Wildest Alaska: Journeys of Great Peril in Lituya Bay

by Philip L. Fradkin

Book Overview

Twenty-five years ago Philip L. Fradkin read a book about a remote bay on the Gulf of Alaska coast. The noted environmental historian was attracted by the threads of violence woven through the natural and human histories of Lituya Bay. Could these histories be related, and if so, how? The attempt to define the power of this wild place was a tantalizing and, as it turned out, dangerous quest. This compelling and eerie memoir tells of Fradkin's odyssey...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520239067
• ISBN13: 9780520239067
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 197 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.7" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

A look at America's most dangerous place

On About.com, I said the following about this book: This dark, impressionistic exploration of landscape and culture in America's most dangerous place is the heart of Fradkin's "earthquake trilogy." In Lituya Bay, nature is stark and the human presence always precarious. In this book is no comforting gloss of scientific detachment. Even the book's geologists feel the chill along the spine, and the ghosts of the bay, witnesses to repeated catastrophe, reach surprisingly far into our world. Knowing geology can be informative, but no less unsettling. Given an aerial photo of Lituya Bay and its location on a world tectonic map, one can spot its geologic hazards in minutes, even moments, and summarize them thus: It is a fjord, guarded at its mouth by boulders of an intact terminal moraine, threatened at its head by calving glaciers and oversteepened rock faces that lie in the path of a plate-bounding transpressional fault. The geographer will add that the bay has strong tides and sits in a subarctic setting between the world's highest coastal range and one of its stormiest seas. Made for shipwreck on the outside, landslide tsunamis within and deadly weather the year round, Lituya Bay may be the most dangerous place in the world that is not Antarctica or an erupting volcano. I visited Lituya Bay one calm day in June 1976 aboard a research vessel, an exhilarating but tense experience. The bay's entire shore was shorn of trees for tens of meters above the high-tide line, and at the bay's head a colossal swath of mountainside some 600 meters high was similarly bare. A landslide there in 1958, caused by a major earthquake, had pushed a gigantic wave over that mountain's shoulder and out the bay. Find Lituya Bay in Google Earth and you'll see the marks today. My ship seemed very small there beneath the steep walls of ice and stone. A full-grown Alaskan brown bear on the rocky slope looked the size of a mite. I'm saying that I was ready for hair-raising reading with Philip Fradkin's account in "Wildest Alaska: Journeys of Great Peril in Lituya Bay." It is the middle book in his earthquake trilogy that includes the California-centered books "Magnitude 8" and "The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906." Their common theme is that the perils of a place make their mark on the peoples who live there. The geologic hazards of California are dire enough, but Fradkin sought out an even more extreme example. Geologists expected something like the great wave of 1958, but it and several others in the previous century were surprises to those in and around Lituya Bay. The native Tlingits considered the bay a bad place, visiting only seasonally for hunting and occasional warfare. A water-centered people, the pre-European Tlingits had a horror of death by drowning, which interrupts the soul's cycle of cremation and rebirth, giving rise to baleful beings called Land Otter Men. Lituya Bay had many, and when angry they were known to shake the bay and flush it clean of li

Nature and Culture in Lituya Bay, Alaska

A fine little book about Lituya Bay, a stunningly beautiful nook of sea, ice, rock and rainforest just north of Glacier Bay Alaska on the pacific coast in southeast Alaska. The bay is south of Yakutat and Dry Bays and is a remote part of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. The Bay has quite a story to tell and Fradkin does a good job of laying out the human/nature interactions that have gone on in this place. Fradkin breaks the narrative down into Place, Tlingits, Russians, French, Americans and his own experience with Lituya Bay, then proceeds to tell tales of misadventure. The bay itself is typical southeast Alaska rainforest with a heavy influence from the pacific, and has a history of exploration, short-lived colonization, natives, mining, hermits and fishermen. Mix this with its precipitous topography, glaciers and its location over an active fault and you have quite a tale of nature and culture to tell. The Bay has taken a lot of human life over the years due to its peculiar physiography and the fact that it is on the fearweather fault. Not only is its entrance treacherous, but every so often when the fault slips, great amounts of rock can potentially fall into the almost vertical shoreline of the east end of the bay. This can cause massive amounts of seawater to displace in seconds and the effects on the bay and its island can be catastrophic. In 1958 the earth shook violently unleashing a massive wave from the back of the bay. The deforestation on the mountainside reached the 1740 ft. level, the highest ever recorded. The harrowing tale of survival the fisherman in the bay at the time tell I will save for Fradkin. The entrance to the bay has claimed many more lives over the centuries, and the Tlingit, the French, the Russians and Americans all have their tales of death and peril in Lituya Bay. Fradkin estimates a ship a year since 1950 has gone down in the entrance, mostly because of the dangerous tides and breakers. He does a good job of relating these tales, and then tells of his own experiences in the bay. The writing style is annoying at first, but Fradkin seems to find his voice about halfway through. The book is well researched and includes a good bibliography with a wide variety of sources. Fradkin has a journalism background, and does not describe the bay in scientific terms, although he does provide the relevant facts. If you are looking for a scientific narrative this is not it. It is more an environmental history of a specific locale, a narrative through which historic accounts of misadventure unfold in the never ending drama of man and nature in southeast Alaska. It's a fascinating and quick read, full of miscellaneous historical facts, as well as the broader context of Lituya Bay in Alaskan history, I recommend it.