♪
We inhabit a restless Earth.
This young land is
in a state of constant turmoil
and endless transformation.
[rumbling]
The towering peaks of the St. Elias Range
continue their climb ever higher into the sky.
Volcanic Mt. Wrangell vents steam
into the cold, thin air,
awaiting its next eruption.
Unyielding, titanic glaciers grind their way to the sea.
And as the vast wilderness of Wrangell-St. Elias
only now emerges from the last ice age,
the chronicle of the planet itself is revealed.
♪
The effort to comprehend the vastness
of Wrangell-St. Elias is irresistible.
In desperation to define the scale,
we turn to the tour guide's litany of statistics.
Nine of the 16 highest peaks in North America.
A single glacier larger than Rhode Island.
The Wrangell Mountains alone
cover an area the size of Connecticut.
The park itself is the size of six Yellowstones.
One national park,
larger than Switzerland...
with higher mountains.
[airplane]
♪
[bird calling]
The struggle to understand
the magnitude of this landscape
is ultimately futile,
for Wrangell-St. Elias does not lend itself
to meaningful comparisons.
Here is the natural world at its most dynamic.
A surging, seething wilderness,
where our world’s geological story
is ever present.
The four mountain ranges of Wrangell-St. Elias
look like a succession of advancing waves...
and they are.
Waves of land, great terranes
that have rafted up from the tropics
over millions of years,
like transoceanic breakers
finally reaching the sands of a distant shore.
[waves lapping]
[bird calling]
The Pacific Plate dives
under the North American continent
along this lonely coast,
buckling the earth's crust
and driving the St. Elias Range upward,
more than three miles up from sea level
and still rising.
The St. Elias is the highest coastal range
in the world.
The mountain barrier is so high,
it captures the intense storms
sweeping in from the Pacific
and holds them hostage.
Climbers consider this
some of the fiercest weather on Earth.
In the higher elevations,
more than 60 feet of snow can fall in a year,
deepening some of the world's heaviest snowpacks.
A blue sky in the St. Elias Range
is a rarity.
♪
Unlike the uplifted St. Elias Range,
the Wrangells are skeletons
of formerly immense volcanoes,
most of them great shield volcanoes,
among the most massive on the planet.
Mount Churchill today, still and serene,
was the source of North America's
two most explosive and voluminous eruptions
in the last 2,000 years.
What has carved these jagged peaks down
from gigantic lava domes...
is ice.
This is the greatest concentration of glaciers
on the continent.
♪
[water dripping]
Hundreds of glaciers,
fed by ceaseless winter snows,
transform the landscape.
These slow-flowing rivers of ice
carve U-shaped valleys.
The glaciers scrape hillsides bare...
and deposit millions of tons of earth
in the braided brown rivers
that flow down to the sea.
[loon wailing]
Even as the glaciers scour
the mountains down to bedrock,
life takes hold almost immediately,
creeping up the slopes of moraines
as the glaciers recede.
Pads of dryas hold down the silt
and begin the march of life,
creating soil other plants will need
to gain a foothold.
Eventually the boreal forest succeeds,
so dense it hides the incredible wildlife.
♪
Below the surface of emerging fjords,
another forest hides the denizens
of the ocean realm.
[water dripping]
[cracking and rumbling]
The elemental forces at work in Wrangell-St. Elias
have organized to create avenues for life to exist.
[goshawk calling]
Pioneering plants, muskeg bogs,
predators and prey have a grand stage
on which to explore their timeless connections.
[chirping]
[bird chirping]
[sheep bleating]
♪
Gigantic forces like the churning geology
of Wrangell-St. Elias regard humankind
with primordial indifference.
But this magnificent landscape
is not merely a vast and pristine wilderness.
To travel in these mountains
is to journey back in time,
to see what much of the world looked like
during the Pleistocene, the age of ice...
the same environment that shaped human evolution
in northern lands.
Native people have lived here for millennia,
bold and resourceful enough
to traverse the Bagley Ice Field
to trade copper along the coast.
We look at this empty land
and imagine that it has been untouched.
Yet the Ahtna people will often have a name
for a peak that lies nameless on our maps.
♪
Survival in a harsh environment
requires an intimate knowledge of the landscape.
Subsistence hunting and fishing
are a part of the fabric of bush life in Alaska
a symbiosis of nature and culture.
But Wrangell-St. Elias is not
an easy or forgiving place.
Whatever the reasons for entering it,
this wilderness requires
a high degree of self-reliance.
It is not that the land is hostile,
merely indifferent, and infinitely demanding.
These are transcendent mountains,
with the power to change the landscaping
and to captivate the souls
of those who venture into them.
♪