“If it’s a brown bear lie down and play dead. But be sure it’s a brown bear. If it’s a black bear, make a lot of noise to scare it away.” The young woman hiker in Nike running shoes and a red windbreaker turned to me nonchalantly, as if her advice was the most natural conversation in the world.

We were on a gravel trail alongside the Mendenhall Glacier outside of Juneau, Alaska, only 13 miles from the downtown and the state capitol building. Opposite, above a brilliant turquoise lake, layered with flat sheets of ice breaking up in the spring thaw, rose a jagged wall of blue ice, sheared with gaping crevasses. As I kept an eye out for bears, hoping I could tell brown ones from black, it slowly dawned on me that Alaska was larger and wilder than I had expected. Much wilder.

Bears, moose, wolves and eagles have frequented the forests of Southeast Alaska for millennia. Man is in many ways an interloper, his hold on the land tenuous at best. Later that week I rode a tramway to the summit of Mt Roberts, high overlooking Gastineau Channel and the town of Juneau. Below me a narrow strip of ant-sized houses and office buildings clustered around the harbor, stretching a few miles to the airport and across the channel to Douglas Island. Beyond them in all directions were forests and mountains. In the distance snow-capped peaks rose over the waters. The small settlement seemed inconsequential in comparison.

From the top of the tramway a rough trail led into the spruce forest. Past the end of the short hiker’s loop lay four hundred miles of unbroken wilderness. These were the historic lands of the Tlingit Indians, the earliest inhabitants of the region. Tammie Mercer, a young Tlingit woman, showed me around the visitor’s center and explained the role of Alaskan Native corporations. To settle native land claims, the US government in 1971 gave hundreds of millions of dollars to the Tlingit, Haida and other native peoples. Each tribe set up a corporation to manage and invest the funds for the benefit of the community. Goldbelt, the company which built the tramway, has active investments in the tourist industry and reserves one third of the jobs on its projects for Tlingit shareholders.

The Tlingit lived in Southeast Alaska long before Russians fur traders crossed the Bering Straits in the 1700’s. Their culture, once suppressed, is now returning. One foggy afternoon in Juneau’s harbor I met a young Tlingit girl, Elizabeth Hovis, a dark haired student at Juneau Douglas High School. Growing up in the town of Angoon on nearby Admiralty Island, she remembers hearing her grandmother speak the Tlingit language. She became so interested that she started classes in her high school to help other students learn their native tongue. The tribe is divided into two clans, Raven and Eagle. “You inherit your tribe from your mother, and marry someone from the opposite tribe,” she explained. “I’m Eagle, and a princess as well. My father was a chief.” As we spoke I caught a glimpse of cultural roots which ran very deep, part of the land itself.

To see more of the land, away from the cities, I took an eight-day cruise southbound from Juneau to Seattle. The thousand mile journey winds through the protected waters of the Inside Passage. Our boat, the M/V Spirit of Endeavour was smaller than most, carrying only a hundred passengers, and offered a more intimate look at the glaciers and wildlife.

The morning after sailing from Juneau we awoke to a surprise. Surrounding our boat, as far as we could see, was ice. Jagged blue-green floes and white pan ice floated in a grey sea. On the shore were great tidewater glaciers which from time to time calved icebergs with a great rushing boom. Glacier Bay National Park contains twelve major glaciers, the longest stretching over forty miles across the border into Canada. Kevin Richards, a resident National Park ranger, had come on board during a brief stop at the entrance to the bay. He explained how Glacier Bay, first seen by Europeans in 1794 (by the British Captain Vancouver), has receded over 65 miles in just over 200 years. Glaciologists have studied the ebb and flow of the ice, identifying a series of major and minor glaciations over the ages. Within the park wildlife is abundant – moose, black and brown bears, timber wolves, mountain goats, river otter, mink, marmots and many seabirds.

Marine mammals are plentiful in Alaskan waters, though their numbers have been much reduced from hunting. In the quiet waters of Icy Strait we sighted a humpback whale. Turning the boat to follow the distinctive spouting of water, the captain approached closely, anticipating where the whale would surface after a deep dive. With another spout, an arch of the back and the flash of a huge tail fin, the whale surfaced and went under again.

Further south in narrow Peril Strait in Chichagof Island, brown harbor seals dozed on rocky outcroppings. On the steep and narrow cliffsides above the channel, several white bearded mountain goats grazed, bounding away when the boat approached. Twice we sighted bears, munching on berries at the forest’s edge.

The Tlingit lived off the natural bounty of the Southeast waters, hunting deer, bear and seal, fishing for salmon and gathering berries. They lived in communal villages, their large houses up to 100 feet long. The animals of the forest also came alive in the sacred stories, passed on by storytellers. Eagle, Raven, Wolf, Whale, all of the tribe’s totems, were well known to every member of the community. Only certain people were privileged to tell each story, and then only at the right time, sometimes in dance.

Tribal stories were recorded in tall carved cedar totem poles. A village might have several dozen, some for memorials to past chiefs, others for welcoming or as part of a house structure. In the town of Sitka on the outer shore of Baranoff Island I walked through the gentle spruce forests of Sitka National Historical Park. Eighteen Tlingit and Haida poles have been carefully reproduced. Each is a vertical sequence of bird, man and animal faces, wings of a bird and symbolic figures, carved and lightly painted with reds, blues and blacks. The origins of some of the stories were lost in the nineteenth century when first Russian, then American, settlers suppressed the Tlingit culture.

Fur traders for the Russian American Company arrived in Sitka in 1799 from their northern settlements on Kodiak Island. There they built a small wooden fort on land ceded by the Tlingit chief Ska-yut-lelt. Not long after, a Tlingit war party attacked, wiping out the fledgling colony using guns traded from the Americans. The Russians were undaunted and settled again, forcing the Tlingit from their ancestral lands.

The Russians brought with them their religion, Russian Orthodox Christianity. With the encouragement of a rugged priest Ivan Veniaminov, later canonized as St Innokenti, many Tlingit eventually converted. Today the barred crosses of two steeples rise over St Michael’s Orthodox Cathedral in the center of Sitka. Over 90% of the congregation is Native Alaskan – Tlingit, Aleut and Eskimo.

Eager to see the cathedral, renowned for its gilt icons and elegant interior, I wandered in during our shore stay and was surprised to find myself in the midst of an Easter Monday service. Candles flickered and glowed throughout the nave and flowers decorated the icons. A golden-robed priest with a full beard circled the altar, swinging a censer to the chants of the choir. Four elderly Tlingit women and a young choir director sang a series of hymns, psalms and troparions, in English, Russian and Tlingit languages, joy mingling with sadness in their song.

Afterwards I stopped at the old fort on the crest of a grassy hillock. The handful of rusty black cannons overlooking the sound lay silent, reminders of a bittersweet past.

Conflict continues in Alaska as the state struggles to protect its environment and to reconcile competing interests. Although over a fourth of the land is part of the federal parks & forest system, some politicians and businessmen are seeking to re-open land to development and have challenged efforts to preserve wildlife and forests.

Debate also surrounds the fishing industry. In the port of Petersburg on Mitkof Island a hundred miles south I spoke with Dick Kuwata, a native fisherman, about declining catches. To purchase a fishing boat and outfit it with electronic navigation and fish detection aids, he said, a fisherman can spend up to an entire year’s take of fish. In frustration, many are leaving for other jobs. Nonetheless the harbor was crowded with fishing boats. Rows of tall masts bobbed in the tide. Nets festooned with colorful red floats lay draped over railings, drying in the sun. Bald eagles and gull circled over the waves, eyes out for leavings cast off by the trawlers.

Fishing is also a mainstay further south in the town of Ketchikan. Once a Wild-West community known for its frontier air and brothels, Ketchikan is now the hub of far Southeastern Alaska and the gateway to nearby Misty Fjords National Monument. It is also the site of an active Tsimshian Indian community in village of Metlakatla on nearby Annette Island. There a tribal group has worked hard to resurrect and preserve native dances, teaching young generations traditional steps and songs. Two dancers, dressed in red capes embroidered with black geometric figures of Whale, Eagle and Raven, and trimmed with white ermine fur, told us about their lives. One young girl plans to return to the mainland to be trained as a teacher. Her aim is come back to her village to teach the children.

As she spoke I realized that the future of Alaska is tied to the preservation of its land, its people and their cultural heritage. We sat in the longhouse and lingered over a plate of dried salmon jerky. Across the water, past a narrow swath of green, rose the mountains. Behind them stretched miles and miles of wilderness. Perhaps Alaska will remain unchanged after all.

Additional images of Southeast Alaska available

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