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CALIFORNIA WILD

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Alaska's Serengeti

Photographs by Subhankar Banerjee

Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge extends 200 miles south from the Arctic coast, across the tundra, and over the Brooks Range to the birch forests of the Yukon. The refuge contains the greatest variety of plant and animal life of any region north of the Arctic Circle. Though the Gwich'in Athabascan Indians and Inupiat Eskimos have called this region home for thousands of years, few other people have ever ventured here, and nowhere else in the United States is human impact on the land so light.

Musk oxen seen through ice fog. Ice crystals in the air refract the light and fill the sky with color. Banerjee hid behind a mound for five hours until the midnight sun and musk ox came together. He had to photograph from beneath the fog, holding the camera just inches above the snow.
Male buff-breasted sandpiper puts on a mating display. These tiny birds migrate each spring from Argentina to the Arctic. The world's population numbers only about 15,000 birds. They have been identified as one of the five species at greatest risk from oil exploration in the Arctic Refuge.	Kaktovik cemetery on Barter Island is marked with jawbones from the bowhead whale. The life and death of whales are intimately connected with the life and death of the Inupiat people. The photograph was taken in early November, with the temperature at -35°F. At top left is a "sun dog," a duplicate image of the sun created by ice crystal refraction.
Pregnant caribou from the Porcupine herd cross the frozen Coleen River as they move north over the Brooks Range to their coast plain calving ground. The Cessna's door had been removed to simplify shooting, but exposed the photographer to the buffeting of freezing 30-mile-an-hour winds. "It was a cloudy day," Banerjee says, "but that's when I prefer to shoot. I have philosophical reservations against 'beautiful light,' because then the light takes precedence over details of land."