Lately, with apologies to Mr. Frost, I’ve begun to wonder if there is any such thing as a path left untaken. Speaking quite literally, where I live in the Matanuska Valley, there are two roads diverging, each heading by different routes into the interior of Alaska. At this time of year, both are hopelessly clogged with construction projects that apparently will never be finished. If one is less traveled, the distinction is merely relative.

But all that’s beside the point, and I know, such literal interpretation is not what the great poet had in mind. Still, I sometimes look at the Alaska encountered in two hundred-angler queues at the mouth of the Russian River and bog-marsh footraces to the Rock at Lower Talarik Creek and cannot help but fret, for when even the Last Frontier has been tamed, where will we next go for inspiration?

This past June, I had occasion to leave all traces of asphalt and dotted lines behind and venture into the decidedly untracked wilderness of the Alaska Peninsula. Far from the reach of road and cell phone, where the enormity of the open tundra and the volatile peaks of the Aleutian Range collide, I hoped to encounter at least a touch of that revolutionary aura—novel, enigmatic, and maybe even a bit dangerous—which so enraptures those afflicted with a pioneering spirit, the Himalayan climbers, the heli-skiers and big-wave surfers, the anglers who’ve purchased a license in half a dozen different countries. Predictably, I found someone already there when I arrived.

To be fair, despite its remote location, this fishery is no one’s secret. In the past, its name has shown up way too often among the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s trophy fish lists. And the people who read those things don’t often overlook that sort of information. In fact, ask the next Alaskan angler you see about the state’s largest rainbow trout, its largest king salmon, largest laker. He or she might not be able to tell you exactly how big the fish was, but my guess is you’ll quickly learn where it was caught. Here, the trophy targets are Arctic grayling, and the man I encountered, living in a small but well-kept cabin near the edge of floatplane range from the lodges of Katmai, no longer considers himself simply an angler. He’s already been down that road.

His name is Ludwig, and he’s a German national who hails from Munich, though for almost three decades now he’s spent the days between June and September in an area where the isolation is too ponderous, the weather too unpredictable to have garnered more than a passing interest from most folks. Only the fish, it seems, have held promise enough to draw visitors Ludwig’s way. And not too long ago, when trophy grayling were mosquito-thick in the crystal clear waters that separate Upper and Lower Ugashik lakes, anglers arrived in good numbers. When they left, some of the fish went with them.

Arctic grayling are a notoriously slow-growing species. Studies have shown that a 12-inch fish might already have reached five or six years of age, while a 19-inch trophy is probably ten years old or even older. They thrive in cold, clear waters and only rarely exceed twenty inches in length. Obviously, those that do are old fish—ADF&G biologist Fred DeCicco has documented the oldest known grayling in Alaska at 31 years of age, from the Eldorado River near Nome. These Alaska Peninsula fish were not average grayling, then, not in size nor necessarily, in age. Add to this the fact that as a species, they are well known for a rather indiscriminate feeding behavior. Any halfway competent angler fishing a good spot can generally catch as many as desired in a given day. Start killing a lot of those fish, though, especially the largest (and oldest) of the population, and just a few rods can do great damage to the stock.

The Ugashik fishery has returned recently from darker days, with above-average sized grayling again rather abundant, but only the truly inattentive—or worse—would say that all the trophy hunting of the previous few decades hadn’t been detrimental to the area’s wild stock. Ludwig, too, shoulders some of the blame, as he freely admits. For years, he and visitors from Germany took the great quantity of big fish to mean the supply was limitless. He, like most of us, has come to understand otherwise. Now he’s taken it upon himself to be caretaker of much more than just a cozy little cabin.

“The Alaska Peninsula,” he says, sweeping a hand across miles of hopelessly green, encouragingly untended terrain, “we’ve got to keep it just like this, no?” His cobalt blue eyes do more questioning, as if at any moment I might lip a three-pound grayling, toss it on the grassy bank behind me, and ask him to do the honors with the filet knife while I get a fire going. Later, we talk more about the land than the fish. With a finger pointed at the horizon, he shows me the easiest routes for scaling the volcanoes and other mountains that enclose the valley. He tells of a secret spring he discovered, the water clear, cold, and deliciously pure, bursting from the ground for about twenty meters before disappearing again into the hillside from whence it came. There’s also an area bear that he seems to consider nothing more than a neighbor, and a good one at that, reliable, not exactly nosy, and unlikely to permanently borrow any of his tools.

Soon I found myself thinking of Frost and those two roads in particular. Yes, many paths had already been tread upon, finding Ludwig out here in one of North America’s most remote places was proof of that. But he was also proof of the fact that we can always find a different manner in which to take to our route. He’s been coming to the same corner of Alaska for all these years, but today he says, it’s an entirely different trip. And, he can’t help but mention, the big grayling have come back.