Of course, there would be obstacles. Several rivers would have to be crossed, along with a large tidal slough and a lake wedged between a tumbling waterfall and a glacier. There would be a five-hundred-foot-high moraine of glacial rubble to climb, and the weather along the coast can be frightful. Hurricane-force winds, storms that drop several inches of rain in an hour, and fog are all common. It is, as pioneering geologist Don Miller noted in a report to the U.S. Geological Service, “an area of bold contrasts,” where a traveler will experience “every extreme of environment.” For more than a hundred miles a belt of forest and underbrush as dense as any jungle on earth borders “a vast ice-covered land desolate and arctic in appearance.”