Road-to-Road - Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - June 2018
TOTAL MILES: 200-ish; Backpacking Dalton Highway to Ivishak Headwaters: 100 miles; Packrafting Ivishak River: 100 miles
Malcolm floats past aufeis as we travel through the coastal plain on the Ivishak River.
In late-June 2018, my partner Malcolm and I headed north from Anchorage towards my oft-visited and favorite Alaska destination: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Amidst a busy summer of work, I had cordoned off two weeks for a personal trip and the arctic was where I wanted to spend it.
In the past, trips I have guided in the Arctic Refuge have involved a lot of aviation - usually two flights in small airplanes from Fairbanks into and out of the Refuge. I love bush planes, aviation and flying, but, as I’ve mentioned before, I was starting to feel guilty about the size of my carbon footprint. In 2017, my personal trip to the Refuge involved only scheduled, commercial flights - nothing chartered. That felt like an improvement.
This year we opted for a road-to-road itinerary, no flights required. This not only saved us money and fossil fuel-guilt, but I hope also demonstrates that the Refuge isn’t just for the super rich who can afford $2000+ of flight costs. If you have two feet you can get yourself into the Arctic Refuge. Getting there still required plenty of driving (15 hours each way from Anchorage) so it was by no means a carbon-neutral trip. But I was happy to consume fewer fossil fuels while exploring a place I have been pretty vocal about protecting from oil and gas development.
15 hours of windshield time sucks, but it helps when the views look like this.
As we drove north towards the Brooks Range, we left behind the beautiful, sunny weather of interior Alaska for overcast skies and rivers swollen with rainfall. We came into the trip with recent reports of late-winter/early-summer storms shutting down expeditions. Rivers were running low and airstrips, mountain passes and even lower elevations had been blanketed by snowfall. Due to this weather-related ambiguity, we came equipped with multiple potential routes through the mountains to the Ivishak River, which we would eventually float back to the Dalton Highway. If there was too much snow, we could stay in the valleys at lower elevations. If the snow wasn’t a problem, we would go high. In the end we ended up somewhere in the middle of our elevation options.
The best part of traveling through the Arctic Refuge in late-June or early-July? An abundance of wildflowers exploding from the tundra!
We parked our truck at Galbraith Lake with a friendly note for bears and humans to please not steal/vandalize it in the next 10 days. Although we were traveling with packrafts, we started by opting to walk along the Atigun River through Atigun Gorge to its confluence with the Saganavirtok River. After driving past numerous flood-stage Brooks Range rivers we decided not to start the trip with a potential swim - especially considering we were traveling without drysuits or helmets. Our eventual target, the Ivishak River, promised easy paddling, so we ditched the safety gear to save a few pounds on our backs. Atigun Gorge and the next day and a half of this route overlapped with the first couple days of my trip in 2017 - which I thought might feel different or redundant, but I really didn’t mind. A different season, different weather and a different trip partner helped make it all feel new.
We stumbled upon some really neat stuff as we made our way northeast towards the Ivishak - including a wolverine carcass and a rocket! The wolverine was surrounded by wolf scat on a high promontory - so I decided it died in an epic showdown with another predator. The rocket came from Poker Flat Research Range and apparently finding a rocket on the tundra isn’t as rare an experience as you might think. Wildlife was consistent, if not abundant, and we saw a sampling of most of the arctic critters: sheep (tons), grizzly bears (we unwittingly took a quick nap adjacent to a couple of browsing subadults, oops), moose, caribou (many small bands as we approached the coastal plain), a lone, bedraggled wolf and a river otter. The otter surprised me - for some reason I didn’t think they were found on the north side of the continental divide in rivers bound for the Beaufort Sea. But he/she proved me wrong by playing alongside our packrafts as we floated out of the mountains.
I prefer my snack breaks to be scenic, sunny and at least 50% cheese.
For the most part, the geology was classic Brooks Range - slanted limestone peaks, broad, gradual valleys and steep rocky drainages - but I thought this trip had a bit more geologic variety than some of my past Refuge trips. Overall the walking ranged from good to excellent - with minimal ankle-twisting tussocks. And the paddling was what I would call “low consequence, splashy, fun times”. Technically speaking, class II-. Mellow enough that we didn’t need to carry drysuits with us, but not so boring that I thought I would fall asleep. The scenery and frequent bird, caribou & otter visitors kept the paddling engaging too. I’ve now paddled the Marsh Fork, Canning, Atigun, Wind, Junjik and Kongakut Rivers. And I’ve walked long portions of the Hulahula and Jago Rivers. And I think that the mountainous portion of the Ivishak has scenery to rival any of them.
After all the reports of winter weather and storms, summer arrived in the arctic just as we did - I don’t recall wearing a puffy jacket, gloves or a hat for the whole trip. Mostly I felt sweaty, hot and mildly sunburnt. While there was plenty of snow on the ground - which turned to isothermal slop as we walked through it - this was my first summer trip to the Arctic Refuge that didn’t involve actively getting snowed on. We did get a pretty fun hail storm as a consolation prize. In fact, we were so hot hiking one day that we started scheming up trips to somewhere cooler and rainier - we settled on Kauai. It is a rare, hot day in the arctic when Hawaii starts to sound like a cool weather vacation destination.
It wasn’t just the weather that was kind to us; literally everything about this trip felt easy. I slept great every night. When we were hiking, nothing was too steep, too exposed. Daily mileage was totally reasonable. Campsites were generally excellent and right where we needed them. I never felt physically beat down or tired. It wasn’t ever psychologically hard. Malcolm and I got along great the whole time. We were prepared for strong, demoralizing headwinds as we paddled north on the Ivishak, but they never materialized. At one point as we descended a valley we came to a choked, narrow gorge with tall sheer walls. Having to turn around would have meant a multi-day reroute, but as luck would have it, there was a beautiful critter trail traversing the talus field above the gorge, shepherding us around what could have felt like a crux, but in the end was just another pleasant day of walking through the arctic. At the end of this trip, I felt like I could recommend this route to any person looking for their first Brooks Range traverse.
Looking down on the Ivishak River, and our future floating, from “I Am Sheep” Peak - no thats not the USGS name, but it should be. The soil at the peak was 75% sheep poop and we followed a perfect sheep trail all the way to the top.
The trip isn’t over until you manage to hitch a ride back to your truck. The “cruxiest” part of the trip was waiting 7 hours for someone to drive us south.
I truly had a great time - enjoying almost every second of being outside - traveling through a landscape that I love - with my partner. But after the trip, I found myself wrestling with some questions. It is hard to put words too, but since almost everything about this trip was easy, in hindsight I was almost disappointed. I was left wondering, what is so wrong with everything going right? I didn’t actually want anything to go wrong, but when there isn’t enough hardship, something feels off. Did we fail to challenge ourselves sufficiently? Or would “challenging” ourselves just be manufacturing hardship where it didn’t need exist? This post-trip rumination has me cooking up some bigger plans for 2019 - hoping to be challenged in new ways as I move through the wilderness!
