The elevated platform that Ada built near her camp is documented in the accounts of her time alone on the island. It served as a watch post: a structure high enough to give her a view across the terrain around the camp, from which she could see bears approaching before they got too close.
The polar bears of Wrangel Island are one of the island’s defining features. The island is among the most important polar bear habitats in the circumpolar region — the high density of walruses and seals in the surrounding waters, and the walrus haul-outs on the island’s beaches, make it a place where bears concentrate. In summer, when the sea ice retreats and the bears can no longer hunt on the ice, many of them remain on the island, living on stored fat and whatever they can find on land.
A lone woman in a camp on Wrangel Island in the summer of 1923 was surrounded by polar bears in numbers that we now understand, from modern ecological surveys, to be substantial. She knew the bears were present. She was managing her own visibility and the camp’s scent and her movements in relation to the bears’ patterns, and she was using the platform to extend her range of observation.
The gun rack she built above her bed — specifically so she could reach a weapon quickly in the night — is the detail that captures the lived experience of bear coexistence on the island. She was sleeping in a place where polar bears were moving through the terrain, and she was alone. The rack was the practical solution to the problem of being able to respond quickly if a bear approached the tent. She was not making a symbolic statement; she was solving a logistical problem created by a very large, very capable predator that moved through her sleeping area.