The epitome of the ‘Big, Wild Life’
The legendary Dick Griffith, a man who inspired a generation of Alaska adventurers, has gone off on that last grand adventure that awaits us all. He was 98 years old when he departed on Tuesday.
‘Old Blackass’ to some of his friends, he was an ageless wonder long into his senior years. Some thought he might be the first human to live forever, but nobody lives forever.
Some run hot and burn out early. Many smolder for a long time. Dick was one of those who burned hot for a long, long time before the inevitable end. Such people are rare.
It was a fitting end that having done all that he had done, and having survived all he had survived, he at the end went to sleep for the night and died peacefully in his own bed.
He’d loved the wilderness of the Arctic and subArctic and danced with its dangers. He could have died a hundred times, but didn’t. The first mistake, he once observed, is almost never the one that kills you.
What kills you is that cascade of mistakes that too often follows the first. Genetics and hard work rewarded Griffith with fitness to be envied, but it was his ability to stay calm in crisis that so many times saved him.
As for his fitness, well:
How many in America today could walk 200 miles even if forced to? And of the few who could, how many would pass the feat off so nonchalantly as a “200-mile trek” in order to get on with the rest of their story.
Griffith was in 2019 talking about when he was young and adventuring along the edge of a still relatively wild American Southwest not far from where he was born in a one-room cabin in southwest Colorado.
He’d grow up on a homestead to the north in rural Wyoming, survive scarlet fever and later rheumatic fever, find himself unable to join the U.S. military due to a heart murmur linked to the those diseases, and ignore it all as if it never happened.
What’s life worth if you don’t live it to the fullest?
Dick lived it to the fullest. And because his life was shaped so much by the environments in which he came of age, there will never be another like him if for no other reason than that many of those environments are gone forever.
Dick floated the Glen Canyon on the Colorado River before it was buried forever beneath the waters of Lake Powell. He paddled the Grand Canyon long before it became the tourist attraction it is today.
North to Alaska
And he and his late wife, Isabelle, arrived in Alaska in the 1950s when the state was still a territory and so, so much different than today. As late as 1959, Anchorage was a city with a population a third the size of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough of 2025.
The George Parks Highway connecting Anchorage and Fairbanks didn’t exist then. The road north of Anchorage petered out somewhere beyond Willow. Talkeetna, a popular tourist destination along the Parks today, was a remote train stop along the the tracks of the Alaska Railroad.
Talkeenta wouldn’t be linked by road to Alaska’s largest city until the early 1960s. To the south of Anchorage, the Seward Highway didn’t become a two-lane road to Seward until 1954, and it wasn’t much of a road. Back then, Alaska truly was the “Big Wild Life” that the Anchorage Convention and Visitors Bureau would embrace as a marketing gimmick decades later.
Dick had access to all sorts of wilderness adventure right out his back door in Anchorage, but that wasn’t quite enough. He went truly wild above the Arctic Circle in the Brooks Range and along the Arctic Coast.
He would eventually become the first human in recorded history to ski and walk the Arctic coast from Northwest Alaska to Eastern Canada. Along the way, he would survive a couple of attacks from rabid foxes and fend off plenty of polar bears.
The Arctic adventures made him an Alaskan of note, but he might have become most famous in the new millennium as the father of wilderness travel in tiny, inflatable boats.
“Most importantly for Alaskan adventurers, he was packrafting before it had that name,” observed Roman Dial, an Alaska adventurer of note in his own right, and a long-time friend of Griffith. “He introduced the idea of carrying a small inflatable using his cheap vinyl raft in the now famous 1982 Hope to Homer” wilderness race.
That cheap vinyl raft would eventually inspire a number of people – Dial and Sherri Tingey, the founder of Alpacka Raft among them – to start experimenting with better, more durable designs that turned packrafting into a “mainstream sport,” according to the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame, while at the same time launching the little boats into the world of extreme sport.
Dick became a candidate for the Hall in 2023. By then, fit and slightly crazy paddlers were running Class V whitewater in modern-day packrafts.
The packraft is Dick’s “Big Wild” legacy, but personally I’ll always remember him for kicking my ass on the Arctic-to-Indian ski route in the early 1990s. He was then a man at retirement age. I had just turned 40 and was running 100 miles a week, sometimes more, training for marathons.
Running isn’t cross-country skiing, however, and skiing is as much about technique as it is about power and fitness. Dick’s technique was way better than mine. I managed to keep up with him, but it was a struggle.
He just smiled. It was life lesson that served to underline an infamous quote Dick is said to have uttered on the banks of a flooded Skilak River during that Hope-to-Homer race destined to serve as the beginning of the now infamous Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic, a race so hard most people avoid it.
As a bunch of fit, young guys stood on the east bank of the Skilak in 1982 trying to figure out how to cross the turbid, glacial flow, Dick arrived, pulled that vinyl raft out of his pack, started pumping it up and observed, “You young guys eat too much and don’t know nothin’.”
Those words are hard to forget, especially as one ages and realizes more and more how little even the smartest among us know. Dick underlined in a few words one of the biggest perils of youth – thinking you know more than you actually know.
He might actually have saved my life a time or two with that simple warning that it is often wise to think before you act. And even more imporant to think long and hard about what to do next after something goes wrong in the wild as it inevitably will.
He’s going to be missed, but hopefully some of his advice will live on for a long, long time.
His “Old Blackass” nickname, for those who have read this far, came from a nasty experience with frostbite after a long, downwind hike in a Brooks Range storm with raging winds and extreme cold when Dick was younger and himself in that “don’t know nothing category.”
He learned. We should all be so lucky.
(For those interested in knowing more,
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Nicely done Craig. Your shortest obituary of all time!
Inspired by Dick’s life, saddened by his passing. Honored to have shared some time with him on those early Hope to Homer races and in the mountains above Anchorage! RIP Dick Griffith.
Says someone whose idea of how to cross raging torrents is to swim them. I still wonder where that swept away sleeping bag went….