Camp Iron Sights

Summer here is brief and cool, and remarkable mostly for its light, with evenings that stretch far past an outside sense of night and, in the Interior, a sun that barely sets at midsummer. Warmth is modest even at the peak and the nights stay cold. The water is cold everywhere it turns up, lake and river and coast, so swimming is a quick and bracing business rather than a long one, and biting insects are part of the season near any wet ground. The figures below are air temperatures for a single station on the state's south-central coast standing in for a place of enormous internal variation; the Interior, the outer coast and the high country all run their own way.

Almost everything funnels through Anchorage and its airport, Ted Stevens Anchorage International (ANC), which is both the way in from outside and the place smaller planes leave from for the rest of the state. Fairbanks International (FAI) plays the same role for the Interior and the North. From Anchorage the Seward and Sterling highways run south onto the Kenai Peninsula toward the lake and coastal camp country, while the Glenn and Parks highways reach the Mat-Su valley and carry on toward Fairbanks. Road-accessible camps are generally a stretch of highway and then a secondary road out from a home city.

The larger truth is that only a small part of the state sits on the road at all, and most communities do not. Reaching a home community for the summers kept on the land usually means a small commuter or bush flight out of Anchorage or a regional hub, sometimes then a boat, with no highway to it: a matter of flying in, not driving in. Much of the day camp layer, by contrast, asks for no travel at all, since it sits inside the towns where families already are. For the teen expeditions, the road and the contact both end at the trailhead. Any shuttle, pickup or charter is a thing to settle with the individual program rather than to assume.