Steve McCurry Has Traveled to the World’s Most Exotic Places. This Year He Ventured to Alaska
Seven continents, nearly a hundred countries, natural wonders such as the Sahara, the Himalayas, Gobi Desert and Antarctica — Steve McCurry has seen, and photographed, much of planet Earth and its people. But until this year he had never been to Alaska.
Now he’s exceptionally glad he added the Great Land to his lifetime travel itinerary.
“If you truly want to experience the grandeur and beauty of the world we live in, this is a destination you really should go to,” McCurry tells me. “It’s a place like no other.”
McCurry sailed for a week aboard Silver Nova in Southeast Alaska, on assignment for Silversea, and was amazed by the palpable vastness of the region. Even though the Panhandle comprises barely 6 percent of the state’s 665,384 square miles, Southeast is larger than Maine.
“Overall, it’s just one immense wilderness where you can only marvel at the abundance of natural beauty,” he says. “And the vastness is accentuated by the fact it is less populated than almost any other place I’ve been.
“Hard to believe the Russians sold it to us for just over $7 million.”
Alaska offers photographers both challenge and treasure. Few places on Earth hold as much visual interest and majestic scale as the Great Land; few places are home to a lifestyle as robust and picturesque. McCurry documented both aspects of the locales he visited, coming away with images that depict earthly immensity contrasted with intimate human activity, such as Southeast artisans fashioning works by hand from the tall trees that climb the lower slopes of the region’s towering peaks.
“The size was a challenge. How do you depict that? It’s just one vast wilderness,” McCurry says. His photos do more than hint at it, though. Here’s a sampling:
Majestic Alaska
The narrow strip of highway crossing these two valleys near Girdwood, south of Anchorage, illustrates how insignificant the constructs of civilization can seem, set against the vast landscape through which they thread. The mountains in the background are the Chugach, a 250-mile-long range that tops out at 13,094 feet at Mount Marcus Baker, both statistics being sizable by Lower 48 standards but modest in Alaska.
Hubbard Glacier
The Hubbard Glacier, outside Yakutat, is one of Alaska’s largest and most impressive tidewater glaciers. Its saltwater face stretches 6 miles, and the glacier itself is 76 miles long from its origin near Mount Logan in Canada’s Yukon Territory.
“When you’re there,” McCurry says, “you can’t really even understand the size of it. There was a research vessel near the face of the glacier while we were there, and it looked like a toy against the glacier. And there we were, out in the middle of nowhere, no roads, no sign of civilization aside from the two ships… It’s hard to grasp.”
Kenai Fjords
Alaska holds more than half the National Park land in the United States; Kenai Fjords National Park near Seward is one among many of these spectacular natural preserves. A land of glaciers and uncrowded coastal waters, Kenai Fjords has only one short access road and a small Nature Center within its 600,000 acres.
Alaska’s wildlife
Alaska is famed for its wildlife, and justly so. Here are bears, seals, sea lions, caribou, moose, eagles and countless other “charismatic” species, sightings of which are visitors hope for. The state’s wildlife bounty is the reason it holds several of the finest wildlife centers in the U.S.
The Alaska Sealife Center in Seward, established using funds received from an oil spill, has many people- and animal-friendly displays, such as this huge pool holding a walrus. Not far away, the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center includes a small herd of wood buffalo. These larger cousins of the better-known plains bison were native to Alaska but had been extirpated; offspring of the AWCC herd have been transplanted to remote sites in the Yukon River basin to repopulate the species.
Art as culture
Famed Alaska Native carver Nathan Jackson is the master of an art that dates back centuries in Southeast Alaska, relying on the beautiful trees of the region’s temperate rainforest. Although axes are rarely used today in the region’s logging industry, the art of wielding them survives, as in this lumberjack show in Ketchikan.
As a photographer who has spent his career depicting the wonders of nature and the ties that bind the humans who abide within them, McCurry was struck by the connections among the people of Alaska. “It’s fascinating to see how people in different parts of the world celebrate their own culture, and to celebrate the regional differences,” McCurry says of his human focus as part of an exhibit of his Silversea photos at Sotheby’s in New York in September.
Tlingit Indigenous culture
Southeast Alaska is home to one of the most dynamic indigenous cultures in North America, the Tlingit, whose spectacular dances, chants and songs are as elaborate and compelling as any Broadway show. The longhouses in which they practice these arts are instantly recognizable by their colorful totems and wall panels.
One of the world’s most famous glaciers
Mendenhall Glacier, just outside Juneau, is likely the most visited glacier in the world. A half-million people a year come to marvel at the beauty of it and learn about its rapid retreat. Most of the lake visible here was beneath the ice just a few decades ago.
Alaska’s marine life
It’s easy to imagine that “spy-hopping” orcas are simply greeting whoever’s about. Biologists would dispel that notion, but this is a common behavior among the killer whales of Southeast. Let’s say it’s a welcome gesture, intentional or not.