Celia Hunter flew a war surplus plane to Alaska in 1947 and built a wilderness near Denali; 54 years later, at 82, he spent his last night fighting to protect the Arctic Refuge.

Celia Hunter spent the last night of her life writing urgent letters to American politicians, asking them to oppose oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It ended a 54-year campaign to protect Alaska’s wild landscapes. According to historical records documented by the Alaska Conservation Foundation, Hunter died in his sleep on December 1, 2001 at the age of 82. His death marked the end of an environmental career that began when he flew surplus military aircraft north to Fairbanks in the winter of 1946. Hunter co-founded the Alaska Conservation Society in 1960 and then helped establish the Alaska Conservation Foundation in 1980. For more than five decades, his work helped protect more than 100 million acres of public lands in Alaska.

Military service and the flight from the north

Born in Arlington, Washington, in 1919 and raised in a Quaker family, Hunter learned to fly in 1940. During World War II, she joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), flying military aircraft from factories to supply bases across the continental United States. Federal rules did not allow female pilots to fly military aircraft across Canada to Alaska, but Hunter remained determined to visit the territory. In late 1946, Hunter and fellow WASP pilot Ginny Hill Wood reached an agreement with an Alaskan pilot in Seattle to deliver two war surplus aircraft to Fairbanks. They left in early December and the winter journey lasted 27 days in adverse weather conditions. Recalling the flight in archival footage preserved by the Alaska Conservation Foundation, Hunter described the harsh conditions. “It took us 27 days to fly from Seattle to Fairbanks. Ginny’s plane had non-airworthy fabric and no heating; We nicknamed it ‘Little Igloo’. On the leg between Watson Lake and Whitehorse, a three-hour flight, we had to remove him from the cabin when we landed; He was so cold he couldn’t move! Hunter commented. When the two women arrived in Fairbanks on January 1, 1947, freezing temperatures had halted commercial flights. They were forced to stay and found work as flight attendants on the first commercial flights to Nome and Kotzebue.

Wilderness tourism at Camp Denali

When Hunter first came to Alaska, she didn’t see herself as a conservation advocate. “I don’t think ‘conservationist’ existed in my vocabulary at the time. We were just looking for adventure!” Hunter noticed it later. After briefly studying in Sweden and traveling through postwar Europe, Hunter and Wood returned to Alaska. In 1951, they joined with Wood’s husband to claim property under the Farm Act near the boundary of what was then Mount McKinley National Park. A year later, in 1952, they founded Camp Denali, a wilderness lodge based on the European cabin system. It offered simple accommodation while teaching visitors about nature. Their approach set strict environmental standards for tourism at the time. “We specialized in offering healthy, sustainable meals, with freshly baked bread and pastries, and we refused to handle soft drinks or beer in our small store because we didn’t want to see disposable cans lying on the roadsides,” Hunter recalled. They ran Camp Denali until 1975, when they sold the property. The lodge was later included within the expanded boundaries of the Denali National Park and Preserve.

Organizing Alaska’s Conservation Movement

As industrial development, resource extraction, and military projects grew in Alaska after the war, Hunter turned to organized environmental campaigns. Having seen Alaska’s vast wilderness areas before it became a state, Hunter remembered how connected and untouched the landscape seemed. “Flying through the Alaskan wilderness, the entire landscape was a perfect whole, free of man-made boundaries,” Hunter observed. In 1960, Hunter and his colleagues created the Alaska Conservation Society, the first statewide volunteer environmental group in Alaska. The organization gave local residents a way to talk about federal conservation policies, including plans to establish the Arctic National Wildlife Range. In 1976, Hunter became the first woman to serve as interim executive director of The Wilderness Society. He led national campaigns during an important period of debate over federal land policy. In 1980, he co-founded the Alaska Conservation Foundation, which provided grants and financial support to grassroots environmental groups across the state. His work received great recognition. In 1991, the Sierra Club presented Hunter with the John Muir Award, its highest honor for his lifetime conservation work. The Wilderness Society followed with the Robert Marshall Award in 1998. Hunter continued to participate in public policy debates into his eighties. He regularly wrote to federal officials and advised younger conservationists. The night of his death, in December 2001, he stayed late at his desk writing letters to members of the U.S. Congress, urging them to vote against allowing oil exploration on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.