Lake Clark: Qizhjeh Vena, and the Man Who Filmed Himself Building It

The Dena'ina Athabascan people have a name for the great lake at the center of what is now Lake Clark National Park and Preserve. They call it Qizhjeh Vena, which translates roughly as the place where people gather. They have been gathering here for at least a thousand years, and their oral tradition suggests considerably longer. The Dena'ina are the only Athabascan people in Alaska who settled coastal territory, building a culture that combined Interior forest subsistence with the maritime economy of Cook Inlet. The lake was not a wilderness to them. It was the center of their world.

The park itself is accessible only by small plane. There are no roads in or out. Most visitors fly from Anchorage to Port Alsworth, a small community on the shore of Lake Clark where the Alsworth family has run a bush-flying operation for generations. From there, you can reach the mountains, the bears along the coast, or the place on Upper Twin Lake where a man named Richard Proenneke built a cabin by hand and lived in it for thirty years.

Proenneke arrived at Twin Lakes in May of nineteen sixty-eight at age fifty-one, carrying hand tools and the plan to build a one-room log structure without assistance. He felled the trees, split the shingles, and fitted the logs with a precision that visitors still comment on. He lived there alone or nearly so through winters that dropped to fifty degrees below zero and summers of midnight light, keeping a meticulous journal and filming himself at work with a sixteen-millimeter camera. He was not making a film. He was documenting.

The footage and journals were later edited into a documentary called 'Alone in the Wilderness,' which became one of the most-watched programs in the history of the Public Broadcasting System. Proenneke left Twin Lakes in nineteen ninety-nine when his health made solo winter living unsafe. He died in two thousand three. The cabin is now a National Historic Landmark, maintained by the National Park Service. The tools he used are still inside.

The Dena'ina community has opposed the Pebble Mine proposal, which would threaten the salmon headwaters of Bristol Bay at the edge of this watershed. Their reasons, grounded in a thousand years of knowing what this place produces, have been stated publicly and at length.