It was bordered on the north and east by the Quilak Mountains, a coastal range that wandered back and forth over the Alaska-Canada border and whose tallest peaks shared an average height of sixteen thousand feet, not the twenty thousand feet of Denali’s McKinley, but high enough to awe and to challenge. Glaciers three thousand feet thick and thirty miles long poked their cold tongues out of every pass, all of them in recession, but only slowly and very, very reluctantly. On the south was the Gulf of Alaska; in the west the more or less parallel lines of the TransAlaska Pipeline, the pipeline haul road and the single north-south track of the Alaska Railroad. The land, gently sloping and open in the west, rose rapidly into the mountains in the east and was drained by the Kanuyaq River. Two hundred and fifty miles long including every twist and turn, the river was frozen over in winter, swollen with glacial runoff and salmon in summer, wide, shallow and navigable for less than six months out of the year.
