The lodge on Fox Island, set in the landscape explored by the American artist Rockwell Kent and his son in 1918
ROCKWELL KENT, FOX ISLAND VIEW ALASKA (1919). RIGHTS COURTESY OF PLATTSBURGH STATE ART MUSEUM, STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, USA, ROCKWELL KENT COLLECTION, BEQUEST OF SALLY KENT GORTON. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. SPUTNIK/ALAMY
Alight the town down black-pebble peaks ferry rain of the bracket Seward from falls gangway beach. as the the and I disembark beach, mainland to step Twin the forming a protected cove lined with spruce. Driftwood is scattered along the shoreline like matchsticks. This is Fox Island, Alaska, my home for the next few days. Just under three and a half miles in length, and barely a mile wide, the island is a dot in the fjords and bays that line southern Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula.
One hundred years before my arrival, the American painter Rockwell Kent came to Fox Island with his nine-year-old son. His plan: to work on his paintings while having a ‘quiet adventure in the wilderness’, as he wrote in his journals, published a few years later. I’m here to ind out what irst brought Kent into the wilderness, and what continues to draw a steady trickle of people to this part of Alaska.
To get a higher vantage point, I hike up to a ridge strung between the island’s mountains like a hammock. Dewy ferns and sponge-like moss blanket the forest loor. Magpies chatter in the trees. After an hour on the muddy trail, I stop at the top of a 400-foot cliff. Through the bramble, I see the peaks that form the southwestern border of the Chugach National Forest – hard, rugged, seemingly impenetrable.
Kent felt the same tug to explore. ‘A banana peeling on a mountaintop tames the wilderness,’ he wrote. ‘Much of the glory of this Alaska is in the knowledge I have that the next bay – which I may never choose to enter – is uninhabited, that beyond those mountains across the water is a vast region that no man has ever trodden, a terrible ice-bound wilderness.’