This shot of the Aghileen Pinnacles with Mount Dutton beyond was one of the many Izembek National Wildlife Refuge photos Gerrit Vyn took during a trip there in 2018. The spectacular volcanic peaks around Izembek Lagoon add to the refuge’s outstanding wilderness qualities. More than two-thirds of Izembek’s 310,000 acres are designated as federally protected wilderness.
As a photographer and a lover of wildlife and wild locales, I think there’s no place on Earth like Alaska.
A gray wolf patrols the shores of Izembek Lagoon. Wolves are common in the region and follow the migration of the southern Alaska Peninsula caribou herd through the refuge.
For 25 years, I’ve visited the state regularly and have explored the familiar, like Denali and Katmai national parks, and places far more remote like the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, the North Slope and outer Aleutian Islands. I’ve gone in search of bears and birds, mountains and glaciers, and walrus and wilderness. But there was one place far off the beaten track, a mysterious place with an unforgettable name, that I had never been and always wondered about—Izembek.
Izembek National Wildlife Refuge and associated State Game Refuge lie at the end of the Alaska Peninsula where land gives way to the Bering Sea and North Pacific, terminating at the Aleutian Islands. The refuge was established in 1960 by President Eisenhower, in recognition of its critical importance to migratory birds and large concentrations of brown bears. Its marine wetlands, especially vast Izembek Lagoon, are so unique that it was the first place in the United States to be designated under the Ramsar Convention as a Wetland of International Importance, and it is recognized as an Important Bird Area of global significance by national and international conservation groups.
Throughout the Arctic and Subarctic, Pacific walrus have been showing up in new places in recent years, including the protected barrier islands that separate Izembek Lagoon from the Bering Sea. Diminished summer sea ice due to climate change and a redistribution of marine organisms in the changing Bering and Chukchi seas are the likely cause of new and unexpected walrus movements. Protecting their terrestrial haulouts and undisturbed time to rest ashore is more critical to their survival than ever. 
The narrow isthmus of land separating Izembek Lagoon and the Bering Sea from Cold Bay and the Pacific Ocean is the heart of the Izembek wilderness. It is also the location for a proposed road through the federally protected wilderness there.
So, I jumped at the chance in the late summer and fall of 2018 to lead a six-week expedition sponsored by The Cornell Lab of Ornithology to document its wildlife and wild lands in photographs and film. What I found at Izembek wasn’t just birds and bears but one of the most spectacular volcanic landscapes I’ve ever witnessed, along with an abundance of both marine and terrestrial life rivaled by few places in Alaska. It turns out that Izembek has it all.
Though it’s not known as a bear viewing location, Izembek National Wildlife Refuge holds some of the highest densities of grizzly bear in the world. Summer runs of sockeye, chum, pink, and silver salmon fill the refuge’s waterways and provide food for an abundance of terrestrial mammals. 
Migratory brant feeding in Izembek Lagoon with Mount Shishaldin stratovolcano in the background. Alaska’s Izembek National Wildlife Refuge and State Game Refuge protect a vast coastal lagoon and robust wildlife populations. 
Izembek Lagoon contains the largest beds of highly nutritious eelgrass on Earth; they are critically important to several species of migratory waterfowl. 
Izembek supports more than half of all the Emperor geese in the world, as well globally significant populations of endangered Steller’s eider and Taverner’s cackling geese.
Capturing these images was not just a unique opportunity for photography. It was important for another reason: to show Alaskans and Americans a wilderness in the cross-hairs. There has been a decades-long effort to build an unprecedented road through the federally protected wilderness at Izembek, and people need to see what’s at stake before it is lost. What I found at Izembek was a place that is grand even on an Alaskan scale—an intact wilderness encompassing vast wetlands, abundant wildlife, and a volcanic landscape as spectacular as anywhere on Earth. It is a little-known Alaskan treasure more than worthy of the protections it has long been afforded.
The uniqueness of Izembek Lagoon led to it being the first place in the United States to be designated under the Ramsar Convention as a Wetland of International Importance. There has been pressure for nearly four decades to build a road through Izembek’s federally designated wilderness, but it has consistently been found that a road would cause long-term damage to the refuge’s unique habitats and major impacts to its wilderness value.
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