Alaska: Spirit of the Wild

Earth, 18,000 years before the present

it's a world locked in cold

at the height of the last great lce Age.

Across tens of thousands of years

unmelting snows have compacted into massive glaciers.

Buried under ice sheets averaging a mile thick

are lands where hundreds of millions live today.

As Earth's water is increasing locked up in ice

sea levels plummet more than a hundred meters.

Exposed sea floor nearly joins Australia to Southeast Asia

Japan becomes part of mainland Asia.

Across North America, ice fields and glaciers

envelop all of Canada and northernmost United States.

As the lce Age spreads, Alaska emerges as a crossroads.

Off it's Bering sea coastline

the retreating ocean exposes a great land bridge

a thousand miles wide connecting Asia to America.

Across this corridor, a river of living creatures would flow.

It was the genesis of a great wave of life

that would inhabit the Americas, and this was it's Eden.

Crossing into ancient Alaska

migrating herds find new forage and sheltering valleys

but they're followed from Asia by fierce carnivore...

saber-toothed cats, giant bears

and the greatest of all predators.

They arrive in small bands from Siberia

pressing east in pursuit of game

unaware they're discovering a continent.

The hunters are sustained by bison, moose, woolly mammoth

and the wild reindeer called caribou.

Where frozen tundra limits vegetation, meat is life.

Most of the year, it is kill or starve.

The hunters prosper here across millennia

but as the receding lce Age

opens the wall of glaciers to the south

most move on with the herds

into the virgin continents beyond.

Their descendants will become Apache and Sioux, Aztec and Maya

lnca and Amazonian.

yet some remain in Alaska.

For them, this is a world of mysterious forces and spirits.

To science, the Aurora Borealis is created

by streams of charged particles from the sun

colliding with the atmosphere.

To some Native Americans, the Northern Lights

were children not yet born at play in the heavens.

Here at the far edges of existence

the wildness of the ancient earth

never vanished.

Even today, the solitude of the past

is broken only occasionally by the sound of the present.

In Alaska, the last great lce Age survives.

Vast regions appear as lifeless as a frozen planet.

Sheer walls a mile deep loom as monuments to the power

of the glaciers which carved them.

Most of its rugged terrain can be crossed only with wings.

Massive snowfalls compress glacial ice

so dense in some places

only a single color of the spectrum is reflected...

an ethereal blue...

chilling and strangely beautiful.

Where the frozen rivers end

icebergs are born in a spectacle so mighty

native tribes call it "While Thunder"

Some blocks are the size of 30-story buildings.

It would seem a place too hostile for living things

but each year, after a winter that can last nine months

Alaska erupts with life.

Hundreds of thousands of birds

stream here from as far away as Antarctica

to breed in Alaska's protected cliffs and coves

and to feed on it's rich seas.

For one brief season of abundance

life flourishes.

lce-falls turn to waterfalls.

Grasses emerge, fueled by up to 24 hours of sunlight a day.

Animals hurry to store up nutrients

before winter returns.

Without the plenty of the warm season

life couldn't survive the long months of bitter cold.

Famished from half a year of hibernation

even the lordly brown bear

is content to graze in spring

sharing the meadows with caribou too fleet to be caught.

As bellies fill, play begins.

There is other business conducted

in the fields of fresh grass...

the age-old rite of spring.

They will remain a couple for only a day or two

sharing a rough affection.

Bear hugs will lead to the conception of new life

to be born in the hibernation den

in the dead of winter.

A world of extremes

Alaska is swept by enormous tidal fluctuations.

Low tide can drain an entire bay like a bathtub.

Taking advantage of the low tides

brown bears roam the exposed tidal flats.

to dig for clams.

Any protein is welcome in the effort

to replenish a body that can weigh 1,400 pounds.

Perhaps noticing the success

of mother and cub, an imitator arrives.

But clamming is not as easy as it looks.

For a red fox, survival is, in part, knowing when to give up

and just move on.

As summer's warmth deepens

Alaska's three million lakes turn to gathering places.

Beavers prepare

for the ravages of cold weather ahead

by repairing their lodges.

Moose feast on tender aquatic plants

hidden on lake bottoms.

Wolf pups gorge on mother's milk

to reach near-adult size before winter arrives.

But the serenity of summer

can be shattered by the approach of an intruder.

The black bear has a fearsome reputation

but it's the most playful of bear species

and with the coast clear and the water cool

even a bear may succumb

to the impulse merely to have fun.

Life along the coast, too, is eased by the warm season.

After a winter battered by North Pacific storms

sea lion colonies haul out to sun themselves

like vacationers enjoying a day at the beach.

A game of King of the Mountain ensues.

In the world of sea lions, size matters...

but patience succeeds.

Ungainly on shore, the sea lion moves in the sea

with the ease of a circus performer...

both acrobat and clown.

Like its meadows, Alaska's seas bloom with fertility

under the lengthening daylight.

So rich are the waters

humpback whales swim nearly 4,000 miles from Hawaii

to revel in Alaska's season of abundance.

Humpbacks fast for eight months

in the relatively sparse waters of the tropics

where they breed and give birth.

For survival, they depend almost entirely upon the krill

and small fish that concentrate here in summer.

To capture the immense quantities

of food they need

some humpbacks have devised an extraordinary technique

of cooperative feeding.

Diving in unison

they surround a school of herring

while one or more sings a ritual feeding song.

Simultaneously, a whale blows a circular net of bubbles

around the fish.

Then, as the trap is completed

the entire group rockets upward through the bubble bath.

Each species finds a way to survive.

Humpbacks have learned to invent

and, more importantly, to cooperate.

In summer, a miracle arrives from the sea

in wave after wave

salmon return from the open ocean

and embark on a final migration inland

to spawn in the same streams of their birth.

Silver bodies transfiguring for the act of spawning...

a phenomenal sense of smell guiding them...

they sweep into Alaska by the millions

in a vast flood of life.

They face a marathon journey upstream

sometimes hundreds of miles long

yet they persist

even in the face of impossible obstacles.

For brown bears, the arrival of salmon

is the most important feeding event of the year.

It's the last opportunity to add the bulk they need

for the months of winter hibernation ahead.