St, Paul Island, Alaska 
7 July 1964 
Dear Komrads; 
This place was inhabited 99 years by the Russian sealers and only 97 years since 
then by American sealers. The Russian influence is still strong. The most ornate and 
beautiful building in town is the Russian Orthodox Church on the hill behind our "hotel" 
with its gilted cross atop the highest cupulo. It's raining and the fog hangs low, but 
let me leave the dreary present to describe the brightness of the immediate past. 
In Seattle I visited our sealing ship at the Navy Docks, the PSR 791- It will 
leave to come to these islands 27 July, arriving a bit over a week later, and transport 
us to the more primitive and bird-infested St. George. I gave the obliging Capt. 
Langbeahm a big roll of chickenwire and some other goodies like non-airtransportable 
pressure paint & propane to bring by sea. 
Then to the IORTH, where Max and I had agreed to meet through a mutual friend, Dr. 
F.S.L. Williamson, but of course "Willi" & family had gone fishing for the long weekend, 
so Mas & I never got together in Anchorage. We either both did the things we had to do 
like buy alcohol, chloroform, & bug dope (mixed drinks), or neither did them like tele¬ 
graph here to tell them we were coming. And our air freight didn't arrive in Anchorage 
so I just had to look hungrily at the young arctic terns of which there'seemed to be 
helpless scores on the flats by Anchorage, rather than slapping bands on their far- 
flying bods. 
Wot long did I remain inactive, sinco I know too many people in Anchorage and have 
a reputation of "activity". Each Independence Day for the past 50 a little mountain 
ce known as a Mountain Marathon has been staged at the port city ox Seward, and 2 yrs 
T* O 
n go 
C.I* 
I was invegaled 
to run 
xn 
the 
same. I'd done enough climbing & 
running 
than 
beforehand 
to be in fair shape that year and placed 11th out of 35» That's better than it sounds 
because each year half the runners are Army biathylon teams which do nothing but prac¬ 
tise yearround, and they always take the top places. Anyway, an acquaintance named 
Hartmut Pluntke, who's come in last for the last 3 years, talked me into agreeing I'd 
run on his Seward "All-American" Team. The drive to Seward was spectacular since it 
must be done with a tide-table nowadays. The high tides along Turnagain Arm flood the 
highway closing it to all traffic because the whole area sank in the 27 March quake. The 
towns of Girdwood and Portage were pretty well battered to pieces and carried off by ice 
chunks in these high tides. Miles of marsh are now regularly flooded and will die. 
Seward too has undergone a change. When I made a Christmas bird count there in December 
it was a thriving seaport serving interior Alaska by rail and highway. Row tho wateriro: 
is gone, canneries & docks gone, railroad gone, the radio station I spoke -g- an hour on 
last year, all gone in the tidal wave, A woman whose boat I enquired about renting for 
Pacific Project last December disappeared with the boat In the quake. Even the sea 
otters are no longer seen in Resurrection Bay. But the spirit of the survivors remains; 
they still stage their races & salmon derbies, make visitors x'fei like honored guests, 
and describe to me fantastic numbers of improbable birds. 
To shorten a story with which you are already bored, I ran that dat—blamed mountain 
again but was so out of shape it hurt and placed l8th out of 40 , but helped my team get 
a nice big trophy for first civilian team by being one of their top 3 runners. See 
clipping (and return it so I can play hero to my folks too). 
~ ~Yesterday Max & I met at Anchorage International Airport and boarded our DC-4 bound 
for the Bering Sea, but our many parcels of air freight were still missing. Reeve has 
been informed to send them on. Our plane touched down at Kodiak and from there to Cold 
Bay only a few smoking Aleutian volcanos pierced the general cloud layer. Chatted 
briefly with refuge manager Bob Jones and his new assistant at Cold Bay, then northwest 
over the "Smokey Sea" to those of its islands furthest removed from any other land - 
the Pribilofs. 
T'Jhen we dropped down through the low clouds for our approach lcittiwakes and light- 
phase fulmars scattered from our noise, hundreds of fur seals and a small whale sounded. 
Seals were breaching and sounding everywhere. The high silhouette (sp?) 01 St, George 
appeared as a gray blob to the left, then faded and soon we were touching down on the 
"'1 . ~ , —. . , . _ _ ___tt-4 4-“U 1to 
aces so dense with lupxne 
to be a bluerv instead and bright yellow arctic poppies and other flowers added uo 
red ash runway of St. Paul. The greenery outside was some pla-ues* 
as 
the color. While the sun could not actually have been said to shine, it was a bright 
day, not raining or blowing much. Summer lasted all afternoon, oJr i ,^ 
