Expanded Horizons: Notes from Alaska's Bering Sea

I always think that the hardest thing about Alaska for visitors to grasp is the sheer size of the place. Alaska is immense. It is more than twice the size of Texas; the equivalent of California, Oregon, Washington, and Montana put together; or, to give it a global perspective, you could put England, France, and Germany inside Alaska, and still have room for Japan. If you placed Alaska over the Lower 48 so that its easternmost point (near Ketchikan) lay on Jacksonville, Florida, then the westernmost (in the Aleutian Islands) would fall within San Francisco Bay. The distance from the northernmost to the southernmost points of Alaska would reach from New York City to somewhere in Texas. Alaska has a school district the size of Ohio.

As a longtime Alaska resident, I'm familiar with the scale of the 49th state. But when I took our Wild Alaska voyage this summer, I got a whole new education on the subject.

I got that education by experiencing the isolated islands of the Bering Sea and the Aleutians, parts of Alaska so inaccessible that very few Alaskans ever see them. Little Diomede, St. Lawrence, St. Matthew, the Pribilofs, Unga, Unimak, the Semidis—these are half-legendary places that an average resident of the mainland might occasionally hear about, but couldn't really describe.

And if a place is remote by Alaskan standards, it is really remote. Take uninhabited St. Matthew, for example. A recent GIS (geographic Information Systems) study found that it is the most remote spot in all the United States—the farthest from any road, building, or habitation. Too bad more people can't see it, because it also happens to be very beautiful, composed of weirdly eroded volcanic spires, and covered with lush green tundra. The tundra is crisscrossed with the passageways and excavations of an endemic rodent, the St. Matthew singing vole, and dotted with the dens of red foxes, which arrived on the island on their own one winter, crossing vast stretches of sea ice to get there. There is also an endemic songbird, the lovely McKay's bunting, common as dirt on the island, but found nowhere else in the world. The spires are covered with life too, in the form of innumerable nesting seabirds.

These are the richest, most productive waters on earth, and each far-flung island creates an upwelling that brings vast quantities of nutrients up to the surface. Various types of whales congregate to slurp up this plankton soup. Twice on our 2009 Wild Alaska voyage we found ourselves in the midst of aggregations of feeding humpbacks that must have numbered into the hundreds. We also came across a regular convention of orca. We saw at least a hundred of them in a small area—what scientists are now calling a superpod.

On many of the remote, rocky islands, incredible concentrations of northern fur seals, horned and tufted puffins, short-tailed shearwaters, pigeon guillemots, common and thick-billed murres, and crested, least, parakeet, and whiskered auklets can be found. I came away with an overwhelming impression of the sheer abundance of life in this area.

Moreover, I added a whole new region, maybe a couple of them, to my mental map. When you've lived in Alaska for a while, you like to think you have a good sense of its extent. But I have to say that before this trip, the places we visited did not even exist in my personal geography of the state. For me, Wild Alaska and the Bering Sea literally expanded my horizons.