On the Ridge Between Life and Death by David Roberts

Author:David Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

In the fall of 1967, a month before our wedding, Sharon had moved into the tiny house, converted from a garage, that I had rented on York Street, in a leafy neighborhood some dozen blocks north of the DU campus. For months and even years thereafter, the novelty of living together as husband and wife would retain its charm. We were playing house together, but for keeps. Around the English Department, we were accepted as a “cute couple,” invited to dinner parties by our professors.

I had only my ill-starred affair with Lisa with which to compare this new arrangement. In the melodrama I had made of my adolescence, I had felt that it was essential to keep Lisa a secret. No one had ever invited her and me to a dinner party. The passion of our furtive nights in Green Mountain Cemetery had had a doomed urgency about it that was, I now realized, the antithesis of marriage. The horror of the domestic that had always lurked just beneath my skin was still there, at age twenty-four, and during Sharon’s and my Denver years, on humdrum evenings when I was too tired or drunk to concentrate on The Faerie Queene or Samson Agonistes, I felt the dull throb of quiet desperation.

It was to Alaska that I turned for a solution. By the spring of 1968, I thought, I had come up with the perfect recipe to integrate marriage with mountaineering. It was called the Brooks Range.

Stretching 700 miles across Alaska north of the Arctic Circle, the Brooks Range then comprised the last great roadless tract in the United States. Though it lay a solid 300 miles north of the Alaska Range, a climatic fluke had spared these mountains the bad weather and heavy glaciation that smothered all the other massifs in the forty-ninth state. Ranging between latitudes 67° and 69° N., the Brooks lay almost completely beyond the northern limit of treeline. It was an empty wilderness of tundra, rushing rivers, and unnamed peaks. Huge swaths of the range had scarcely been explored, even by government surveyors.

Until the 1890s, the Brooks Range had been the homeland for nomadic bands of Inupiaq, inland Eskimos. With the dwindling of the caribou herds and the advent of miners, whalers, and missionaries, however, the headwaters of such great rivers as the Colville, the Noatak, the Koyukuk, and the Chandalar were swiftly depopulated. No longer self-sufficient, the natives began to settle into symbiotic squalor with white traders in such bleak coastal villages as Barrow, Kotzebue, and Shishmaref. By 1968, only a handful of lonely outposts, some of them derelict mining towns, crept toward the range from the south: Bettles, Wiseman, Ambler, and the like. The single town within the Brooks Range proper was Anaktuvuk Pass, near the headwaters of the John River, a Nunamiut village whose 1968 population was about thirty-five men, women, and children.

The highest peak in the Brooks Range is Mount Isto, at 9,060 feet, way over on the eastern edge of the mountain chain, not far from the Canadian border.

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