The first thing we saw after exiting the plane that night in Fairbanks was the dancing, shimmering, waving neon green of aurora borealis, one of the seven natural wonders of the world.
It wasn’t why we came, the group of us, old friends recently out of college — the northern lights were a bonus. We grabbed a cheap cabin that night, bickered as only old friends do over the last of the bacon the next morning, and that afternoon arrived at the entrance of one of the great manmade wonders of the world — Denali National Park.
It sounds strange to call a national park a “manmade” wonder, especially one as lavishly blessed by nature as Denali, but without the intervention, protection and leadership of conservation-minded politicians, including notably President Jimmy Carter in 1980, the wildlife — as dramatic a reason for visiting as the mountain — and more would most certainly have been lost.
That first trip to Denali was a revelation for this Kansas kid, and included an outrageous overload of firsts: the tallest mountain in North America, the first time I saw grizzlies in the wild (seven on that trip) as well as my first caribou and dall sheep sightings, and the first and only time I have seen a wolf in the wild.
The park was created in 1917, when 1.9 million acres were set aside for what was initially called Mount McKinley National Park. It was not enough. Sixty-three years after that park was created, it was expanded by Carter to 6.2 million acres — about the size of the state of Vermont — and renamed Denali, a native term meaning “the great one,” in honor of the 20,310-foot mountain.
However else history judges Carter’s presidency, in one important area he already ranks near the top. That area is conservation, and on a Mount Rushmore of conservation presidents, his face would loom as large as Theodore Roosevelt’s.
According to the National Park Service, “President Jimmy Carter’s 1978 proclamation of 11 monuments in Alaska remains the most substantial use of the Antiquities Act to expand the National Park System.” It protected 56 million acres.
“Among the treasures to be preserved are the nation’s largest pristine river valley, the place where man may first have come into the New World, a glacier as large as Rhode Island, and the largest group of peaks over 15,000 feet in North America,” Carter said.
For that, Carter was burned in effigy in Fairbanks.
The 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, or ANILCA, remained Carter’s signature conservation act.
Carter’s conservation legacy as president wasn’t limited to Alaska. He protected a number of rivers, wilderness areas and sacred sites in the lower 48, and signed laws creating Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, also in Georgia, and Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota.
Tim Palmer, the country’s preeminent river conservation historian, wrote that Carter’s expansion of Wild and Scenic Rivers in the lower 48 “confirmed his as the greatest river protection presidency … During his one-term presidency, the system increased by over 5,000 miles, or 300%.” American Rivers calls Carter a “true river hero.”
I dreamed as young man, and occasionally still as an older one, of getting to see more of the places in Alaska that Carter saved: The Noatak National Wild and Scenic River, at 330 miles the longest wild river in the United States; Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, its more than 13 million acres protecting the largest national park in the country; and the nearly 20-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, with its great migration of caribou.
And, of course, getting back to Denali.
But even if I never get back there, it’s enough to know that Carter’s conservation legacy is big enough for my children and grandchildren, and waits for them.