A ram watches us from a high point of rock; his flock grazes above. Mark kneels by a mountain stream trying to photograph the crosshatched ripples of converging currents. Dana glasses the high ridges for bear, shotgun at his side. John is fishing back at the river. Mike, Maureen and Ginger are eating cheese and crackers and identifying the many flowers (with the help of a guidebook) that I have not mentioned. I sit on the grass scribbling these notes, with a clump of Siberian asters fluttering at my elbow.

This is what I am writing:

Alaska is not, as the state license plate asserts, “the Last Frontier.” Alaska is the final big bite on the American table, where there is never quite enough to go around. “We’re here for the megabucks,” said a construction worker in the Bunkhouse at Kaktovik, “and nothing else.” At the Bunkhouse the room and board costs $ 150 per day, on the monthly rate, but a cook can earn $ 10,000 a month. Others much more. Alaska is where a man feels free to destroy an entire valley by placer mining, as I could see from the air over Fairbanks, in order to extract one peanut-butter jar full of gold dust. Flying from Barter Island to the Kongakut, pilot Gil Zemansky showed me the vast spread of unspoiled coastal plain where Arco, Chevron and others plan oil and gas exploration in the near future, using D-7 bulldozers pulling sledges, thus invading the caribou calving grounds and tearing up the tundra and foothills of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, last great genuine wilderness area left in the fifty United States. Under the heavy thumb of James Watt, the Fish and Wildlife Service apparently has no choice but to knuckle under to the demands of the oil industry. In southeast Alaska the industrial tree farmers who now run the U.S. Forest Service are allowing the logging companies to clearcut and decimate vast areas of the Tongass National Forest, home of our national bird, the bald eagle, and officially, ostensibly, the legal property of the American public—all of us. With Dracula placed in charge of the blood bank (as Congressman Morris Udall has said), Alaska, like the rest of our public domain, has been strapped down and laid open to the lust and greed of the international corporations. “Last Frontier”? Not exactly: Anchorage, Fairbanks and outposts like Barter Island, with their glass-and-aluminum office buildings, their airlift prefab fiberboard hovels for the natives and the workers, their compounds of elaborate and destructive machinery, exhibit merely the latest development in the planetary expansion of space-age sleaze—not a frontier but a high-technology slum. For Americans, Alaska is the last pork chop.

What then is a frontier? The frontier, in my view, is that forgotten country where men and women live with and by and for the land, in self-reliant communities of mutual aid, in a spirit of independence, magnanimity and trust. (As Henry Thoreau once said.) A few people, but not many—few of the natives and even less of the whites—still attempt to inhabit Alaska in such a manner. The majority, it appears, or at least the majority of the vocal and powerful, are here for the profits. For the megabucks.