VIII THE GREAT NORTHERN FOREST

ALASKA - September, 2019
We are staying in a hut beside the aptly named Vogel (Bird) Lake, in the Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska. Roads are nowhere to be seen. In the winter, when the water is frozen solid, you can travel here by snowmobile, but it is only September. The one way to travel at this time of year is by seaplane, a twenty-minute flight from Anchorage, the biggest city in the American state. Alaska.

There are various names for this forest. The Americans and the Canadians call it the Great Northern Forest or the Boreal Forests (derived from borealis, Latin for ‘northern’). Better-known is perhaps the Russian word taiga, which is actually a word loaned from one of the nomadic peoples who populate the Siberian taiga.