Author Seth Kantner On How Alaska’s Wild Lands Are Changing

In 2021, we featured a book excerpt of A Thousand Trails Home and interview with that book’s author, Seth Kantner.

Kantner is passionate about protecting his home state’s caribou herds and other natural resources in Alaska. He recently wrote a guest column in the Anchorage Daily News.

Here’s some of Kantner’s essay:

After lunch I climb my 40-foot spruce tower to glass for caribou. Actually, I do this throughout the day, every day — more each week that passes without caribou. Each trip up the wooden ladder I scan the land carefully for distant dots. I’ve scanned this terrain all my life, for more than half a century now, and my memories are filled with encounters with animals — bears, wolves, moose and wolverine, otters and eagles and thousands of birds — and especially caribou. Caribou dotting the distance; antlers moving in the brush; lines of caribou stretching as far as the eye can see; caribou riding moving ice; big bulls swimming the river. Today there are none. I can see south to the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes, north into the mountains. The tundra, like those spruce trees, is tough to even recognize. Small spruce and clumps of alders, dwarf birch and willows are covering the once open land. Willows hide the view of creeks and sloughs and have walled off many of the old trails.

Finally, white glints make me catch my breath. It’s not caribou but a family of swans, eating blueberries, far away on the still-open tundra west of the Hunt River.

The following evening my friend Nick Jans stops in his jetboat. With him are his brother, Tony, and his nephew, Paul, first-time visitors here. I open the stove, point out nails to hang their wet gear, and tell them they can leave their Xtratufs on. Outside, it’s raining and blowing north wind, not a usual combination. I’ve known Nick 40 years and though he lives far south nowadays, he’s part of the past and remembers the land how it was, the old people and the years of countless caribou. He, too, looks like those spruce, gray now and older, still getting out on the river but more cautious, moving slower, and equally dismayed about the changed landscape.

It’s a really good read in full.