Lynn Schooler - Walking Home: A Journey in the Alaskan Wilderness

Its commonly pronounced KLEEN-kit by English speakers, but the first syllable is more properly pronounced with a breathy l sound that does not exist in English.

Alaska did not become a state until 1959.

This is not a typo. The wave was 400 feet higher than the World Trade Center towers.

The Coast Pilot is a compilation of navigation information, descriptions of bays and harbors, tide and current data, and meteorological tables published by the U.S. government. No prudent mariner would travel the coast of Alaska without one.

Compare this with Mount Everest, which rises slightly more than 11,000 feet from its base on a plateau at 17,575 feet to 29,000 feet at its summit.

Though dozens and dozens of taxonomic subgroups were once used, biologists now agree that all brown bears and grizzliesincluding European brown bearsbelong to a single species, Ursus arctos . The names grizzly bear and brown bear are used interchangeably.

Quartersawn describes lumber from a log that has been sawed into quarters lengthwise. Boards are sawed from each quarter by cutting at right angles to the annual growth rings, which then appear as parallel lines on the face of the board. Quartersawn wood is prized for its stability and resistance to warping.

Vitus Bering, who is often credited with discovering Alaska, spotted land on July 16, a day after Chirikov, when he saw Mount Saint Elias rising above the clouds approximately 200 miles north of Chirikovs position.

Read, for example, as Fifty-seven degrees, fifteen minutes north, 57 15 North indicates a position fifteen nautical miles north of the fifty-seventh parallel in the northern hemisphere. Each minute of arc (equivalent to one sixtieth of a degree) measures one nautical mile, obtained by measuring the height of the sun above the horizon at noon.

The scholar Allan Engstrom makes a strong argument for Chirikovs men having landed at Surge Bay, on the southern shore of Cross Sound. According to local fishermen, Surge Bay can be dangerous during westerly seas. Engstroms hypothesis is also strengthened by the recent discovery of a stone petroglyph, carved by an unknown Tlingit artist, that appears to represent a two-masted ship resembling the St. Paul .

Frederica de Laguna, one of the foremost ethnographers of the Tlingit culture, has postulated that the cries of Agai! that Chirikov heard were the Natives saying, Haa di !, or Come down! Over here!, a phrase used to summon visitors to traditional ceremonies.

There is irony in this, in that Rousseau did not in fact equate the state of natural man with that of the noble savage, as has so oftenand so mistakenlybeen claimed. For Rousseau, the goodness of uncivilized man was that of behaving according to his true nature, rather than one codified by artificial notions of virtue and morality. Rousseaus political philosophy also greatly influenced the French Revolution, which led to Louis XVIs being guillotined. The king is said to have asked, Is there any word of La Prouse? on the way to his execution.

Alaska has semidiurnal tides, meaning there are two complete cycles from high to low in every twenty-four-hour period. More accurately, each rise or fall takes a bit more than six hours, causing both highs and lows to occur approximately forty minutes to an hour later every day.

By comparison, Niagara Falls flows at approximately 100,000 cubic feet per second. The Colorado Rivers average flow through the Grand Canyon is 30,000 cubic feet per second, and the Colorado is considered one of the premier white-water rivers in the world.

Ten years after La Prouse visited Lituya Bay, the master of a Russian vessel entering the harbor recorded a drop of one and a half fathoms, or nine feet, at the entrance, which his vessel shot with irresistible speed and great danger. The drop the Swift went over was much less than that.

The name of the elder varies among traditional Tlingit oral accounts of La Prouses arrival. In some he is called Leiwkut or Yeahlth-kan, while in others he is referred to only as an old man. Other details vary slightly as well, but the gist of the story has been handed down with remarkable consistency for over two hundred years. In choosing to use Yeahlth-kan as the elders name, I mean no disrespect to those who relate the account using other names.

In 1937 a Tlingit man of the Wooshkeetaan clan that claims traditional use of lands north of Juneau told a game warden for the Territory of Alaska that he still had the bell, saying that at that time it had been in his family for eight generations.

The Tlingit already possessed a few pieces of iron when La Prouse arrived, possibly from trading with the Eskimos of Prince William Sound and the inhabitants of Kodiak Island and the Aleutian Islands, more than 500 miles to the west, who were already under the sway of the Russians. There is also evidence that the ocean currents of the North Pacific had on occasion deposited the hulks of disabled fishing boats from China and Japan on Alaskas shores. The iron fittings from such shipwrecks would have been priceless.

A century later Henry W. Elliott, who visited Alaska in 1882 as an agent of the U.S. Treasury Department, noted the continuing effect of the Russians brutal orgies against Alaskas Natives, writing in his report to the government that the wild, savage life which the Russians led in the early days of their possession of this new land... beggars description, and seem[s] well-nigh incredible to the trader or traveler who sojourns in Alaska today.

Why La Prouse made his estimate in Spanish piastres is a puzzle, but it may have been because gold was relatively scarce in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and silver, which the Spanish possessed in abundance from their mines in South America, was commonly used in matters involving foreign exchange.

It is an interesting footnote that the survival of the sea otter in Alaska can be attributed to the rise of nuclear weapons and the advent of the Cold War. The animal had been wiped out across most of its range by the end of the 1800s, and the only viable population remaining was located near Amchitka Island, in the remote Aleutians. When the Atomic Energy Commission announced that it planned to perform nuclear tests on Amchitka Island in the 1970s, the resulting uproar over the threat to the sea otters resulted in the AECs funding the research that made transplanting the little-studied and poorly understood otterswhose sensitive physiology had turned every effort to reintroduce them to Southeast Alaska and British Columbia into a disasterviable.

Birds do not blink like humans do. They have three eyelids: one upper, one lower, and a nictitating membrane that lies between the other two and the cornea. The nictitating membrane has a lubricating duct and is used to clean and protect the eye. And when a bird wants to close its eyes, the lower lids move instead of the upper ones.

The moment magnitude scale has replaced the more commonly referred to but less accurate Richter scale, which suffered from saturation during quakes greater than approximately 7.3 on the Richter scale.

Silver tape is considered indispensable by many outdoorsmen. Originally designed to seal the joints in metal air ducting, it is strong and highly adhesive and can be used to improvise repairs to leaky rafts, rubber boots, raincoats, and tents. I have also seen it used to provide first aid for heel blisters and to close open wounds, splint a broken canoe paddle, patch a torn sail, and close a tear in the fabric of a damaged airplane wing. For a backpacker, carrying a large roll is impractical, but a dozen or so turns around a set of tent poles or hiking poles means having some available without adding much weight to ones load.

A pony wall is a short wall framed on top of a standard eight-foot wall, in this case as an addition built with pockets between sections of two-by-six framing into which the ends of the roof timbers and trusses were secured, so that the roof load would be carried by the fully framed wall underneath. Construction nomenclature varies from region to regionand sometimes from carpenter to carpenterand pony walls, knee walls, and stub walls may be referred to interchangeably.