We scramble up a pile of scree and eat lunch on the summit, twenty-five hundred feet above the river, five thousand feet above sea level. Snowy peaks lift hoary heads (as John Muir would say) in most—not all—directions. We are in that part of the Brooks Range called the Romanzof Mountains, which recalls the former colonizers of the Alaskan territory. To the Russians Alaska must have seemed like merely a two-bit extension of Siberia. Extreme East Slobbovia. No wonder they parted with it so cheaply.

Americans think Alaska is big. The Mackenzie Territory of northwest Canada is bigger. Siberia is several times bigger than both combined. So much for surface extension. If the state of Utah, which consists mostly of mountains, plateaus, mesas, buttes, pinnacles, synclines, anticlines, folds, reefs, canyons and vertical canyon walls, were ironed out flat it would take up more room on a map than Texas. What does that prove? It’s what is there, or here, now, that matters. So much for chauvinism. Most of the mountains around us, so far as we know, have never been climbed by anybody but the Dall sheep. The majority have not even been named, except for the most prominent, like Michelson (9,239 feet) and Chamberlin (9,131).

We return to camp by a different route, finding fresh bear sign on the way—torn-up sod, where the bear was rooting for marmots and ground squirrels; a well-trod bear trail; a messy pile of bear dung. Dana carries his shotgun slung on shoulder, but we stay alert as we march along. There is an animal out here that is bigger than we are. And he sings, as he rollicks along, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for I am the evilest motherfucker in the valley.”

We tramp through a mile of muskeg at the foot of the hills. Now we see what the rubber boots are for. Muskeg consists of tussocks of balled-up grass, each tussock the size of a human head, all rooted in a bog. The thoughtless locals down in Fairbanks call these unstable obstacles “nigger heads” but “Swede heads” would be more appropriate, for they are blond, straight haired and long-headed. It is difficult to walk in the soft muck between them, even more difficult to walk upon or over them. Some “desert” this is. True, the average annual rainfall and snowfall is only between eight and ten inches. But the permafrost, the nearly universal permafrost, that hidden layer of never-thawing impermeable ice, prevents water from sinking below the surface of the ground. The North Slope is our swampiest desert; Alaska, our biggest, boggiest, buggiest state. We lurch and stumble through the mire, and as we advance great shimmering hosts of mosquitoes rise eagerly from the weeds to greet us. Dripping in sweat and the greasy oil of insect repellent, we stagger on. Takes guts to live in Alaska, no doubt about it. I am favorably impressed, once again, by the pluck and hardihood of these people, both native and white. I wonder though, sometimes, about their native intelligence.