First views, Chugach National Forest

Icebergs, Portage Lake

This place—a narrow strip of land stretching from Prince William Sound to Turnagain Arm; a deep valley separating the Kenai Peninsula from the Chugach Range; a not-so-secret corner of south-central Alaska—is dripping with beauty. The mist-swirling, water-falling, mountain-brooding, glacier-blue-ing, iceberg-floating, flower-blooming, bear-scatting, eagle-soaring, eye-popping, jaw-dropping kind of beauty that assaults one’s senses and overwhelms one’s soul. Round a corner and there’s a thousand-foot cascade; look up and an arete pierces the clouds; pause a second and a skein of snow geese honks overhead; inhale and your lungs fill with the fresh scent of willows. Pine. Rain. Rock. Ice. Beauty, beauty everywhere.

Temperate rainforest

Waterfalls streaming off of Maynard Mountain

Barrow's Goldeneyes

It’s too easy.

As I write, it’s 11 p.m. at 60 degrees north latitude, late May.  The sky glows with the diffuse light of rainy dusk. A carpet of moss and lichen erupts in wildflowers. Small shrubs shiver in the wind. Out one window, a ribbon of water shimmers down a dark ravine; out another, snow-covered mountainsides blend into stormclouds. Through that same window this morning, I watched a big fluffy black bear amble by, pausing to gauge his surroundings, nose twitching with curiosity. I didn’t even have to stand up; the wild beauty came to me.

Morning visitor, as seen through the kitchen window

Sunrise, Portage Lake (first clear morning)

It’s too easy.

Within a five-minute walk, I can be on the shore of a deep, glacially-carved and -fed lake. The water is surely grey and choppy right now, with little icebergs and bergy bits bobbing up and down. After the storm passes (and if there’s a rare window of calm before the next rolls in), those chunks of ex-glacier will linger by the shoreline, suspended in the reflection of the surrounding mountains, serenely glowing their impossibly blue blue. Mist will hover over the peaks and ride katabatic winds down the valleys, making it impossible tell what’s rock and what’s air. Gulls will soar overhead, their screams ringing into the silence. Beautiful.

Mist over Portage Lake, weaving past the remnants of an iceberg

It’s too easy.

When I think of the most awe-inspiring landscapes I’ve seen—the colorful clay hills of Arizona’s Painted Desert; the snow-swept ridges of southwestern Wyoming; the remoted ravines in Colorado’s Black Canyon; the sheer expanse and even more expansive, unreadable sky of Alaska’s North Slope—I think of them not as vistas or scenery, but as experiences. I had to earn them. Years prowling the Painted Desert. Frost-nippingly cold moon-lit mornings in Wyoming. Long, arduous treks scaling fossiliferous outcrops. Nearly two weeks of whirling down little-travelled rivers in a tiny red raft, ignorant and open to any and all topographical, hydrological, and meteorological challenges (and hyper-aware of the possibility of polar bears). The arduousness and uncertainty heightened my senses, and thus left me even more attuned to beauty. Richer, deeper, hard-won beauty.

(A counter-point to ponder: the view from the Arctic Divide at the heart of the Brooks Range was awe-inspiring and life-changing, but I was too terrified and exhausted to appreciate it. It was too hard.)

Portage Glacier

Here, in this place, where beauty is so easy, does it count to just look up? To stop by in a car or bus en route to or from Anchorage or Whittier? To hop out at the lake to snap a photo or spend an hour strolling one of the trails? To ride out to the foot of the glacier—to face the wall of blue ice, to float with the bergs, to hear waterfall after waterfall splashing off of the cliffsides, all from the comfort and safety of a large tourboat piloted by someone else?

Hundreds or thousands of people come to witness this scenery each day. Surely, it makes us momentarily happy. It enriches our lives to see it, to know it’s there. But if all we have to do is look, do we bother to feel more deeply? Do we care to learn the underlying processes and meanings?

What’s hidden out there, bigger, wilder, beyond beauty?