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Tracks of the Unseen: Meditations on Alaska Wildlife, Landscape, and Photography
Jans shares his extraordinary observations of an Alaska forever unfolding.
- GenresPhotography
224 pages, Hardcover
First published September 16, 2000
50 people want to read
About the author
Nick Jans
17 books83 followersNick Jans is an award-winning writer, photographer, and author of numerous books, including The Grizzly Maze. He is a contributing editor to Alaska Magazine and has written for Rolling Stone, Backpacker, and the Christian Science Monitor.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 19, 2025
While I've seen this place more than once in my dreams, I've seen it waking, too. I remember the first time I walked out of the trees and there it was, a secret desert world perhaps a half-mile wide and seven long, its one opening hidden by miles of claustrophobic brush and spruce thickets. For all my wandering in the western Brooks, the landscape was unlike any I'd ever seen, a place stripped down to water and stone. Wherever the two met, tiny oases clung, some measured only in inches-lichens, mosses, and minute flowers rooted in wet gravel. There wasn't the least sign of human passing, ancient or modern. The Pleistocene ice sheets seemed to have receded yesterday, leaving the land scraped clean.
I haven’t yet visited Alaska; it was on my list as a travel nurse, but I will confess I was intimidated by it travelling alone and the opportunity didn’t come up. I read these types of accounts for the stories the author tells, hoping that it will inspire and move me in some way. The female authors I had hoped to read about Alaska weren’t available through my library, which is possibly telling and
very disappointing. The author writes honestly of his divestment from hunting other than for meat to eat, and partly it is due to his photography taking off, and I appreciate that change, I was afraid the book would only be about hunting for sport. The photography essays were real too, about how hard it is to have the perfect light and spot and animals at the same time, so a lot of failures. There were many essays, like the autumn one, that were beautiful. So overall, worth the time.
If we could see Alaska in only one season, it should be autumn. The other seasons have their own beauty, but autumn holds the others in its frail, golden hands. In a matter of weeks, sometimes even days, the brief summer fades, burns bright, and sinks into winter. The change is so rapid, so startling, that we're caught unaware. In the Arctic and in the mountains, the first leaves turn in July. The changes are subtle: a slight dulling in the willows, then a few sparks of yellow. The sun is still high, scarcely dipping below the horizon; white-crowned sparrows sing and fireweed blooms. But already the light is falling-two, five, six minutes a day.
Working south, and down out of the hills, the first frosts coat the tundra, sometimes catching new flowers in tombs of ice. By mid-August, the high country is tinged in brown and gold, and the green still fades. Snow squalls dust the ridges, then burn away. In the luminous days between the first cold rains, the cry of wild geese echoes down the sky. The caribou grow restless.
The wind shifts, the frost deepens. Now each hour seems marked by change. Streamside willows flare into brilliant yellow; aspens and paper birch along the ridges answer. On the tundra, dwarf birch and blueberry blaze red against the tan of sedges. Patches of bearberry become crimson splashes on sandy ground. A few plants keep their green-alder, spruce, juniper-but the shades are somber, far from the newness of spring.
But arctic weather is always big: systems of rain, snow, and wind sweeping in off the North Pacific, each one a distinct wave hundreds of miles long and thousands of feet high, curling north up the Bering Sea coast and roaring inland like tsunamis. Or rain or snow might not fall for a month as massive high pressure squats over the state, shrugging those same storm waves off to the south, bringing instead oppressive cold in winter, fire-swept drought in summer. or, in spring and fall, perfect mild weather. Once a pattern sets in, fair or foul, its likely to stick around. And the longer it stays, the harder it becomes to dislodge.
Everything meteorological in Alaska is a variation on the eternal brawl between arctic highs and ocean lows, the two standing toe to toe, trading blows. Keep in mind that Alaska is a huge peninsula made up of smaller peninsulas and islands jutting from the upper left shoulder of the continent, surrounded on three sides by some of the fiercest seas in the world, and the overall picture snaps into focus. Storms gain strength over water, lose it over land. By luck of geography, Alaska takes the first hit.
The owner of the song was Uvanuk, mother of the shaman Niviatsian:
The great sea
Has sent me adrift,
It moves me as the weed in a great river
Earth and the great weather
Move me,
Have carried me away
And move my inward parts with joy.
If you read Lewis and Clark's accounts from their 1804 expedition across the unknown expanse of the continent, you'd get the impression that grizzlies were slavering carnivores from hell who charged at the least provocation and had to be shot as a matter of self-defense. After a close scrape or two, the party let fly at any bear they saw, and asked questions later. This could be literary embellishment, but let's assume Meriwether and his pal were telling it like it was. The most rowdy members of the species Ursus arctos were already being removed from the breeding population. The bears that ran lived another day, at least until homesteaders and ranchers, one hundred percent intolerant of large carnivores, overran their habitat and finished up the job.
A by-product of my drive for big thrills was a systematic, willful ignorance of the country I thought I knew. The extent of all I didn't know, and told myself I didn't care about, would have shocked me if I'd been able to look down from some great height. I remember a time, not so long ago, when any bird smaller than a robin was of little interest. I never stopped to wonder if that flicker in the brush was a dark-eyed junco, a boreal chickadee, or a redpoll, let alone a Wilson's warbler. They were all inconsequential. The tundra at my feet was a collection of, well, plants. Sure, I knew a crowberry from a lingonberry, but my knowledge went only as far as the dictates of utility or simple chance. What did I care that there were more than twenty species of willow in Alaska, and at least a dozen common in my backyard? I knew a willow when I saw it, and that was enough.
I wish I could say there came a sea change of sorts, one defining, instantaneous breakthrough when my perspective altered. I can't point to a moment or even a year as a turning point. I think, in fact, that there was none. Each day was a step on a faint, looping trail, one that doubled back, faded out, then reappeared.
Something was changing, I knew, each time I pulled a trigger and felt the hollow weight of death. I carried a rifle less and less, gave away my shotgun, entirely stopped hunting species one by one-brown bear, beaver, geese and ducks, wolves, fox-until I often didn't carry a gun even for protection in bear country.
But the change wasn't really about hunting or not hunting, killing or not killing, for I still do hunt for meat, and probably always will. It was about somehow sensing an entirely new paradigm: the essential dignity, worth, and value of all living things-not only of the creatures that 1 hunted, but especially of those that I didn't, and had not even bothered to name. The life and death of a red-backed vole or a white-crowned sparrow was just as dramatic, just as noble as that of a bull moose, if you only leaned in and watched.
There's little doubt that photography played a part in the way I saw. The more time I spent leaning into a viewfinder or waiting behind a tripod, the more I found myself funneling down on small details-nuances of light, the exact shape of a leaf, the glint of an eye. If hunting required silence, patience, and total concentration, taking pictures at anything approaching a professional level called for the same, raised by a power of three. And so I watched and waited, hours and sometimes more, as the world breathed around me. I began to carry along my bird and plant books, and to study them at home, as once I'd pored over USGS maps. Lives began to unfold, each a mystery: Why did bearberry stop growing exactly here, and give way to Labrador tea? What was a varied thrush doing this far north, so late in the season? I found myself pondering things like the number of mink in a litter, or the preferred foods of arctic ground squirrels in early spring.
The more I knew, the more I realized the extent of my ignorance. But it was precisely this understanding, arriving at the point where I sensed the beauty of all I didn't know, that changed my way of seeing. As living things, we are all bonded by the same essential truth: there will never be enough time, and each life, each death is, in a way, our own. Like a lone hawk owl at dusk we wait, our bones frail in the wind.
I haven’t yet visited Alaska; it was on my list as a travel nurse, but I will confess I was intimidated by it travelling alone and the opportunity didn’t come up. I read these types of accounts for the stories the author tells, hoping that it will inspire and move me in some way. The female authors I had hoped to read about Alaska weren’t available through my library, which is possibly telling and
very disappointing. The author writes honestly of his divestment from hunting other than for meat to eat, and partly it is due to his photography taking off, and I appreciate that change, I was afraid the book would only be about hunting for sport. The photography essays were real too, about how hard it is to have the perfect light and spot and animals at the same time, so a lot of failures. There were many essays, like the autumn one, that were beautiful. So overall, worth the time.
If we could see Alaska in only one season, it should be autumn. The other seasons have their own beauty, but autumn holds the others in its frail, golden hands. In a matter of weeks, sometimes even days, the brief summer fades, burns bright, and sinks into winter. The change is so rapid, so startling, that we're caught unaware. In the Arctic and in the mountains, the first leaves turn in July. The changes are subtle: a slight dulling in the willows, then a few sparks of yellow. The sun is still high, scarcely dipping below the horizon; white-crowned sparrows sing and fireweed blooms. But already the light is falling-two, five, six minutes a day.
Working south, and down out of the hills, the first frosts coat the tundra, sometimes catching new flowers in tombs of ice. By mid-August, the high country is tinged in brown and gold, and the green still fades. Snow squalls dust the ridges, then burn away. In the luminous days between the first cold rains, the cry of wild geese echoes down the sky. The caribou grow restless.
The wind shifts, the frost deepens. Now each hour seems marked by change. Streamside willows flare into brilliant yellow; aspens and paper birch along the ridges answer. On the tundra, dwarf birch and blueberry blaze red against the tan of sedges. Patches of bearberry become crimson splashes on sandy ground. A few plants keep their green-alder, spruce, juniper-but the shades are somber, far from the newness of spring.
But arctic weather is always big: systems of rain, snow, and wind sweeping in off the North Pacific, each one a distinct wave hundreds of miles long and thousands of feet high, curling north up the Bering Sea coast and roaring inland like tsunamis. Or rain or snow might not fall for a month as massive high pressure squats over the state, shrugging those same storm waves off to the south, bringing instead oppressive cold in winter, fire-swept drought in summer. or, in spring and fall, perfect mild weather. Once a pattern sets in, fair or foul, its likely to stick around. And the longer it stays, the harder it becomes to dislodge.
Everything meteorological in Alaska is a variation on the eternal brawl between arctic highs and ocean lows, the two standing toe to toe, trading blows. Keep in mind that Alaska is a huge peninsula made up of smaller peninsulas and islands jutting from the upper left shoulder of the continent, surrounded on three sides by some of the fiercest seas in the world, and the overall picture snaps into focus. Storms gain strength over water, lose it over land. By luck of geography, Alaska takes the first hit.
The owner of the song was Uvanuk, mother of the shaman Niviatsian:
The great sea
Has sent me adrift,
It moves me as the weed in a great river
Earth and the great weather
Move me,
Have carried me away
And move my inward parts with joy.
If you read Lewis and Clark's accounts from their 1804 expedition across the unknown expanse of the continent, you'd get the impression that grizzlies were slavering carnivores from hell who charged at the least provocation and had to be shot as a matter of self-defense. After a close scrape or two, the party let fly at any bear they saw, and asked questions later. This could be literary embellishment, but let's assume Meriwether and his pal were telling it like it was. The most rowdy members of the species Ursus arctos were already being removed from the breeding population. The bears that ran lived another day, at least until homesteaders and ranchers, one hundred percent intolerant of large carnivores, overran their habitat and finished up the job.
A by-product of my drive for big thrills was a systematic, willful ignorance of the country I thought I knew. The extent of all I didn't know, and told myself I didn't care about, would have shocked me if I'd been able to look down from some great height. I remember a time, not so long ago, when any bird smaller than a robin was of little interest. I never stopped to wonder if that flicker in the brush was a dark-eyed junco, a boreal chickadee, or a redpoll, let alone a Wilson's warbler. They were all inconsequential. The tundra at my feet was a collection of, well, plants. Sure, I knew a crowberry from a lingonberry, but my knowledge went only as far as the dictates of utility or simple chance. What did I care that there were more than twenty species of willow in Alaska, and at least a dozen common in my backyard? I knew a willow when I saw it, and that was enough.
I wish I could say there came a sea change of sorts, one defining, instantaneous breakthrough when my perspective altered. I can't point to a moment or even a year as a turning point. I think, in fact, that there was none. Each day was a step on a faint, looping trail, one that doubled back, faded out, then reappeared.
Something was changing, I knew, each time I pulled a trigger and felt the hollow weight of death. I carried a rifle less and less, gave away my shotgun, entirely stopped hunting species one by one-brown bear, beaver, geese and ducks, wolves, fox-until I often didn't carry a gun even for protection in bear country.
But the change wasn't really about hunting or not hunting, killing or not killing, for I still do hunt for meat, and probably always will. It was about somehow sensing an entirely new paradigm: the essential dignity, worth, and value of all living things-not only of the creatures that 1 hunted, but especially of those that I didn't, and had not even bothered to name. The life and death of a red-backed vole or a white-crowned sparrow was just as dramatic, just as noble as that of a bull moose, if you only leaned in and watched.
There's little doubt that photography played a part in the way I saw. The more time I spent leaning into a viewfinder or waiting behind a tripod, the more I found myself funneling down on small details-nuances of light, the exact shape of a leaf, the glint of an eye. If hunting required silence, patience, and total concentration, taking pictures at anything approaching a professional level called for the same, raised by a power of three. And so I watched and waited, hours and sometimes more, as the world breathed around me. I began to carry along my bird and plant books, and to study them at home, as once I'd pored over USGS maps. Lives began to unfold, each a mystery: Why did bearberry stop growing exactly here, and give way to Labrador tea? What was a varied thrush doing this far north, so late in the season? I found myself pondering things like the number of mink in a litter, or the preferred foods of arctic ground squirrels in early spring.
The more I knew, the more I realized the extent of my ignorance. But it was precisely this understanding, arriving at the point where I sensed the beauty of all I didn't know, that changed my way of seeing. As living things, we are all bonded by the same essential truth: there will never be enough time, and each life, each death is, in a way, our own. Like a lone hawk owl at dusk we wait, our bones frail in the wind.
April 25, 2019
Can you be nostalgic for somewhere you’ve never been? Oh man – I love these essays – and this book is made even better for me because each essay is illustrated with a representative full-color photograph (also by Nick)… His writing is so beautiful --- “… a river’s gravel is the echo of mountains, gnawed to dust and scattered seaward…” --- and he manages to present a lot of pertinent, researched scientific data without, as he puts it, using “science-speak, dry as cat litter”. More, please…
November 30, 2010
Another gem by Jans. Different layout: each chapter begins with a picture, then follows an essay discussing the picture, the meaning of it (or not), Alaska living in general, and living in the Bush in particular. Well worth your time.
January 24, 2016
Tracks of the Unseen: Meditations on Alaska Wildlife, Nature, and Photography by Nick Jans (Fulcrum Publishing 2000) (508.798) is a collection of essays and photographs of Alaskan travels. This is not one of my favorites. My rating: 3/10, finished 3/29/11.
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February 12, 2014Loved his descriptions, his humility.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews