Word: yukon
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...northwestern reaches of the state, well above the Arctic Circle. Second, McPhee tells of a helicopter ride with a committee looking for a site on which to build a new state capital. The last and longest section covers some wintry months spent in Eagle, a tiny settlement on the Yukon River just west of the Canadian border-"a community deeply compressed in its own isolation," McPhee writes, with cabin-fever feuds so sharp that "a cup of borrowed sugar can go off like a grenade...
...Alaska runs off the edge of the imagination," McPhee writes, and he relies on attentive reportorial methods to keep himself and his story firmly planted on the icy ground. He carefully provides the dimensions of the Yukon River cabins he visits, often numbering and describing the items of furniture in them. He lists some 30 uses that Alaskans have found for 55-gal. drums, describes how contemporary miners pan for gold and tells how to operate a dog sled up a hill. The dozens of Alaskans he sought out and listened to come trailing clouds of particulars. McPhee can capture...
...will pass over or under 800 streams and rivers, including the Yukon. It will rise 4,800 ft. into the Brooks Mountain Range, swoop down east of Fairbanks, rise 3,300 ft. in the Alaska Range, and eventually drop into half-million-bbl. storage tanks in Valdez to await loading on tankers. The trip will take a month, longer if trouble turns up. But if all goes well, an uninterrupted ribbon of oil-9 million bbl. just to fill the pipeline-should stretch across the Alaskan tundra by mid-July. The flow will be stepped up gradually, reaching...
Some people were clearly thinking bigger. House Republican Leader John Rhodes of Arizona revived a ten-year-old proposal to divert some of Alaska's Yukon River before it spills into the Bering Sea. The waters would be channeled instead to the Lower 48. The cost of such a big ditch would be at least $200 billion, but some of that cost could perhaps be recovered by the generation of hydroelectric power as the water descended through the Canadian Rockies...
There is undoubtedly a good movie to be made about the Alaska pipeline -the rigors of construction, the boomtown atmosphere, the struggle between the exploiters and the exploited. But Pipe Dreams is not it. The old Yukon hands would have had a word for this pallid melodrama: mush...