Classic Krakauer: After the Fall, Mark Foo's Last Ride and Other Essays From the Vault by Krakauer Jon

Author:Krakauer, Jon [Krakauer, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Adventure, Travel
ISBN: 9780525562733
Goodreads: 37537853
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-02-27T08:00:00+00:00

Gates of the Arctic

The route climbed to a high divide that was notched like a gunsight between bald granite cliffs. Humping a big load up the pass, I was preoccupied with the weight biting into my shoulders and the rocks shifting underfoot, so I didn’t see the bear until it was less than 75 yards away. I paused to catch my breath, glanced up, and there he was: a 350-pound grizzly, loping across the talus that spilled down from the notch. Because the wind was at the bear’s back he hadn’t yet noticed me, but a single route led over the divide, and I was smack in the animal’s path.

As grizzlies go, it was a relatively small one. His bulk would have dwarfed any lineman in the NFL, however, and the beast’s dull, tiny eyes did not convey congenial intent. I was deep in the Alaskan Brooks Range, well north of the Arctic Circle, so there were no trees for me to climb. I didn’t have a gun. Running, I knew, might invite attack. Too scared to breathe, I tried to remain calm but felt my mouth go dry.

The bear kept coming. At thirty yards, catching my scent, he stopped abruptly and reared onto his hind legs. His shaggy blond fur rippled in the breeze. His arms were as thick as spruce logs. Stories of gruesome bear maulings fast-forwarded through my brain. The grizzly sniffed the air, stared at me, sniffed some more. And then he dropped to all fours and bolted in the opposite direction, sprinting across a jumble of tank-trap boulders at a speed that defied belief.

The date was July 2, 1974. Two decades later, the memory is still vivid. For a long time after the bear ran off, I sat on a rock and just listened to the pounding of my heart. It was an hour after midnight. Mosquitoes swarmed around my face. Far above the divide, a prow of jagged granite burned orange in the twilight, illuminated by a sun that never set. Ranks of nameless mountains marched into the distance as far as I could see.

Over the preceding weeks I’d become attuned to wolf song and the whistle of golden plovers, walked through a snorting tide of caribou, gazed down from untrod summits, gorged on fat grayling pulled from crystalline streams. And now I’d stared into the eyes of Ursus arctos horribilis, only to discover that the star of my nightmares was even more discombobulated by the encounter than I was. I would see four more grizzlies before the month was out.

I’d climbed and fished in the emptiest reaches of the American West, but Alaska made the wilds of the Lower 48 seem insipid and tame, a toothless simulacrum. In the Arctic, for the first time in my life I was surrounded by real wilderness. Even as a callow twenty-year-old, I understood that such an experience, in the late-twentieth century, was a rare and wondrous privilege.

Six years later, in 1980, the United States Congress recognized

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