Alaska is trying to kill you. There is no way to sugarcoat this. The Big Wild Life, as much as some of us might love it, combines the worst of two worlds -- the modern dangers of the way Americans live today and the ancient dangers of the way the continent's original inhabitants lived ages ago.

If you don't die getting to the wilderness, the wilderness might well try to kill you. Consider the the fatalities so far in June:

Twenty-three-year-old Andrew Jones went for an early morning hike along Turnagain Arm. He slipped, started sliding on the notoriously bad rock of the Chugach Mountains, and tumbled to his death.

Thirty-six-year-old Jason Allgood went to do some subsistence fishing near Haines. His car was later found parked near the Chilkat River. A single set of footprints led to a gravel bar half a mile away. Searchers found Allgood's backpack and his dipnet in the area. The river was running high. Search dogs later alerted to scent in the water a quarter mile downstream from where Allgood's gear was discovered, but his body has yet to be found. Alaska State Troppers are waiting for river levels to drop. Allgood left behind a wife and three children.

Fifty-seven-year-old Dottie Linoff simply sat down to enjoy a dinner of clams her family dug from a beach near Juneau. She ended up dead of paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) -- the disease of the so-called "red tide" that needs no red water in Southeast Alaska waters. The poison is there almost year round no matter what color the water.

Twenty-seven-year-old Joris Van Reeth fell only 100 feet down a slope below the summit of Mount McKinley. Plenty of people have fallen farther on North America's tallest mountain and survived, but the Belgian climber died. He became the fourth climber to perish in and around the 20,320-foot mountain this year. Two others had died buried in an avalanche in late May.

Most places in the world you are safe from avalanche by the end of May. Most places in the world if you fall in a river you splash out. But Alaska is not most places.

The water is colder. Sometimes so cold it can suck the wind right out of you if you fall in.

The mountains are snowier, which can make for smooth, easy hiking right up until the moment you slip, fall and start accelerating. The worst climbing accident in Chugach State Park history happened much this way within sight of downtown Anchorage. Two beginning climbers fell and then slid to their deaths along the snows of the North Col of Ptarmigan Peak. Nine others were injured. I have safely climbed the same snow-filled couloir in trail running shoes, though I would not recommend this.

To paraphrase Hudson Stuck, who traveled more than 10,000 miles of Alaska by dogsled before becoming one of the first to summit McKinley, "Everything is fine as long as it is fine."

The problem with Alaska is that the geography, the climate and the sometimes unfamiliar dangers -- PSP, frigid water even in the heat of summer, grizzly bears, monster tides, scree -- can sometimes conspire to turn a minor accident, like Jones's slip, into a cascade toward death.

All of which makes Alaska a place with more risks than most. You don't have to worry about getting attacked by a grizzly bear in California or washed away by a 20-foot boretide along the Gulf Coast. There is no danger of slipping on rotten graywacke and falling to your death in Iowa or getting hit by an avalanche in Georgia.

In most of those places, the greatest danger anyone faces is the risk of dying in a motor vehicle accident. Somewhere in the United States today, someone will die that way in the next 15 minutes. About 37,000 people died this way in 2008, the last full year for which figures are available from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

If motor-vehicle deaths were cut by even 10 percent, perhaps by requiring drivers pay attention while they are at the wheel, the country would save more people every year than died in the 9/11 attacks. But driving is the one big risk no one thinks about much because everyone takes driving for granted.