Call of the Last Wilderness : Leaving Civilization Far Behind in the Alaskan Arctic

We glass the ridgeline ahead with binoculars, looking for wolf. They roam up where the breeze is fresh and the tundra dry and where they can see for 100 miles. We know this becauseon the brow of the promontories they leave behind gnawed bones and hairy scat, piles of it.

Besides, where else would you go but up high if you were a wolf and these were the dog days of summer and this was your domain?

Temporary wanderers into this timelessness, we see no wolf right now. But hmmm. Something’s moving on the ridgeline.

First, wide-set, wobbling ears emerge over the crest. Then a big dish face with a snout big as a stovepipe ahead of shaggy, rippling shoulders. A blonde barren-ground grizzly is on the move. And her shambling, zigzag course is bringing her our way.

She is followed by he--a larger, darker bear hard on her heels. This is July on the North Slope of the Brooks Range mountains in northeast Alaska and already courtship has begun. The big boar will follow the coy sow for days, perhaps weeks, and then she--perhaps--will acknowledge his interest. Why, Ed, aren’t you looking exceedingly robust today?

Until then they move in lonely tandem, busily scraping a living from the roots and rodents of the tundra. And grabbing off the larger stuff when it’s handy.

By the way, I should mention the two bears are still coming our way, and more or less directly so.

Here in the Arctic, beyond where trees break the vista, we live in our binoculars. And a good rule of thumb when omnivores are closer than 8-power range: Make way, while you can.

We do, and retreat a quarter-mile before the bears can see or overtake us.

When we look back, a little bear, maybe a 2-year-old on its first summer away from home, is flushed out by the larger bears and dashes up the hillside. The little bear seems to have been sitting on a cache of some kind, perhaps the meat of a kill, and seems reluctant to venture too far. Nervously, it lurks on high ground, and like us, tries to plot the course of those who hold a more favored place on the food chain.

Awhile later, a fourth bear--it looks like another boar--wanders into the scene from the left. Maybe he has some courtship action in mind.

By now, we have to name the bears so we can whisper about them as we watch. “I think Little Britches is coming back down the hill . . . .” “Look, I think Lefty is a little discouraged after he saw the size of Big Ed . . . .”

Someone from our group takes a glance behind us. Across the Kongakut River is a fifth bear, galumphing across a tundra slope.

So, you say you want to get away from the hurley-burley and spend some time in the natural world?

This is as far away and as wild as one can go in the U.S. We are on the eighth day of a 10-day float down the Kongakut River, near the border with the Canadian Yukon, and except for our troupe of 10, we have seen more bears, wolverines, foxes, Dall sheep, caribou, moose and eagles than people. We haven’t caught sight of a wolf, but have stopped along the river and listened to one’s melodious howl, our skin prickling at the truest call of the wild.

Across a side creek from our camp, two primitive-looking musk oxen crash through chest-high willow thickets. One is a juvenile with flapjack ears in the shape of Mr. Spock’s. The other is a mature bull with a proud, shaggy coat that hangs and sways like a grass skirt.

And nature doesn’t stop with that. Nearby, a low-slung wolverine raids a fox den and emerges with a pup in its jaws. Mom and dad fox fill the air with tormented squalls and give chase, snapping at the waddling intruder without avail. One fox is black, the other red. The chase takes them over the horizon. Only red returns.

Our guide, Macgill Adams, foreman of his own Anchorage-based Wilderness Alaska outfitters, is spending his 15th summer here. Today is the wildlife highlight of our trip, a record-book day by any measure. We are drained, uplifted, astonished, mesmerized and not apt to sleep so soundly in the company of what is literally a ton of live grizzly bears.

“This is a great wide-open place and there are no guard rails,” says Adams, smiling. He arches his eyebrows. “And, oh my, I forgot my ruby slippers.”

We gather under a tarp sometime around midnight. Why look at your watch when you’re far above the Arctic Circle under 24 hours of daylight? One of our three rafts is hoisted on its side for a wind break. Macgill fixes a tub of guacamole and chips, and passes a flagon of tequila. This is followed by steak fajitas the size of the Sunday paper. For dessert, strawberry cheesecake.

Stuffed and tired, we sit on five-gallon buckets, absorbing the absolute stillness of this remaining heritage of America’s authentic remoteness. And we listen to the satisfied inner voice that whispers congratulations to each of us for our wisdom in coming.

It is the Fourth of July.

From my notebook that day: “This is the standard by which all other holidays will be judged--and judged short.”

*

Most everyone has a favorite place in the outdoors, where air and sky and water renew the spirit, calm the soul. And in extreme places like this, the outdoors, at least for a moment, touches more deeply our unsatisfied and primitive human yearning for space.

The Arctic. It ignites imagination with its forbidding, which, yes, it can be. But not always. Space and scale here in the refuge portion of the Brooks Range is incomprehensible and (so far) untamed--19 million acres sharp from the chisel of creation--sheer rock mountains, epic tundra foothills and a vast, treeless plain leading to the Beaufort Sea. No roads, no bridges, no man-made trails. Proof, if necessary, that a place needs plenty of room to be wild.

As this is being written, I can report that during the last 12 months I’ve spent more than one day of 10 here on rivers of the North Slope of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with Macgill Adams. And that’s not enough, yet. More than half of those who have accompanied us are planning their returns, including me.

Easiest to tell are our stories of the bears and falcons, the warm sun on rivers whose banks still hold ice, the fossil rocks, the wildflowers tiny as gemstones, the forbidden cliff faces that have never known piton or hammer, the tundra plants which reach out to capture and hold precious droplets of rain--the things we see. More subtle, personal and, ultimately, more profound are the sensations of casting loose to achieve such latitudes.

Some of us on this 10-day trip have been in the Brooks Range before. Others have not camped out since childhood. We all came by word of mouth or through tiny ads in outdoor publications. Adams is one of a small clan of Brooks Range naturalist guides with the mastery, sensibility, drive, muscle and ego to, year after year, open the Arctic curtain for people who otherwise would never venture so far north.

At the airport in Fairbanks, we become separated from our delusions of controlling our lives--and the faster the better, so we can fling ourselves at discovery.

A single-engine charter carries us about 240 miles to the Athabascan Indian settlement of Arctic Village, population 150. A smaller bush plane then shuttles us 45 minutes over the Continental Divide in twos and threes to a gravel bar landing strip on the Kongakut where we will launch our 14-foot boats. The process takes all day.

We put on the water at 10:30 p.m. in a driving storm, with fat rain pellets drumming hard on our eyeballs. To a person, we are euphoric.

Some days we float, some we hike and some we do a little of both. Our movements are determined not by a clock or a schedule but by our moods, by the scenery, the weather. These are primordial, honest cadences with a logic too many of us have forgotten but which are quickly re-established.

At first, Adams is besieged with questions: How far have we floated today? How high is that peak? What is the temperature? How much does that bear weigh?

He shakes his head. Part of truly getting away is liberating ourselves from this kind of slavish box-score accounting. So he answers thus: We floated a long way today. That mountain is pretty dog-gone high. The temperature feels warm enough to wear shorts, don’t you think? And, that is one big son-of-a-gun of a bear.

Flabby muscles throb. Appetites go crazy. And our sense of wonder, stale from urban routine, swells larger each day, at every bend of the river, with every knoll hiked, under every sudden change in weather, by every scan of distant ridges.

*

None of us would say it’s an easy trip. Wonderful, full of discovery, but not easy. For every uplifting moment of wonder, there is a corresponding spell of self-doubt. But if we could chart our emotions on an oscilloscope, we’d find in our wake almost none of those flat, modulated moments which relentlessly consume our otherwise measured lives.

Even a seasoned hand like Adams, to our surprise, relinquishes himself to euphoric ups and introspective downs that are the rhythms of the wild.

Early in the trip, a couple of miles of Class II rock gardens could surge to Class III in higher water, but even our heavily loaded, underpowered paddle rafts take the stream easily. The water is spring clear and icy, and is some of the last in the world where you dare plunge your face in and gulp it raw and untreated.

Our downhill course will take us 55 miles. We start deep back in the Brooks Range, surrounded by imposing, multicolored rock mountains, and we float north for several days through a broad-shouldered, winding valley, exploring side canyons along the way.

Later the mountains will lose their ragged tops and we will be in foothills, which from afar seem covered in velvet. Up close, we see it is tundra, the complex mat of lumpy, clumpy, spongy, often soggy, ankle-wrenching vegetation that insulates the ice below from the sun above during the short 50-odd days of summer.

We conclude our trip where the hills come to rest on the empty vastness of the coastal plain, the summer home and calving grounds for more than 150,000 caribou. We miss their passing migration by only a couple of days, but the air still has a faint barnyard bouquet.

From a nob, our group looks out onto the Arctic Ocean and the far-off ice pack. Heat waves shimmer from horizon to horizon across a plain as empty and rich and wondrous as Kansas in 1820.

We hear a buzz that for a change is not a mosquito. A bush plane bounces to a stop on our tundra shelf. Outbound adventurers are shuttled to the oil-field airport of Deadhorse at Prudhoe Bay, to the west, for a jetliner connection back to Fairbanks.

Too fast, the world of engines and stoplights and telephones and money is there with its imposing greetings. With the endless Arctic summer days, tonight’s sunset will be the first anyone has seen in 10 days and the darkness carries a melancholy gloom. The wild is something you can sample, but you cannot bring home.

Mosquito Madness

They are spooky, as dense in the Arctic as anywhere I’ve been, which includes the Amazon Basin. But the challenge proves more mental than physical.

Repellents with 25%-30% concentrations of the chemical Deet will keep mosquitoes from biting. (The 100% stuff is hard on your skin and your gear, and in my experience gains you nothing.) Tight-weave, loose-fitting nylon pants and jackets keep them off your body. For the worst days of our trip, we donned mesh jackets (sold under the Bug Armor or Shoo-Bug brand names) soaked in Deet. That’s the physical part.

But mosquitoes still buzz in your face and swirl in clouds 20 feet high during peak summer season. Huffing up a hill, you’ll breath a few. Look in your soup cup and you’ll find that you’re eating a few. Bathing in the ice water of the Kongakut River is hard enough, but also exposes tender flesh faster than you can spray bug dope. Ditto when using the, ah, facilities. All this is the mental part.

Sounds awful, but we all adjusted. By the end, the bugs were a nuisance, not a nightmare. Everyone brought a head net, but after a day or two, they were stowed at the bottom of the gear bag.

GUIDEBOOK

Adventures North of the Arctic Circle

Getting there: Alaska Airlines and Delta have direct flights from LAX to Fairbanks. United offers connecting flights to Fairbanks out of LAX, Alaska Airlines a connecting flight out of Burbank. Round-trip fares start at $445, advance purchase. Bush plane shuttles in and out are arranged by guides.

Clothing: Hardly ever is good gear more important than in the Arctic. Rain, fog, 40-degree wind-swept cold, 80-degree sun with no shade for 150 miles, mosquitoes, boggy tundra, sharp scree rock--you get it all in extremes, and not uncommonly, in a single day. The only solution is layers and lightweight synthetics such as Capilene and fleece, which are best because they resist moisture. For rain gear, an impenetrable cagaoule , or long anorak, sailing bibs and high rubber boots are standard.

Choosing a guide: I would only travel with a guide after speaking first to people who had been on previous trips with him or her. Compare Arctic experience, the tempo of trips, food, naturalist skills, group size, equipment. Confirm with the guide whether he or she will lead the trip or contract it out to someone else. Try to connect with a trip where everyone has similar physical abilities and goals.

Because of the Arctic’s unique flora, fauna, character, weather extremes and remoteness, I place my trust in those one-person guide companies who specialize in trips in the region rather than those larger, contract operations that provide adventure travel elsewhere. The Arctic specialists know best the local bush pilots on whose shoulders your trip depends. They know the right gear. They know the birds and wildflowers of the tundra. They are willing to accommodate your special interests.

Two Arctic guides with years of experience and long lists of satisfied Arctic visitors: Macgill Adams, Wilderness Alaska, Box 113063, Anchorage, Alaska 99511-3063; tel. (907) 345-3567. Bob Dittrick, Wilderness Birding Adventures, P.O. Box 103747-B, Anchorage, Alaska 99510-3747; tel. (907) 694-7442.