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Alaska Range: Exploring the Last Great Wild
The Alaska Range stretches more than 650 miles over central Alaska, separating the south central coast from the interior of the state. In Alaska Range , award-winning photographer Carl Battreall and seven beloved Alaskan writers and adventurers (Art Davidson, Bill Sherwonit, Verna Pratt & others) share the beauty of this truly wild place.
117 pages, Hardcover
Published October 17, 2016
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January 19, 2025
The park is six million acres surrounding the Denali Massif, with three million acres of designated wilderness. We followed the Park Road westward for eighty miles to Wonder Lake and Kantishna, where the hilltops provide views of Denal's Wickersham Wall rising eighteen thousand feet (about fifty-five hundred meters) above the tundra plain, the earth's highest rise from mountain base to mountain-top. North of the Denali Massif and beyond Wonder Lake is one of the wildest places in the United States without any dwellings or roads. Protected from hunting for over a century, enormous moose follow veritable animal highways reigned by unnervingly curious grizzlies and wolves. ROMAN DIAL
Alaska is noted for its variety of scenic vistas from the rain forests of Southeast to the rocky cliffs of the Aleutian Islands in the west and on north to the Arctic Ocean. There isn't a place across the state that doesn't have great beauty, but there is nothing more awe-inspiring than Alaska's many mountain ranges. Like a giant magnet, they draw you toward them. It doesn't matter how many snow-covered peaks you have seen or how many times you have been to the same valley; there is always the intrigue of seeing something new. Every range is different and has its own character and charm, but the allure of the Alaska Range captivates me over and over again. VERNA PRATT
Reading about Alaska is like reading about another planet, or at least another country far, far away, with beautiful indigenous names of landforms and unique glaciers and flora, and giant masses of wild animals. Many of the essays were unfortunately about a man conquering/exploring/risking lives in the pursuit of photos or stats, and it completely detracted from the gorgeous photos in the book. It is hard to see photography as art in this kind of setting, like the pictures are technically brilliant but lacking soul. A polar vortex was settling in as I am reading several books about Alaska, so appropriate.
Verna Pratt's essay on flora was a standout, excerpt below:
Many of the plants that grow in the eastern part of the Alaska Range are also found in the Rocky Mountains as far south as Colorado but at a much higher elevation (at ten thousand to fourteen thousand feet). Only those that can adjust to warmer and dryer conditions will survive there, as most alpine plants prefer cooler weather even in summer. Their seeds may need stratification, which is a long cold period that prompts them to germinate when it becomes warm again.
Because much of the soil in the mountains is very young in maturity, it does not contain much compost, and the plants in this zone of the Alaska Range grow slowly. When the sun is out, the very shallow rocky soil heats up, allowing the small amount of plant material to decay, enrich the soil, and retain moisture. This varies from spot to spot, depending on the amount of decaying matter, the type of rocks available, and the direction of the sun. Plants on a mountain's cool, damp, and more acidic north side, where composting takes more time, are very different from those growing on the sunnier south side. Small evergreen shrubs such as bell heather (Cassiope tetragona) and crowberry (Empetrum nigrum) favor the north-side environment. Plants that preter more mineral-based soil, especially lime, usually prefer the south side and lime-encrusted rocks.
The Alaska Range is a melting pot of plants. Alaska Range contains some plants that occur in the mountains in the Aleutians and Japan, such as weasel snout (Lagotis glauca) and Arctic primrose (Primula exima). These are plants of wet tundra, which ofte has standing or slow running water moving through it as the permafrost beneath it does not allow it to drain. The middle section of the Range has a collection of plants seen in northeastern Asia as well as in Alaska's North Slope, such as mountain for-get-me-not (Eritrichium nanum) and northern larkspur (Delphinium brachycentrum). Many of the plants that exist in the alpine zone are circumpolar. Visitors from Norway or Iceland will find the familiar subshrub Lapland diapensia (Diapensia lapponica) on many Alaska mountaintops.
Other plant species have limited distribution in the world, and the Alaska Range has a few endemics in the alpine zone, such as polar milk vetch (Astragalus polaris), Alaska douglasia (Douglasia alaskana), and denseleaf draba (Draba densifolia).
JEFF BENOWITZ had an interesting essay on its geology:
Denali is the albino moose of the Alaska Range, taller by three thousand feet and broader than all the other peaks in the Range. Many geologic factors contribute to how Denali got to be so big and so strikingly different from the surrounding mountains. The combined forces of the Yakutat microplate and a change in the vector of the incoming Pacific Plate six million years ago are the far-afield drivers for the most recent episode of rapid uplift in the central Alaska Range. Plate tectonics aside, the main contributing factor to Denali's astonishing bulk is more local: a kink called a restraining bend in the Denali Fault. As the fault moves at an average rate of four to eight millimeters (about a quarter inch) per year, the mountain is essentially "stuck" inside this bend because the vertex of the bend is also moving west (at a slightly slower rate of about three millimeters a year). Hence Mount Foraker (17,400 feet, 5303 meters) is essentially a paleo-Denali. Additional factors also play a role in Denali and Foraker's high elevations but have substantially less influence. Denali's crustal block has essentially caught a great tectonic wave and has been riding it for six million years.
The Revelation Mountains and neighboring sub-ranges are also being driven skyward because of their fixed position relative to the Denali Fault system. The crust south of the fault, referred to in geological circles as the Southern Alaska Block, is rotating counterclockwise along the right lateral Denali Fault. To the west of the Revelations, the Bering Plate is rotating clockwise. The intersection of these two rotating crustal bodies is a classic space problem. With nowhere to go but up, the majestic Revelations lifted to the sky.
Alaska is noted for its variety of scenic vistas from the rain forests of Southeast to the rocky cliffs of the Aleutian Islands in the west and on north to the Arctic Ocean. There isn't a place across the state that doesn't have great beauty, but there is nothing more awe-inspiring than Alaska's many mountain ranges. Like a giant magnet, they draw you toward them. It doesn't matter how many snow-covered peaks you have seen or how many times you have been to the same valley; there is always the intrigue of seeing something new. Every range is different and has its own character and charm, but the allure of the Alaska Range captivates me over and over again. VERNA PRATT
Reading about Alaska is like reading about another planet, or at least another country far, far away, with beautiful indigenous names of landforms and unique glaciers and flora, and giant masses of wild animals. Many of the essays were unfortunately about a man conquering/exploring/risking lives in the pursuit of photos or stats, and it completely detracted from the gorgeous photos in the book. It is hard to see photography as art in this kind of setting, like the pictures are technically brilliant but lacking soul. A polar vortex was settling in as I am reading several books about Alaska, so appropriate.
Verna Pratt's essay on flora was a standout, excerpt below:
Many of the plants that grow in the eastern part of the Alaska Range are also found in the Rocky Mountains as far south as Colorado but at a much higher elevation (at ten thousand to fourteen thousand feet). Only those that can adjust to warmer and dryer conditions will survive there, as most alpine plants prefer cooler weather even in summer. Their seeds may need stratification, which is a long cold period that prompts them to germinate when it becomes warm again.
Because much of the soil in the mountains is very young in maturity, it does not contain much compost, and the plants in this zone of the Alaska Range grow slowly. When the sun is out, the very shallow rocky soil heats up, allowing the small amount of plant material to decay, enrich the soil, and retain moisture. This varies from spot to spot, depending on the amount of decaying matter, the type of rocks available, and the direction of the sun. Plants on a mountain's cool, damp, and more acidic north side, where composting takes more time, are very different from those growing on the sunnier south side. Small evergreen shrubs such as bell heather (Cassiope tetragona) and crowberry (Empetrum nigrum) favor the north-side environment. Plants that preter more mineral-based soil, especially lime, usually prefer the south side and lime-encrusted rocks.
The Alaska Range is a melting pot of plants. Alaska Range contains some plants that occur in the mountains in the Aleutians and Japan, such as weasel snout (Lagotis glauca) and Arctic primrose (Primula exima). These are plants of wet tundra, which ofte has standing or slow running water moving through it as the permafrost beneath it does not allow it to drain. The middle section of the Range has a collection of plants seen in northeastern Asia as well as in Alaska's North Slope, such as mountain for-get-me-not (Eritrichium nanum) and northern larkspur (Delphinium brachycentrum). Many of the plants that exist in the alpine zone are circumpolar. Visitors from Norway or Iceland will find the familiar subshrub Lapland diapensia (Diapensia lapponica) on many Alaska mountaintops.
Other plant species have limited distribution in the world, and the Alaska Range has a few endemics in the alpine zone, such as polar milk vetch (Astragalus polaris), Alaska douglasia (Douglasia alaskana), and denseleaf draba (Draba densifolia).
JEFF BENOWITZ had an interesting essay on its geology:
Denali is the albino moose of the Alaska Range, taller by three thousand feet and broader than all the other peaks in the Range. Many geologic factors contribute to how Denali got to be so big and so strikingly different from the surrounding mountains. The combined forces of the Yakutat microplate and a change in the vector of the incoming Pacific Plate six million years ago are the far-afield drivers for the most recent episode of rapid uplift in the central Alaska Range. Plate tectonics aside, the main contributing factor to Denali's astonishing bulk is more local: a kink called a restraining bend in the Denali Fault. As the fault moves at an average rate of four to eight millimeters (about a quarter inch) per year, the mountain is essentially "stuck" inside this bend because the vertex of the bend is also moving west (at a slightly slower rate of about three millimeters a year). Hence Mount Foraker (17,400 feet, 5303 meters) is essentially a paleo-Denali. Additional factors also play a role in Denali and Foraker's high elevations but have substantially less influence. Denali's crustal block has essentially caught a great tectonic wave and has been riding it for six million years.
The Revelation Mountains and neighboring sub-ranges are also being driven skyward because of their fixed position relative to the Denali Fault system. The crust south of the fault, referred to in geological circles as the Southern Alaska Block, is rotating counterclockwise along the right lateral Denali Fault. To the west of the Revelations, the Bering Plate is rotating clockwise. The intersection of these two rotating crustal bodies is a classic space problem. With nowhere to go but up, the majestic Revelations lifted to the sky.
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