Crossing an Arctic mountain range
In the middle of a deep sleep I woke suddenly to a grunting and snorting. We chose our Tarptent in part for weight and in part because we can see out through the mesh around the bottom. Peter was in between me and the grunting- I shook his shoulder. He was sound asleep. “Peter!” I whispered, “Wake up!” He looked at me with barely open groggy eyes. “I hear something!”
His eyes moved to half mast but he rolled over quickly toward the mesh and I peered over his shoulder. Just outside of our bear fence were two caribou, munching, burping and grunting happily, looking at us looking at them through the mesh of the tent.
“OK, more ‘bou- sorry I woke you.” It occurs to me that his ability to sleep through anything will help him once this baby comes, but I’m doomed.
A sheep skull on the tundra reminds us of all seasons of life
Arctic time- we rose around noon, but the clock no longer had any meaning. Our valley was quiet; the caribou had moved on. A small straggler group of fifty continued south upriver. During breakfast and packing the camp site, additional smaller groups of twenty to thirty trotted purposefully down the mountain saddle we were about to ascend, following the direction of the herd which had filled the valley the night before.
Mark hiking up the first saddle out of the Jago River valley
Sometime mid-afternoon we got started, ascending the saddle to our east out of the valley. We wondered if we were missing another night full of caribou, but there are never any guarantees. The previous day had simply been too much for words. As if to support our reluctance, the tundra was alternately flat and dry, and in other places unbearably boggy.
The perspective of just a few hundred feet of elevation revealed more and more details of the Jago River valley, high peaks just beyond with thick cornices, the curve and gyrations of the path of the river curving gracefully through the valley below.
We reached a camp along the trickle of stream in the upper saddle that evening, opting to stay on our side of the ridge and save the crossing for the next day because we didn’t know what the water supply would be. Even as we served up another round of Mountain House meals, groups of thirty to fifty caribou trotted through the saddle. Mark and Peter walked across the valley with their cameras, but they were too late; once observed, the caribou galloped up the hills. Just before a dubious freeze dried desert, we spotted a larger group, another hundred or more, further back in the wide saddle moving along the mysterious migration path they seemed to have imprinted deep within them. Peter and Mark headed up the valley early this time, across the valley and up the hill. I stayed in place to reduce potential distractions to the caribou and watched.
Later Peter reported his experience: he climbed the hill on the opposite side of the valley, well ahead of the caribou, and found a small depression in the tundra grass. He lay there and waited for the caribou. He was upwind, and the sun was behind him. “The hill was concave, so I heard them before I could see them,” he said. “I could hear tearing and chewing the tundra plants. Then they broke over the hill. I don’t think they ever saw me- they just kept moving along their paths.”
Even remaining stationary on the tundra, from across the valley I could hear the clatter of the caribou hooves on rock, the snorts and grunts and forceful exhales as the group made their way up the slope. It was as though the air between us didn’t exist, the sounds carried so clearly and completely. We slept again that night in a magical cocoon of wonder.
Peter hiking up the saddle
Shannon heading up the saddle
The next day we crossed over into another drainage which, about eight miles later, would take us to the confluence of the Aichilik. The hydrology depicted on the maps was not consistent with what we encountered; after passing our turn-off the first time, we finally headed up and over the pass through a narrow and boggy draw. The skies alternated spitting rain with deep blue skies. The bright Arctic sun seemed highlighted colorful and plentiful wildflowers, fields of white mountain aven, with the lower groupings if tiny pink moss campion. Bright yellow arnica. A few capitate louseworts with their otherworldly curved petals.
Then, halfway up the draw, the silhouettes of another thirty caribou appeared against the blue sky. Peter, Mark and I were spread out, each of us taking photos or enjoying the hike. The herd was trapped on the ridge with us in the narrow draw. They stood high on the ridge, peering down at us, heads held high and alert, some balancing seemingly precariously large antlers, delicate legs ready to bolt at any time.
Three of the caribou stand alert on the ridge
Then they sprung into action. Half of the group broke into a run, heading down the steep rocky hillside just below us. The other half wavered, uncertainly, and then ran the ridge the other direction. Rocks clattered. Their breaths heaved. We stayed perfectly still, but in the confined space there was nowhere for us to go. As the first group made it below us and halfway down the saddle to the valley they suddenly stopped, as though aware that they had left half of their group, or perhaps just catching out smell. They wheeled, and ran back up to the ridge from where they had come.
“Let’s get closer together,” I suggested to the guys.
“We’ll all get over on the right side,” Peter concurred. “Then they’ll have plenty of room if they want to go down the saddle.”
The three of us came back together, staying as still as possible to let the caribou decide their next move. They almost hovered on the ridgeline. Then, as dignified as though they had decided on this all along, they filed back on the ridgeline over the saddle where we were headed, and disappeared behind another rocky peak. As frustrated as I was for having been such a distraction for them, it was hard not to be simply caught up in the energy of the herd, still seeming to vibrate in the Arctic air, trembling along the ridge.
Over the saddle we descended in a rainstorm, which broke as we reached a strangely beautiful mountain stream, deep red as the rocks in Sedona, a pocket of iron oxide. The wind had picked up and blew away the rain clouds. Birds hung in the air or sang from hidden spots in the tussocked tundra. As we descended into the unnamed drainage we would follow for several more miles, willows appeared and increased in size as we lost altitude. The sides of the hills and the riverbed gave us better sight lines. Though a wide gravel bed defined the bottom of the drainage, there was no water; it had earlier plunged to subterranean channels.
We continued on picking our way through rocks and tussocks. Peter and Mark broke into the next day’s rations of Eat Local Flapjacks. At ten PM all of us were exhausted. Heavy packs, crossing a mountain pass and eight hours of hiking had done it- and we had only covered eight miles, firmly holding the average tundra travel time. We started looking for a place for a camp.
One problem was that there was still no water. Hearing a stream ahead of us flowing into our drainage, we moved on. And then we saw the fresh pile of bear scat. It was black and grassy, dark as fertilizer. We continued on. In a small muddy area in the creek bed, was a perfectly defined paw print of the bear, also recent and easy to identify with the claws visible, an easy sign of the grizzly which has particularly long claws suitable for digging. As we approached the drainage a loud cry split the evening air. A large black bird perched high on a cliff up the tertiary drainage. Its cry chilled each of us to the bone; it sounded something like a cross between a woman and a baby screaming. Another large bird swooped around the perched bird, all too far away to identify. The cut arced gracefully back into the mountains, verdant and gentle. And there was water. But none of us wanted to head up it.
“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” someone said.
“Too much bear sign, and that bird…it’s creepy. There could be a kill up there.”
“Let’s keep going.”
My legs were dragging, and my energy had plummeted. We hiked up onto the small plateau above the creek. More fresh bear scat- within a day anyway- and several areas of recent digging. I finished one of my water bottles of nuun. My heart sank. We kept on. Passing the cut masked the terrible sound of the bird. We dropped into another cut and came back up on another plateau. It had good sight lines in all directions. We pulled out the maps and GPS.
“We could keep going,” Mark suggested. “Just push through. It’s about five more miles to the Aichilik, so we’d get there about five in the morning.”
“I’m done,” I said. “Unless someone doesn’t feel safe here, I’d rather stay.”
Having left the bear sign a couple of plateaus away, and feeling good about the visibility in our camp, we set up. The gravel bar below us was still dry. There was no water, other than a murky pool beneath us. Peter decided it would filter acceptably. We set up the dining area a particularly long way from our tents, put up the bear fence, and fell into our sleeping bags after two AM.
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