Mostly what I remember, though, is the feeling of a different rhythm taking hold, not of the wristwatch but of natural places. Each day as we hike, the sun sets a little sooner. We see salmon gather in the bays, sniffing for their home rivers—and see bears come down to the shore, ready to flick their sushi onto the sand. My fancy GPS watch dies; I don’t much care. I go days without thinking of e-mail or my iPhone. This is what we want from our Aniakchaks, isn’t it? Places that help us shake off the dross and find a surer and more ancient pulse.

suffering and spectacle

The reason that Dan suggested we keep going on foot is simple: he’d never hiked the rarely trammeled, four-day, 80-mile route along the Pacific to Chignik Lagoon and wanted to do some recon for a possible client trip. Gabe and I were game. 

As we drift languidly, I remember something Dan told me over lunch before we left Anchorage. “I could grow my business and do stupid touristy shit,” he said, making a sour face. “But the soul of my business is in the wilderness.”

It will be our escape route.

Then there’s Surprise Lake, the crater’s psychedelic gem, which glows the unreal green of Imodium A-D, thanks to suspended volcanic particles in the water.

A “bewitched stadium” is how Hubbard described the crater the first time he stepped inside. My initial thought is less poetic. It feels like we’ve stumbled into a gargantuan gopher hole. Inside it’s sunny and dry: an ash-filled bowl more than six miles across whose floor is so large—nearly 30 square miles—that Manhattan could easily fit inside. Before us spreads a scene that’s Land of the Lost meets nuclear holocaust. Eighty years on, the ground underfoot still looks charred. A few sprigs of dwarf fireweed flower bravely in the dry ash. Cinder cones pimple the crater 

mer mountain guide who has worked everywhere from the top of 8,000-meter Shishapangma to the unclimbed vertical walls of Ethiopia.

“Oh, my God,” I say, looking at Gabe. “Oh, my God,” says Gabe, looking at Dan.“Oh, my God,” says Dan, looking everywhere.

Then Aniakchak erupted again, in the spring of 1931. When the holy man returned that summer and peered over the crater’s edge, he likened himself to Dante on the edge of the Inferno. “It was the abomination of desolation… the prelude of hell,” he wrote in his book Mush, You Malemutes! “Black walls, black floor, black water, deep black holes and black vents; it fairly agonized the eye to look at it.” Hubbard’s Eden had been obliterated, replaced by a Hieronymus Bosch canvas of cauldrons bubbling with sulfurous yellows and greens and fumaroles hot enough to cook his crew’s beans. 

Then, in 1930, the Glacier Priest arrived. Father Bernard Hubbard was a Jack London character sprung to life—a self-promoting Jesuit and peripatetic head of the geology department at California’s Santa Clara University who was as quick with a bear-felling shot as he was with a Hail Mary.

The Aleut’s silence is a verdict. Jimmy then says that he prefers to carry a shotgun with slugs, the Alaska-approved way to stop one thousand pounds of charging meat. 

one of the largest concentrations of the biggest brown bears on earth. Then there are the man-eating vegetables, alder jungles that swallow bushwhackers, and cow parsnip with poison leaves that blister the skin. Add routinely nasty meteorology—“This is where a lot of the weather is made for the rest of the country,” a guide once told me—and the challenge we face is pretty stark. 

lurks

our bush plane nosed down into the soup

he seems to run his hometown. He’s sort of the gentle Tony Soprano of Port Heiden. There’s not much new here for a man like Jimmy, and our sudden appearance and determination seem to amuse him.