The only kayak A journey into the heart of Alaska

One hundred years after naturalist John Muir made his first trip to Alaska, National Park Service employee Heacox is paddling the waters of Glacier Bay with Richard Steele, a fellow summer recruit. The year is 1979, and their goal is to visit untrammeled wilderness, and to be the only kayak in the bay. Although some 25 years have passed since that summer, Heacox is still enamored of Alaska, and the valuable friendships he made there. He is an intrepid spirit well suited to Alaskan life, and has little patience for those who don't meet his standards. Make access easy, and a place dies, is his motto, and therein lies the paradox that Heacox tries to resolve in this book. He knows that cruise ships are damaging to the bay's ecosystem, for example, yet he also realizes that it would be nearly impossible for the elderly visitors to enjoy the coastline by kayak as he does. As he wrestles with such conundrums, Heacox creates a nicely balanced environmental portrait of Alaska's ice-cut coast. --Rebecca Maksel Copyright 2005 Booklist

Writer and photographer Heacox delivers a genuine, deeply moving account of the past 25 years he has spent living in Glacier Bay, Alaska, the last wild shore, nine hundred miles north of Seattle and nine hundred years in the past. This work's title comes from the first kayaking trip Heacox took there in 1979. As he explored the bay with a friend, they found themselves the sole kayak in that body of water, alone, and escaped, left to wonder how long it could last, this wildness and grace. Heacox's ability to use this tension between the beauty of the Alaskan wilderness and the creeping encroachment of modern life is the thread that unites his varied observations, and it's what gives the book its uniqueness and keeps it from being another pale imitation of Coming into the Country, John McPhee's late-1970s classic on Alaska. Heacox (An American Idea; Shackleton; etc.) deftly renders highly personal accounts of life with his wife and constant companion especially a horrific account of her near-death from hypothermia in a winter storm and the development of his friendship with Michio Hoshino, who became a famed photographer of bears before an untimely death. He also offers a fascinating look at his own development as a conservationist. The combination of these various elements makes for a charming reverie on Alaska's past and a thoughtful look at its future. Map. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A long-time resident of Alaska's Glacier Bay reflects on and explores human accountability toward the area. "Does that which nurtures us in turn deserve our nurturing?" asks Heacox (Caribou Crossing, , 2001, etc.), but it's not really a question. What nurtures him, and has for the last 25 years, is storm-thrummed, ice-cut Glacier Bay: "a world in transition from bare rock to bears, a magical place, a miracle place," as his geology professor told him. That was enough to get the author into a kayak with a friend back in 1979 to paddle its length, an immaculately described journey. Forever changed by the experience of piloting a lone boat in 3.3-million acres of wilderness, he stayed on. Heacox offers great descriptions of the region's elemental beauty: light like green apples, monarch yellow cottonwoods, bruised clouds and long rains. Fearful of the ever-increasing human impact on the bay, from commercial fishing to industrial tourism, he remembers to judge himself as he goes about judging others; after all, he himself moved in and built a house on a handsome piece of acreage. But Heacox is nonetheless protective of his home place, and he finds himself hoisted into position as president of Friends of Glacier Bay, a group dedicated to preserving the area's ecology and its opportunities for solitude. They wage a political fight to keep the bay as quiet and unsullied as possible, excavated only by glaciers, with fish nurseries the only multiple dwellings. Heacox recounts time spent with the many friends he has made in the area, a pleasingly witty society of odd-fellows, as well as the relationships that have gone sour due to his activism. Tender chronicle of a miracle in process, with glints of its rarity thrown by the handful from these pages. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.