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At Large in a Vast Place

At Large in a Vast Place

Last updated on: July 6, 2026 at 8:33 pm by Dan Peterson

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At Large in a Vast Place 2026-07-06T20:33:40-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The “key art” poster for our ongoing “Becoming Brigham” mini-documentary series

The latest installment of the Interpreter Foundation’s ongoing series of short video documentaries, Becoming Brigham, went up earlier today. It runs just over fifteen minutes in length: “Who Didn’t Hate the Mormons? – Becoming Brigham, Episode 24,” Did you know, by the way, that you can subscribe to Becoming Brigham? At no charge? By so doing, you will make it less likely that you’ll miss new installments when they appear. You can subscribe at the homepage of Becoming Brigham. Just go to the button that says . . . well, it says Subscribe on YouTube. (Pretty clever how we gave that subtle clue, don’t you think?) And please share this with others that you think might be interested.

A Wikimedia Commons public domain map of Cook Inlet and its Knik Arm and Turnagain Arm

We’re here in Alaska with members of our extended family (on my wife’s side), and we spent part of Sunday visiting with an extension of an Alaska-resident portion of that extended family. A two-generation medical family with two twin daughters set to enter medical school this fall, they had us over for dinner at their magnificent and beautiful home. A spacious and wonderfully open structure of stone, wood, and glass set in the woods and with a river running beside it and below, it looks over forested land down to the Turnagain Arm of Cook Inlet in the distance. (Incidentally, the sun went down last night at 11:33 PM.)

And what, you may be asking yourself, is the origin of the peculiar name “Turnagain Arm” for the particular body of water under consideration? Well, I asked myself precisely that same question, and here is the answer that I discovered: Turnagain Arm was named in 1778 by the crew of Captain James Cook‘s ship, the HMS Resolution, during his third voyage in quest of the fabled Northwest Passage. They were frustrated at being obliged to “turn again” when they learned that the waterway was a dead end rather than the passage from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic that they had been hoping to find.

Earlier yesterday, driving southward via the Seward Highway to the Airbnb home in which we’re staying — one element of the visiting extended family arrived early enough on Sunday afternoon for the dinner invitation, while the other arrived at about midnight — we drove past the Anchorage Alaska Temple. It’s a curious sight and a curious site, because a new temple (often rather curiously termed a “renovation”) is being constructed directly adjacent to the previously constructed (and still functioning) temple that was originally dedicated in 1999. When the nearly three-times-larger new temple is completed, the older temple will be decommissioned and razed. I can’t think, off hand, of any other place where two temples stand on the same site.

Incidentally, construction on a small temple in Fairbanks, Alaska, in the interior to the north, has just commenced.

The Seward Highway, running along Turnagain Arm near Girdwood, Alaska. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

Today, we drove up and around the Turnagain Arm (which is to say, right around the dead end that had so exasperated the crew of HMS Resolution) and out onto the Kenai Peninsula, which is depicted in the small map shown at the top of this blog entry, above. The landscape here is medicine for the soul — water and trees and green mountains still bearing the remnants of the winter’s snow. At various points, I could easily have persuaded myself that we were in Norway.

Giving in to my brutish physical nature — so unlike my ethereal critics over at the Peterson Obsession Board, who have already begun their tut-tutting about the vast quantities of greasy junk food that I will likely consume during this trip, although, given their delicate natures, they themselves obviously have no direct personal experience with gross processes like ingestion and digestion — I ate today. Yes, I confess it. I ate. And not just once.

My principal meal today occurred in the small town of Girdwood, Alaska, which is located just forty miles south of Anchorage, slightly inland from the Seward Highway. Nestled within a northern rainforest in the Chugach Mountains, Girdwood is most famous for its gold-mining history and, today, for the Alyeska Resort, which is the largest ski area in the state of Alaska.

But was I there for any of that? No. As my critics at the POB know and are delighted to point out pretty much every day of every week of every month of every year, I am of an altogether baser nature. I did no gold-mining. I did no skiing. (That the resort has little snow right now and that it is closed scarcely offer an excuse.) Instead, quite brazenly and without the slightest bit of shame, I and my fellow-travelers sought out an eating establishment — such places are permitted to operate openly here and with impunity by local government officials — where I personally consumed a bowl of chowder that had been made with smoked Alaskan salmon. And, later in the day, I indulged myself in a piece of reindeer jerky, which is apparently another characteristic local specialty. My depravity is boundless.

The Austen house in Chawton, Hampshire, to which we’ve made several pilgrimages
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Incidentally, on the flight up to Anchorage from Salt Lake City the other day, I took an excursion into the past. First, I watched Frank Capra’s 1934 classic film It Happened One Night, with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, which captured the Oscars in its year of eligibility for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay. I’ve loved the film since I first saw it — which was some years after its release, actually, when I was an undergraduate at BYU in a period long before seeing old films was commonplace and fairly easy.

Happily too, and just by the skin of my teeth, I was able to squeeze in the last three installments of the six-episode 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, which — incurable romantic that I am — I never tire of watching and re-watching. And, together with It Happened One Night, this made for a very pleasant flight that didn’t really seem to last very long at all.

Posted from Anchorage, Alaska

History and Religion

Travel and Religion

It Happened One Night

Kenai

Turnagain Arm

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