The way I call it, September is the best month to be in Alaska. The whopper mosquitoes are in full retreat—or dead. The evenings are crisp. The aspen are butter-and-gold. And the cruise ships are reeling in their busloads of tourists, giving interior places a bit of a rest from the glare of binoculars and the flash of cameras.
Divested of those seagoing summer visitors, rural Alaskans begin to rediscover a sense of place and a lifestyle dedicated to the proposition that the woodpile must be replenished, the meat locker readied to receive wild game, and the last run of silver salmon remanded to the smokehouse.
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Of all the good things to be said about September in Alaska, good flying weather is not one of them—especially in the precincts of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve.
Thank heavens Frans Lanting, our photographer, had more time to wait out the low ceilings and the high drizzles. Me, I got by in a rented cabin with a good novel set in sunny Italy.
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On the lonely outskirts of Glennallen (population 500 and four hours by two-lane road from Anchorage), I paid a visit one evening to the Brown Bear Roadhouse—"The Best Food and the Friendliest Bar," promised the sign on the door.
The message proved true on both counts.
The proprietors were a big bear of a bearded man behind the bar and a four-foot-eleven-inch
(1.5-meter-) blonde woman waiting tables. Among the framed photos on the wall was a picture of the blonde in hunting togs and a thousand-pound (500 kilograms) very dead Alaska brown bear. A news clipping beside the photograph indicated that our hostess had shot the bear on Kodiak Island, that it was listed in the Boone & Crockett Club record books as the sixth largest Alaska brown ever dropped, and that in all probability it was also the largest bear of any kind ever shot by a woman.
"We're heading north in a few days to hunt moose," the man behind the bar told me after supper.
"Why north?" I asked. "I thought there were plenty of moose around Glenallen."
"Not enough," he said. "But I'll tell you the real reason we're going: We want to get away from all the people."
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