So much of Alaska’s lure is its ability to humble. This is a place first inhabited by our ancestors more than eleven thousand years ago and hardly more developed when Russia sold it to America in 1867 for two cents an acre. Yet Alaska remains the “Great Land,” as James Michener called it: the closest we have to a time before man, unsullied terrain, nature so titanically overwhelming it’s impossible not to be awed and a little afraid. Adventurers and loners, romantics and desperadoes, eccentrics and slow suicides—the luxuriousness of the place, its seduction and savagery, calls to the wildest
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