Alaska's Brooks Range: The Ultimate Mountains

Not just the "ultimate mountains" for their northernmost location on the North American continent, the Brooks Range is also one of the world's last, great, unspoiled wildernesses. A land of environmental and cultural extremes, its impression on those who visit or reside there is as far-ranging as humankind's effect on the Range itself. Austere, mystical, and stunningly beautiful, the psychic and corporeal influence of the region is inescapable. Alaska's Brooks Range: The Ultimate Mountains looks at the many facets that make this region so provocative and so worthy of our strongest preservation efforts. It explores the geologic origins of some of the most desolate beauty on earth; the native inhabitants - both man and animal - whose age-old methods of survival have been altered "by the winds from the lower forty-eight"; and the human history, from early British military explorers to gold panners to the geographers who first mapped the Arctic wilderness. The story of Bob Marshall traces his influence as the father of the Arctic conservation movement, and "Range Writings" offers a sampling of literature inspired by the Brooks Range experience. Finally, this book takes a hard look at past, present, and proposed conservation efforts in the Brooks Range, because there is much more at stake than land and wildlife in this last frontier. The future of humankind is here in this place where hunter-gatherers pursue age-old ways of life; where the rarity of existence in pristine country is an everyday reality; where we can study and learn how best to fit in without destroying the scheme of life so exquisitely evolved on this planet. Will we make room for it? Alaska's Brooks Range suggests that wecan, and must, by exploring some recent conservation efforts, including those exemplified by the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Noatak National Preserve, and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. Alaska's Brooks Range: The Ultimate Mountains is an affectionate portrait of an untamed territory - a land that challenges the limits of its natural inhabitants and those of human spirit and providence.