Balto, three tourist guides, one autobiography, one book on Exxon-Valdez (for children), Call of the Wild: the books filed under Alaska at the local library in Virginia. I checked them all out.

My wife had accepted a job in Anchorage. I couldn’t have found it on a map, but I decided to go along. It was May.

A homesteader captures the first panorama of the Anchorage townsite in 1912: the mudflats along Ship Creek, thick forest and mountain peaks beyond.

The grass along the creek is so high, it seems an odd place to think of putting a heavy city.

The museum photographer stands in socks on a white table, pulling a camera across two metal rods. He shoots the map beneath, fraction by fraction: 32 blocks.

Around the room, a hall composed of oral histories. A woman describes life on the North Slope: innumerable lakes.

The Alaska Engineering Commission (AEC) hired a succession of photographers to document the construction of the railroad in 8x10 prints, labeled at the bottom in precise, white all-caps.

As a general rule, the AEC photos are shot with the railroad either to the far left or right of the frame; the grade slopes down to a stand of trees. Or up, where a corset of logs presses the earth (and glacial silt) away from the track.

One map, a segment of the rail line’s route: first from Seward to Anchorage, past Bear Lake, Snow River, the Trail Creek, Bartlett, and Spencer Glaciers, to the bed along Ship Creek.

The inception point is Resurrection Bay—where otters recline in the water and little puffins display their bellies like proud babies.

I’ve said that I want to study the route to urban Alaska once I arrive, beginning with these photos. I work on the open floor of the archives, beside a window that looks out on the park and the museum’s entrance.

Cabinets ring the room, recently closed after falling open—an earthquake, which I mistook for someone jumping on my car bumper.

The lake (not quite hardened) pushes bits of driftwood to the rim, little waves like cats’ tongues.

If we could elapse time, we’d see that the snow is coming down over the mountains, a dress pulled over the head.

Phinney S. Hunt, originally of Michigan, took the first shift behind the camera.

One can understand why Hunt abandoned Phinney for the nickname P.S., although it does seem a terrible omen to name oneself a postscript.

At Mile 98, McHough Creek, 300 cans of powder leveled the path. Hunt photographs the snowy hillside erupting over the frozen arm.

Because the color of snow and rock in that region is so stark, the blast itself could be overlooked, aside from its slight blur of motion.

On our fourth anniversary, Alyse says, I want to be up high. From the top floor of the Captain Cook Hotel, remarkably, the Chugach and the peak of Denali are both clear that day.

Frost starts to gather in the mornings, and in the museum lobby, children on field trips. Someone closes the yellow door to the archives.

In cold storage, maps, account ledgers, the papers of famous families, a book of death records from 1915.

Hunt’s fascination: the progression of daylight. A party on a riverboat in broad sun on Sept. 14, 1916, 5 AM.

(Who allows themselves to be photographed at 5 am?)

In a new experiment, Hunt notes the course of the sun on December 21 in two arcs of parallel ink, low in the sky. He adds that the sun has its course carefully marked, lest you believe he engages in speculation.

I want to learn ice skating, to enter the circling crowd of skaters on the frozen lagoon by our apartment. The children in Alaska are raised on skates. They dodge with pucks and sticks as though the natural state of the human is to glide.

My skating lessons end quickly with a broken wrist. Alyse has envisioned an ice dancing duet for the final class project; she performs one half of it herself, anyway. I direct my attention to walking through the city during the early afternoon opening of light.

Hunt marks SUNRISE, 10-15 AM, DEC. 21-16 over Ship Creek.

In the photo of a stack of wooden cross arms arranged in a giant tower, a man, large trousers pinned by suspenders and boots to his body, stands aloft. His right leg props on the stack in the pose of a victorious mountaineer.

Today’s class of children at the museum is composed of preschoolers, one of whom stands in the door to the archives and announces with great authority: They’re not allowed to see any people in there.

In his book on natural light photography, Ansel Adams describes his principle of visualization: When the print is conceived in the mind, either as a realistic statement or as an intentional departure from reality, the brightness values of the subject are determined and are placed appropriately on the exposure scale.

Elsewhere in the collection, a woman drives the first railroad spike. A boy holds a dish of food over his head while a herd of dogs dances around him.

In Wrangell, totems. On the Columbia Glacier, the enormous skeleton of a PREHISTORIC ANIMAL IN ICE.

In a railroad camp, two men pose for a photo, one with hands draped casually around another’s neck.

At the end of steel, rows of suspendered men haul new rails out of a railcar, a wooden horse.

I study drawing in the fall, tuning my wrist again to detail. I build a landscape of paper shapes and shade them. My weakest effort: the self-portrait drawn in a mirror. My face recedes behind exaggerated glasses, a taut hairline, pentagonal ears. Serial Killer, Alyse names it.

Adams: Winter photography is difficult not because of any particular problems of brightness, contrast, etc., but rather because the emotional interpretation of snow is highly subjective and relates to values of the utmost subtlety.

A survey party at Portage Glacier pitches their tents right on the rocky moraine—where else?

In one apocryphal story, a foreman decided to cut across the glacier to meet his team on the other side. He didn’t.

Meanwhile, P.S. Hunt concludes one thread with his unexpected death in Valdez.

The East side ski trails slip down from the Chugach, etched into cross-hatch patterns and parallel bars, oddly stylish.

Across these measured strokes, a pair of loose huskies sprints in unison to my side. They stop, glance into each other’s eyes, then dash away as quickly as they’ve come.

If the line extends before us, that mandates a degree of blindness—can the line see what it projects into?

In the case of the railroad track, it can make minor adjustments in height and curve, but barely. At the slightest volt through the earth’s crust, it splays into a raised tendril: raw and bare, useless as a torn ligament.

In a forest yurt, backpacked in, Alyse and I spend the night by the woodstove, watching lights on the hillside miles away. A rope marks an approximate course down the icy hill outside to the outhouses, a thin line in the beam of a headlamp.

To grasp the rope and search for footing requires a trust that I am hesitant to give. But it has held others.

When the whale appears in Resurrection Bay, it lopes around the coastline with periodic breath (as the ranger promised).

It delights me when the whale changes course and breaches away, a blast of air announcing her advance.

You understand that I don’t come from wilderness. Along the tracks, two men walk side by side, and this is where I feel comfort.

For more information about this piece, see this issue's legend.