*Airplane pilot speaking over radio*
"Give us uh four hours enroute. We've got four and a half hours on the fuel.
Two souls aboard."
Gerrit: "Izembek. It's a national wildlife refuge in Western Alaska
that few people even know exists.
Over two-thirds of its area is designated wilderness.
The highest level of federal land protection in the United States.
For years I had been hearing about pressure to build a road through the
Izembek wilderness to connect two communities and I learned
that a survey had been conducted to mark the proposed route.
Little visual documentation exists of Izembek.
So I came here to photograph and discover for myself
what inspired the protection of this little-known place.
Stepping foot into a wilderness is a humbling experience.
Especially when the best way to travel is to follow an ancient network of
trails that generations of brown bears have
carved into the tundra.
It's late summer. Except for the constant wind the landscape is relatively quiet
The masses of migratory waterfowl that come to Izembek's coastal lagoons
haven't arrived yet, but a little further inland i found another migration
heating up.
Hundreds of thousands of salmon: Chum, Silver
Pink and Sockeye... Pouring into Izembek's streams and rivers to spawn.
And where there are salmon there are bears.
Lots of them.
Bears of all ages congregate here to hunt for easy prey
in the shallow riffles and pools.
It's a critical time of the year for putting on fat before winter sets in.
Mother bears with cubs in tow navigate around much larger and potentially
dangerous adult males that are here too.
But there is plenty of food when the fish arrive
and enough space for an abundance of bears and other wildlife
to co-exist and thrive.
Izembek lies at the end of the Alaska Peninsula.
At 310,000 acres it's the state's smallest wildlife refuge.
but it protects a unique convergence of land and water
that is extremely productive for wildlife.
Rivers and streams descend from the highlands providing habitat for spawning
salmon that attracts some of the highest
densities of brown bears in Alaska. Two brackish coastal lagoons: Izembek
and Kinzarof, offer rich marine environments for a
diversity of waterfowl, shorebirds, and marine mammals.
In between the lagoons, a narrow low-lying isthmus of tundra
and wetlands serves as a vital corridor for the seasonal movements of bears,
wolves, and caribou, and habitat where migratory birds nest and feed.
across eisenbech lagoon on the ribbon of sandy barrier islands that separate it
from the Bering Sea. I traveled to see some animals that have
been arriving in recent years unexpectedly.
Walrus.
After days or weeks spent feeding at sea, walrus come ashore pale and exhausted to rest.
As if dragging their 2,000 pound bodies onto land wasn't hard enough
they were met with the jabbing tusks and protests of rival males.
At times the entire mass is alive and jostling
until bodies redistribute and the herd settles
and sleeps.
There have been signs in recent years that finding food and places to rest
has become more difficult for walrus.
Diminished sea ice changing ocean
conditions from a warming climate are a likely cause.
Whatever the reason for them being here now their undisturbed time resting
ashore is critical to their survival and they found refuge in Izembek.
Walrus may be relative newcomers to Izemebek
but there are species that have been coming here for centuries.
Virtually the entire world population of Pacific brants
around 200,000 individuals arrives each fall.
We've just come out to this lagoon and there are insane
numbers of birds here.
Hard part is like, um just showing how
many there are! There's so many here but they're kind of dispersed so you got
these frames and hundreds of birds but really there's hundreds–
hundreds of thousands!
Brants are hardy geese adapted, to marine environments.
They come from breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic, Alaska,
and Russia to fatten up before making a direct flight to the pacific coast of
the U.S and Mexico for the winter.
They're here for one reason: to feed on the vast meadows of nutrient-rich
eelgrass that lie just below the surfaces of
Izembek and Kinzarof Lagoons.
Eelgrass fuels their long journey and these beds are among the largest in the world.
For brant, Izembek is the linchpin of their annual migration.
There is no other place like this on the planet.
"How do you find anything in this? Oh, there it is!
Look at this!"
In my last days at Izembek I set out to look for the survey markers
that mark a proposed road corridor through the wilderness
and to imagine what that might look like.
"We've seen the maps and where the road
is supposed to go, but we want to see the actual locations."
A half a mile from the edge of Izembek Lagoon in the narrow isthmus of land at
the heart of the refuge, I began to find them.
"There it is.
Right here." We've been in Izembek now for six weeks and
I'm sitting on top of a hilltop that really is at the heart of this
refuge. Off to this side you can see Cold Bay and Kinzarof Lagoon and the
Pacific. Off to this side Izembek Lagoon and the Bering Sea.
And when it's clear ahead of me and
behind me, these great rims of volcanoes and glaciers.
The proposed road would connect the
villages of King Cove and Cold Bay. Winding approximately 20 miles
across the refuge, it would bisect the isthmus. The plan
calls for the removal of hilltops the filling of wetlands and gravel
quarries to be excavated along the road's length.
The U.S department of the interior's assessment of the likely effects of the road
Include profound negative impacts on
wildlife use of the isthmus. The road would damage wetlands and
watersheds and introduce traffic, noise, and increased human activity
changing the refuge forever.
It would be impossible to capture the essence of Izembek
in just six weeks.
But I feel fortunate for the time I had to try
and immerse myself in this place.
It orders a magnitude more spectacular when you see it in person
When you know that it exists.
I came away from my time at Izembek with the belief that its value doesn't
exist solely in its birds, its bears, or the hundreds of thousands
of salmon that reproduce in its streams. The value of Izembek is in the place as a whole.
As a complete and intact ecosystem.
From the depths of the surrounding seas to the peaks of its towering volcanoes
it provides food and refuge but most of all
it provides space undisturbed.
A wilderness.
you