The Final Frontiersman Read online

  The Trans-Alaska Pipeline was to be an engineering marvel. Traveling 800 miles over public domain, from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope, across the 150-mile-wide Brooks Range, south to Valdez, a small fishing village on the Prince William Sound with a fjord deep enough to accommodate large oceangoing tankers, Rogers C.B. Morton, who was Nixon’s second Secretary of the Interior, equated it with the Egyptian pyramids. For conservationists, the prospect of a pipeline was like staring into the face of the apocalypse, a scenario of industrial expansion into the far North that Bob Marshall, mountaineer, author, founder of the The Wilderness Society, and impassioned defender of the Arctic frontier, had prophesied nearly forty years earlier. Henry Pratt, Governor Keith Miller’s advisor, was unmoved by their objections. Summing up what many Alaskans felt, including those in Governor Miller’s administration, he said, with frontier bravado, “Hell, this country’s so goddamn big that even if industry ran wild, we could never wreck it….” For prodevelopment Alaskans, wary of the state’s budget problems, the pipeline represented a figurative shot in the arm for the Alaskan economy. The first oil flowed south on June 20, 1977, pumping 700,000 barrels of oil a day (its capacity is two million) and millions of dollars into the foundering Alaskan economy.

  For decades prior to the discovery of oil, geologists were convinced that there were significant deposits on Alaska’s north coast. Early European explorers of Alaska’s north coast wrote of oil seeping from the ground. After World War II, the U.S. Geological Survey was issued a directive to locate formations favorable to oil, and it produced a grid cut across the Alaskan landscape to aid in aerial surveys. Following the surveys, the federal government issued oil companies cheap leases to encourage exploration. The Israeli-Egyptian war in 1956, which shut down the Suez Canal to shipping, including all oil tanker traffic, convinced British Petroleum’s executives that the company would have to search for more reliable oil supplies elsewhere. Noticing the topographic similarities between the North Slope and Iran, BP’s exploration chief was confident that there was oil to be found. How much was the question.

  When oil was discovered in Prudhoe Bay, talk turned swiftly to a pipeline. Robert Anderson, the chairman of the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), declared that “pipeline and transportation studies would begin immediately,” and the land claims issues of Alaskan Natives suddenly catapulted to national prominence. With the discovery of oil, Native claims had become much more than an Alaskan issue; they became a national one. When Arab countries cut off oil supplies to the U.S. in 1973, proponents of the pipeline used this opportunity to claim that fuel shortages and accompanying economic and national security issues made North American resource development imperative. What they failed to say is that the oil would do nothing to ameliorate the country’s short-term crisis.

  Shortly after oil was discovered in Prudhoe Bay, Robert Anderson, ARCO’s chairman, and other oil company executives who had contributed handsomely to the Nixon campaign were pushing Nixon to appoint a Secretary of the Interior who would support their interests. Nixon came through, naming Walter J. Hickel, Alaska’s prodevelopment Republican governor, to the Interior Department’s top position. However, Stewart Udall, President Lyndon Johnson’s outgoing Secretary of the Interior, had a trick up his sleeve. Three days before leaving office, Udall, who was determined to delay the pipeline and the land-selection process until Native land claims were settled, signed Public Land Order 4582, referred to as the “super land freeze.” This order removed a whopping 262 million acres from “selection, settlement, location, sale and entry” until December 31, 1970. Udall’s action pleased conservationists, who, when they realized that the subdivison of the Alaskan landscape was inevitable, set their sights on sizeable sections of the Alaskan land pie, as did Native leaders.

  Prior to the discovery of oil and the ensuing land grab, the Alaska wilderness was open to anyone who wanted to line a boat up a river, peel logs, build a cabin, set up a fish camp, hunt for food. Though the land was public, few restrictions had been placed on what people could and could not do. The prospect of a pipeline set in motion an irreversible force that would end that historical freedom.

  ANCSA itself was a business transaction, motivated by profit. It was an attempt by the U.S. government to satisfy the land claims of Natives, which, if left unattended, had the potential to block the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Conservationists were so outraged by plans for the pipeline and by the prospect of Native lands being administered not by the federal government but by Native corporations forced to post profits that they demanded significant conservation provisions be written into ANCSA. One conservationist summed it up this way: “You can’t run a pipeline up the middle of a wilderness and still think of that place as wilderness.” Congress responded, because the environmental movement, which had steadily been gaining strength since the early 1900s, was now too powerful to be ignored. Included in ANCSA was a pivotal paragraph, 17(d)(2), instructing the Secretary of the Interior to set aside 80 million acres of national interest lands, henceforth called “d-2” lands, for possible federal protection.

  Disappointed but undeterred by his experience in the Northwest Territories, Heimo was back in Appleton by the end of June 1974, welding combines, hayrakes, and other farm machinery at Fox Tractor. He had tried to get on at Miller again, but they weren’t interested in hiring him. Two and a half months later, Fox laid him off.

  Erich Korth, Sr., had been laid off, too, and the prospect of his getting back to work soon was slim. Heimo was doing nothing but hunting, drinking, and coming home late, which only made Erich Korth more irritable. Heimo and his father hardly spoke. Mostly, they just tried to ignore each other.

  Heimo was watching television one day when his father walked into the room. “He reeked of beer,” Heimo remembers. “I said, ‘Jesus Christ, Dad, you’re drunk again?’ ” Erich Korth couldn’t contain himself. The hypocrisy of it—his drunk of a son scolding him, telling him to lay off the booze. He balled up his fist and drove his knuckles into Heimo’s head. Heimo had a choice—he could either lash out at his father or he could restrain himself and walk away. Heimo walked away, leaving Erich Korth standing in the middle of the room. “ ‘Come on, hit me,’ ” Heimo remembers his father screaming. “ ‘Just try to hit me.’ ”

  Heimo was tired of it. By mid-January 1975, things were about as bad as they could get between Heimo and his father, and Heimo knew he had to get out of the house. One evening he and some friends had plans to drink at Sarge’s. While Heimo waited at the kitchen table for a friend to pick him up, he paged through the classifieds in the January issue of Outdoor Life. He came upon a section for Alaskan hunting guides. The first ad he read was from a guide by the name of Keith Koontz, who was advertising hunting trips in Alaska’s Brooks Range. Heimo decided he would write to him. He asked Koontz if he needed a helper, someone to do the camp stuff—prepare meals, wash dishes—and pack out the animals the hunters shot.

  It was a biography of Daniel Boone that had planted the seed. After reading that book in his early teens, Heimo was filled with the idea of losing himself in North America’s last remaining wildernesses. Early on, he had settled on Canada’s Northwest Territories. But his experience there changed all that. While in Canada, he had heard about another mountain range in Alaska’s inhospitable Interior—the Brooks Range, ultima Thule. From the moment he left Yellowknife, getting to the Brooks Range was his primary ambition.

  Three weeks passed, and Heimo had given up all hope that Koontz would reply when a letter came. The guide expressed interest in hiring him as a packer, but he needed references. Within a few days, Heimo sent him what he wanted.

  Heimo says now, “I wish Mom was around to tell the story. She was so excited for me. But she was always my ally. I watched for the mail like a kid waiting for Santa Claus. When the letter finally came, and I got the job, I was elated. I was jumping up and down. Finally, I was leaving for Alaska.”

  Jim Kryzmarcik, Heimo’s friend from Camp M
ecan, says, “God, Heimo was excited. He called me up and said he was leaving for Alaska. I thought he was crazy, but there was no stopping him. It sounded like a great adventure, but I didn’t think he’d last. I thought I’d see him back in six months, to be honest with you. But he had the desire big-time. He used to walk around with a heavy backpack to train for being a packer in the Brooks Range.”

  Steve Laabs confirms the story. “We were shooting a lot of skeet and trap at the time—Heimo was determined to be a great shot before he left for Alaska—and Heimo would walk out to the gun club. It was eight miles from his house. He’d load his backpack with rocks. He’d walk there, shoot, and then walk home. We always offered him a ride, but he never took it.”

  Roland Pruno says, “I always knew he’d do it. But I was worried about him, too. He was still afraid to go into the woods at night. I knew he’d have to get over that quick.”

  Eight months after sending his intial letter to Keith Koontz, on a 95degree day in early August 1975, with the air hanging heavy with humidity, Heimo left for Alaska to seek what he’d come to believe was his destiny. He and his father had had a ferocious argument that morning. Though Heimo can’t recall what the argument was about, he does remember how mad his father was. “The old man was pissed. God, was he pissed. But that wasn’t unusual. He was always ticked off about something. I was so happy to be getting away. I knew I wasn’t coming back.”

  Irene Korth kissed and hugged her son, wished him luck, told him that she loved him and was proud of him, and dabbed at her tears with a tissue. She’d bought Heimo a round-trip ticket just in case something went wrong. Secretly she hoped that he’d have a change of heart. Heimo hugged his little brother, Tom, who at ten understood only that his big brother was leaving for Alaska and was excited by that. Angie, Lisa, and Erich, Jr., had said their good-byes the night before. But Erich Korth wouldn’t budge. He sat on the couch reading the paper, stewing in his anger, and didn’t so much as say good-bye. When Heimo left, his father didn’t even look at him. To hell with him, Heimo thought. I’m outta here.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Final Frontier

  Along the Old Crow drainage lies a tremendous chunk of wild country, dominated by hogback ridges that top out at 2,800 feet, boggy lowlands, impenetrable tundra, countless creeks, tundra lakes, and ephemeral ponds, which for nearly eight months of every year becomes a vast, navigable plain of windswept snow. At 68 degrees latitude, this is the taiga, a Russian word meaning, “land of little sticks,” the upper limit of the world’s northern forests. Four-hundred-year-old black spruces with trunks no thicker than broom handles and hip-high black spruces, almost a century old, resemble weary, white-robed mendicants. They are bent low by snow and the force of fierce southerly winds. Yet they are survivors, holding on for dear life in only centimeters of soil in the open tundra flats where no other tree can flourish. Along the river and creek beds grow balsam poplar, referred to as cottownwood, head-high willows and alders, and stands of white spruce, reaching up the waterways like God’s fingers.

  This is the Frigid Zone, and only ten miles north of here, the names of trees are preceded by the word dwarf, as in “dwarf willow” and “dwarf birch.” Only thirty feet from the rivers and the tumbling creeks, the trees hug the ground, growing no higher than a few feet. Much of the land is tundra, a maze of spongy, waterlogged clumps of sphagnum moss called tussock, muskeg, hummock, or in the vernacular of old-time Alaskans “niggerheads.” Walking on tussocks is like walking on a trampoline while someone is bouncing; it requires extraordinary balance.

  Though people have traveled this land for perhaps as long as 10,000 years, few have done more than pass through. Prior to Heimo, there were maybe two or three other trappers who called this country home, and they lived lightly on the land. Before the trappers, small, roving bands of Athabaskan Indian subsistence hunters, members of the Gwich’in Nation, the “people of the caribou,” and coastal Inupiat Eskimos followed the movement of game through this inhospitable land. They lived in caribou tents and pulled snow sleds loaded with their few possessions. Forced by weather and erratic game patterns to be perpetually on the move, they came and went, never lingering for long. For the ancient Arctic hunters, life was both a joy and a struggle, plagued by the twin dangers of hunger and death.

  The Gwich’in domain extended from the Yukon River north over the Brooks Range to the Arctic Ocean and east to the Peel River in Canada. The Gwich’in culture is Alaska’s oldest. Its people, anthropologists claim, are close relatives of the Navahos and Apaches of the desert Southwest. When the Gwich’in weren’t fighting off famine and chasing game or warring with coastal Eskimos or far-ranging Inuit Eskimos from the Mackenzie River Delta in Canada, they lived nearer the Yukon River in caribou-skin huts.

  Today the Old Crow drainage is still raw wilderness, the ne plus ultra. It is also a region without names. The Old Crow drainage, as much of Interior Alaska, was once infused with Native history and strung together with names recalling significant events or noting prominent features—to the Gwich’in, the Porcupine River was Ch’oonjik (pronounced Ch with the accent on the second syllable), or “porcupine quill along the river,” and the Brooks Range was Gwazhal—which guided Native travelers from river bend to river bend and mountain to hill. But today those names have largely been forgotten, omitted from modern maps and unknown to a generation of Natives who no longer have a need to travel deep into the country on extended subsistence hunting journeys.

  Because they use the land, Heimo and his family have names for the Old Crow’s prominent features—Rundown Mountain, Thunder Mountain, Krin Creek—but these have not made it onto modern maps either.

  In early January 2002 I purchased two 1:63, 360-series topographic maps at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. When I unrolled them on the long counter at the map office, the dizzying relief lines, the resplendent green, and the sheer number of names confused me until I realized that I’d been given the wrong quadrangles. I was looking at two maps of the Talkeetna area, a fertile, mountainous country just north of Anchorage. When the woman behind the counter returned with the correct ones of the Old Crow and Coleen River drainages, I was relieved to find vast areas awash with white and blotches of green nearly devoid of names. Even the U.S. Geological Surveyors, who superimposed a mathematical grid of six-mile squares over the landscape, refrained from the temptation to name. Perhaps they were humbled enough by what they saw from the air—the area was only cursorily field checked—and understood the meagerness of their efforts to assign names to a land they didn’t know. Only the large rivers and a few of the nearby peaks are spoken for: Yankee Ridge, Horse Hill, Ammerman Mountain. Hundreds of creeks remain anonymous, as do all of the tundra ponds and lakes and the cold, detached spires of the Brooks Range, only fifteen miles away from the Korth’s cabin. Pure, white, and adamantine, these peaks are the apotheosis of this epic landscape, as awesome in their physical presence as their mythic evocations.

  Apart from the international boundary swath and an aborted attempt to establish a winter tractor trail during the winter of 1955-1956 to connect the Yukon River with Distant Early Warning (DEW) line sites in the Canadian Arctic, man’s presence here has been inconsequential. All this unspoiled space, however, is something of an illusion. Only 115 miles north lies one of the world’s largest industrial complexes, over 1,000 square miles of North Slope oil development, including Prudhoe Bay. But the 5,000- and 6,000-thousand-foot peaks of the Brooks Range protect one’s view north and shield the Old Crow from the coast’s brown nitrogen oxide cloud and also help to shelter the imagination from the ugly truth. The DEW line sites are the result of a military establishment that regarded Alaska as a strategic piece of property in a paranoid superpower game and erected the sites during the Cold War years to warn of a Soviet invasion from the north. But the winter tractor trail and the attempt to connect those sites with Alaska’s Interior failed. Afterward the Air Force, or its civilian contractors, jettisoned much of its equipment al
ong the Canada border. Two trailers, tanks from gas tankers, piles of chains, and tires were left along the Old Crow River. Yet, other than the junk along the border and the tractor trail, whose thirty-foot-incision through the trees and the tundra is still visible today, man has left few signs of his occupation.

  The nearest villages are more than one hundred miles away—a two-to-four-day journey by snowmachine if the rivers are frozen solid and the snow isn’t too deep; about the same traveling downriver by boat, much longer going upriver; almost two weeks in summer on foot, three weeks minimum in winter on snowshoes without a trail. Yet for the Korths these villages represent outposts of civilization, reference points in their physical, political, and psychic landscape.

  Kaktovik, an Inupiat Eskimo village with a population of 250, lies 115 miles to the north. The Korths are separated from Kaktovik and the small island on which it is found, Barter Island, by the serrated peaks of the Brooks Range and a small swath of coastal plain, a floorboard-flat area of tundra, ponds, and rivers.

  Until 1945, when Barter Island became a radar site for the Distant Early Warning system, the residents of Barter Island lived much as their ancestors did. They were whale hunters who lived in sod huts along the coast. Shortly after the DEW site was constructed, however, a school was built in Kaktovik, and people began to settle in town. Today, Kaktovik is part of the wealthy Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, the richest, by far, of Alaska’s thirteen Native corporations, and one of eight villages (Wainwright, Point Lay, Point Hope, Nuiqsut, Atqasak, Anaktuvuk Pass, and the city of Barrow) encompassed by the affluent North Slope Borough, which collects taxes on oil leases. Though the people of Kaktovik still trap Arctic fox, wolves, and wolverines in the foothills of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and still fish and hunt along the coast for waterfowl, polar bear, caribou, bearded and hair seals, and bowhead whales, most support oil development in the refuge. Oil money has brought them a new high school and gymnasium, a swimming pool, a power plant, streetlights, running water, new homes, trucks, ATVs, boats, and countless other personal possessions. Their support for drilling, however, is qualified. Because whaling is still an important tradition, most strenuously object to offshore development in their whaling grounds.