This Life's Tempestuous Sea

Go To Alaska While You Are Young (and if You Survive Your First Summer…)

There is so much that Mr. Livingston did not know about me when he made his snap assessment. Then again, who am I to question his ability to assess me? He must have known many things about longevity. How many men do we know live to be 106 years old? But my life has had the benefit of one variable, - an ace up my sleeve, - that he didn’t know about: a crystal mine on the summit of Green Monster Mountain, Prince of Wales Island, Alaska that I co-own with Tom Hanna. Tom and I have mounted annual expeditions to this block of old patented claims almost every year since 1981. The expeditions have kept Tom and me young and in good condition.

My tenure with this enchanted and stormy place extends further back, - to 1967 when I was a member of a Smithsonian expedition. I spent my first summer in Alaska while still an undergrad at the University of Delaware. Dr. Peter B. Leavens, my mineralogy professor, asked me to join him and another professor, Dr. Richard Thomssen from Arizona, on a mineral collecting expedition. I learned to collect minerals the hard way that summer, - climbing mountains in a leaky rain suit and rubber boots while carrying a hammer, several chisels, pry-bar, a shovel, and often a pack laden with mineral specimens. Every day, rain or shine (usually the former), we waged assaults on Green Monster’s and nearby Copper Mountain’s tough garnet and amphibole skarns in search of rare crystal-bearing cavities or “pockets”. A vigorous storm coincided with our departure date and we were storm-bound for an extra five days. We had already run out of food and had little wild food to harvest. Predictably, we had become rather grouchy with each other.

I had my “cliffing out” experience that summer, near the Jumbo mine while searching the slopes of Copper Mountain for specimens. Thinking that a narrow ledge would provide a shortcut, I kept edging forward until I finally realized that I could no longer go forward or turn around. At the same time, my boots began to slip on algae-coated rocks. I’m not proud of it, but I panicked! I lunged for a slippery boulder across a splashy waterfall and secured a handhold. Had I missed, I would have fallen some 50 feet onto a pile of boulders. I barely had anything to hold onto. I pressed a couple of fingers in a crack in the rock while I figured out my next move. Try as I might, I can’t remember what that next move was. All I know is that I didn’t fall. That terrifying moment reinforced my awareness of how precious life is and how I was never going to be that stupid again! Ah, but that promise was short lived. A few days later, I scrambled up a nearly vertical, 10-foot incline to a horizontal adit inside the west edge of the Jumbo mine’s cavernous underground stope. I wore a hardhat that held my carbide lamp, but the daylight behind me made it hard to see where I was going. As I edged forward, my eyes began to adjust to the deepening darkness. About 30 feet in, I sensed a slight change in vision. My light was no longer shining on tunnel walls or floor. I stopped instinctively, and it was a good thing I did! Another half step and I would have plummeted over 50 feet down a vertical drop to my death.

These experiences helped me take to heart a myth that a veteran Ketchikan prospector, “Rocky”, shared: “If you survive your first summer in Alaska, you stand a pretty good chance of surviving the rest of your life up here.” My first summer on Prince of Wales Island brought more dangerous situations that I’d like to forget. A couple weeks after the incident in the tunnel, I tried walking a hemlock log that I thought would make a good level short cut across a ravine. I had yet to learn not to trust the bark on logs that had been down for more than a year or two. Sure enough, just past the highest point above the gully, the bark slipped off like a banana peel and I fell to the ground ten feet below. A ten-foot fall usually isn’t so bad unless you are wearing an 80-pound pack of mineral specimens like I was! Fortunately, I hit the ravine’s steep side on an angle, then slid and tumbled through thick alder and devils club all the way to the bottom. When I finally stopped, my body-bruising pack was still on my back but the belt strap around my waist had broken. The tumble could have broken my back just as easily but it didn’t, probably because the strap broke first. I could have broken any number of bones, but I was lucky that way too. However, my body was badly beat up. Deep bruises, along with a couple of cuts, torn muscles, and countless devils club thorns made climbing and collecting painful for over a week. This experience introduced me to another old Alaskan prospector’s truism: “If you are about to fall to your death and have only one possible hand-hold that will save you, it will be a devils club stalk full of prickly thorns!”

I’m inserting another little side-story here. It’s about a time when I saved Delaware and possibly the entire Mid-Atlantic region from the scourge of devil’s club. Sometime in the 1950’s, grandmother Hamilton ordered an ornamental plant from a catalog. It was billed as a durable perennial with large maple-like leaves and a beautiful flower stalk that produced a cone of bright red seeds. Apparently there was no mention of the plant’s huge thorns and its ability to spread almost as well as kudzu. Grandmother transplanted one specimen in her garden at State Road. In 1964, several years after both grandparents had died and a year after I had returned from the navy, I stopped by the old Hamilton homestead to reminisce. When I walked around to the south side where the garden had been, I was astounded to see a huge patch of gangly stalks and giant leaves covered with thorns! This invasive plant had taken over much of the garden area and was spreading into adjacent trees and brush. It was thriving, especially under the trees. I wasn’t familiar with this plant, but it's the one I got to know up close and very personal in Alaska a few years later.

A native of the Pacific Northwest, devil’s club (Oplopanax horridus) is tough, competitive and shade-tolerant. The next morning I returned with pick and shovel and spent the entire day digging up every single root! I felt confident that I had won after ripping apart an area about 40 by 50 feet. There was no evidence of the vile plant the following year, fueling my hopes that I got all of it. Delawareans would now be spared the experience of removing dozens of festering thorns again and again, and possible blindness if the stalks ever swatted them across the eyes. Or not. It’s very hard to get every scrap of this invasive plant’s roots.