“Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.” So wrote Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the New York Tribune, one hundred and fifty-five long years ago. Somehow, I doubt even he could have imagined the extent to which Americans would do just that, and for what duration.

Manifest Destiny is now a matter for scholars and schoolchildren, and maybe an especially slow day at the coffee shop. But still, as anyone standing on the Sitka docks in July can attest to, west is a preferred direction of travel.

The long journey—and the accompanying notion of adventure—provoke excitement and wonder, occasion promises that are impossible to keep, and generally awaken the most romantic chambers of our imaginations. My guess is it’s been this way since at least the first time a Hellenic bard sang of Odysseus. Of course, the itch to travel could simply be a genetic inheritance, as inflexible as the color of one’s eyes; then again, perhaps it’s only added later, picked up along the way like an after-factory carburetor or a set of colored contacts. It is, however, embedded within the collective Western consciousness. We can dispute the source, I think, but not the effect. After all, no one I know ever sat at a little wooden desk and daydreamed of a life as a patent clerk. Lewis and Clark, on the other hand…well, let’s just say they were bigger than the Theory of Relativity.

Today I live and write just about as far west as a person can go while remaining on the continent, a place where a child’s dream of exploration still lives. Among the innumerable folds of the Brooks Range, deep within the mist and the moss and the old growth of the Southeast coastline, adrift on the oceans of tundra that flow between, there is much left to be discovered. Especially if we allow for the concept of discovery as an utterly personal matter.

Naturally, living in such a place, I see lots of visitors.

As a destination, Alaska has always been of supreme interest, and not only for tourists. Furs, fish, or timber, gold or oil: You name it, this state has it, probably in abundance. What it also has is a lot of room to roam, so much that it’s doubtful any one person could ever really come to know it all, which is probably part of what keeps so many coming back so often. The scenery helps. And did I mention the fish?

Certainly, Alaska is one of the world’s premier angling destinations. That much we all know. But taken alone, even this fishing cannot explain the vast allure of the state or those few remaining places that rival it. There is something else to Alaska, a mystique perhaps, a touch of the exotic, a dose of the unknown. While it’s true that more than the voyages of the great explorers—circumnavigations of the globe, treks to the summits of mountains I’ve never seen, Ponce de León hacking his way through the Florida backcountry—I have been intrigued by tales that involve fish, the settings for those stories are of at least equal importance as the quarry.

Many years ago, Zane Grey began for me a fascination with the Rogue, which to anyone else might seem silly, given the steelhead fishing available right here in my own backyard. Hemingway used one of his own grape-giddy adventures as source material for a passage about trout fishing the Rio Irati, slipping it into The Sun Also Rises. Since the day I first picked up the book, I’ve yearned to visit Spain. Likewise, I read Joe Brooks’ Boca Fever and I want to go to Argentina. And really, I don’t give a damn if I hook so much as a single fish.

Similarly, there are hundreds of places in Alaska that I’ve yet to see, rivers and creeks I would love to wade, and while fish might be the excuse that eventually takes me there, I know there’s a lot more at stake than drag-free drifts and a bent rod. In the months to come, when I find myself perplexed by capricious rainbows or shutout by stubborn kings, I only hope I take the time to remember that.

—Troy Letherman, editor