Alaska lodges and conservation groups have banded together to stop what is almost certain to be a devastating environmental calamity.
Wild W
H eritage By John Ross
8,000-foot peaks for Dall sheep or when you wade into Talarik Creek, casting egg patterns for ten-pound rainbows grown fat on salmon spawn and attempt to ignore fresh grizzly bear footprints the size of dinner plates in the sand, it's hard to think of the environment of Alaska as anything other than robust. Yet quite the opposite is true. If you hunt Alaska's muskeg for moose,
hen you climb into the Talkeetna Range, bow slung across your back, glassing the
with every step you'll sink up to your ankles in bog. Unlike most areas, no layer of rock or lens of permafrost separates surface from groundwater in the flats north of Lake Iliamna. As you slog along, keep in mind that you're close by the Denali Fault. Along it in November 2002, an earthquake measuring 7.9 caused 29 feet of horizontal offset. The Good Friday quake of 1964 devastated Anchorage and many towns along and inland from the Gulf of Alaska. It charted 9.2 on the Richter scale. On average, Alaska experiences one quake measuring 7 or more every year. Terra firma Alaska is
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