ALASKA…

Everyone has a favourite place, that one place that calls them back, that is like no other, that gets its hooks into your heart and your mind.  For me that place is Alaska. After a holiday there in 2008, it is a part of the world I cannot forget.

Yet Alaska is not hospitable or a gentle, pretty place. It’s not warm and welcoming, or civilised with nice hotels, big roads and entertainment on tap.

But, the English language’s overused superlatives were fashioned for Alaska. Alaska is wild. Its beauty is of a place that is vast, overwhelming in scale and savage in splendour. It is like going back in time to a world before modern man littered its landscapes with the cement and metal trappings of his ways. Set against its scale and timeless landscapes, unaltered from eon to eon, you feel how small and temporary we are; momentary in our presence on its vast stage. In most places it is undisturbed by our intrusions, its mighty mountain ranges and tundra’s wielding the weather as a natural weapon to keep at bay the dirty tides of encroaching human life.

Its beauty can be cruel though, angry, and unsurpassed, like its mighty frozen blue glaciers that calve and crash building sized shards of ice into the sea. Its ferocious seasons bring long black winters. Its lush, wild rain forests, wrapped in their skirts of swirling mists, are strange and mystical, twisted dank eerie places unchanged through the millennia.

Alaska is primordial. Its landscapes are harsh and hostile, its towering mountain ranges rise like great motionless waves of rock and stone, with their hidden ice fields and creeping glaciers, reaching out to the cold shores of the distant and icy Arctic Ocean. Yet its lands abound with wild bears and moose. Ever distant wolves howl against the night. If you are lucky you can spot its bald eagles, no more than dots set against the vast vaults of its sky.

Alaskans will tell you how it is all changing, how there are now too many people there (almost 700 000) in an area that is larger than any other state in the US (more than twice the size of Texas), larger than far away South Africa or Iran. Yes, it has it oil wells and industries in the far north on its bleak arctic shores. Yet, by anyone else’s standards, along perhaps with places like Kamchatka in far eastern Russia and of course the Antarctic, Alaska is still one of the earth’s last frontiers.

Alaska is like a place you might visit in a dream; you know your visit is brief, tantalisingly so, for although you may have just arrived, you know your time there is short, like its summer, and rushing by. Its heart is the beat of the seasons, its passage measured in the long, even footsteps of the centuries. It has no need for the transience of our scurrying, rushing, so called civilised world.

And long so may it remain…..