real draw, a geologic wonder I hoped to share with my son.
I wanted to walk the sixty miles from Fort Glenn to Nikolski. I’d done my homework and found the geysers on a map of Alaska’s geothermal features, then phoned an old geologist friend, Roman Motyka, for information. Motyka sent me his published journal articles describing Umnak’s thermal features in scientific detail. He said a single family lived at Fort Glenn and harvested the island’s feral cattle. Motyka also told me about a guide named Scott Kerr who’d made Nikolski his home. After talking to a half dozen people familiar with Umnak and poring over maps of the island, I sketched out a route suitable for a soon-to-be first-grader.
From Fort Glenn’s airfield we would head west along the Pacific coast, then hop over the island to the geyser basin on the Bering Sea side, then back again to follow the bases of Recheshnoi and Vsevidof along the Pacific. The ocean side, peppered with black beaches on a ragged coastline, would offer tide pools, Cody’s favored habitat for exploration and discovery. The island also felt safe from Alaska’s biggest hazards: Umnak has neither bears nor large glacial rivers.
But danger did exist there. Separating the chilly Bering Sea from the warm Pacific Ocean, the Aleutians suffer the worst weather in the world. Always windy, often rainy, mostly foggy, the archipelago is known as the birthplace of storms. While winters rarely see subzero cold, summers are cool and cloudy. Like mountaintops above the tree line, the Aleutians support no trees or shrubs over knee high.
With hypothermia a very real threat, especially for a little boy, Umnak’s weather worried me. A one-piece Gore-Tex suit over long underwear and fleece pants and sweater would seal him in from the incessant wet wind. Pulling on his orange rain pants and jacket would protect him from a driving rain. I would fuel him with his favorite snacks kept handy all day, then quickly have him change into dry clothes each night for warm sleep. Our dome-style mountain tent would shelter us from gale-force wind and rain. And by tucking a copy of Charlotte’s Web into my pack to read aloud before bed, we could bring a little of home with us to the wild.
Full protection from Umnak’s weather was key, but the remoteness itself between Nikolski and Fort Glenn was a risk. Remoteness was not unfamiliar to us. We had driven for days across the Australian Outback when we would see few other cars. As a family, we’d day-hiked in the front country and backpacked for two and three days in the backcountry, including trips with grizzly bears and glacier river crossings. Keeping Cody safe would be simpler without bears or big rivers, but we would need to avoid accidents with a careful, cautious route choice.
Peggy encouraged our journey. She knew firsthand how time spent together in the wilderness strengthens bonds and relationships. And she knew that I would be sensitive to Cody’s needs and fears—looking after him, keeping him safe. But she also voiced her concern: “What if something happens to you?”
My answer begged her question: “Peggy, what could happen? I’ll be careful.”
“You said there are wild cattle. I don’t want you guys unprotected if a bull decides to charge. You should take a gun.” I packed a .44 Magnum.
The responsibility to keep both Cody and me safe from hypothermia, drowning, animal attacks, and injuries went without saying. But beyond safety, I wanted this trip to initiate a lifetime of shared wilderness adventures. For that, Cody needed a profound experience that he would want to repeat. Like most parents, Peggy and I replicated the positive aspects of our own parents’ child-rearing, tried to avoid the negative, and defaulted to the rest. If I wanted Cody to join me on future wild trips, then I needed to notice what interested him.
FROM THE DUTCH Harbor airport, Cody and I hopped in a taxi and met up with George Ripley, organizer of the first Wilderness Classic. At George’s house, out of the wind and rain, we talked about our trip. Our pilot, Tom Madsen, had been flying a big Japanese group of mountain climbers and their camera crew up and down the chain all summer. Every island hop needed multiple flights and there would be an empty seat the next morning. Madsen could drop us off at Fort Glenn on his way to the Islands of Four Mountains, just beyond Nikolski.