Alaskan Life

I BOARDED THE FAST FERRY out of Skagway, AK, to see about a new job in Haines, driving tourists into grizzly country. I’d been coming north for several years as a tour bus driver. The Call of the North had tapped my shoulder.

Normally I drove tourists up White Pass out of Skagway, AK, a small town caught in a crevice between two ridiculously high mountain ranges, and then wound them down into the Canadian tundra, landscapes unrolling into boreal forests and glacial lakes. But the summer of 2014 I’d taken a job with the new company in town but with expectations that didn’t suit. A job posted on our grocery store bulletin caught my eye. Wild Adventures. Taking tourists out to a grizzly reserve. Why not?