The gravel bar is a jumble of jagged clay rock; there are fossils everywhere, worms and seashells, fragments of petrified wood, fern leaves, an ancient world frozen in stone. I imagine myself walking in an ancient arctic rain forest. We climb up the cliff above our tents following game trails and eating blueberries. There are caribou antlers laying in the tundra and caribou grazing on the distant hill.

Reaching the top of the cliff I can look across the river and see a distant oil rig. It is hard to know just how big it is, but it must be big, it fills a distant ridge. The rig unsettles me; I am looking at the last thing I want to see, like looking at a cancer cell under a microscope…there it is, real, solid, not a vision, or an idea…a reality, as real as the caribou or the fossils at my feet.

Later, with the sun low on the horizon, the hills are streaked with yellow and in the distance I can see the vertical tower of the oil rig…It is vertical in a horizontal landscape…it sits there alone…a sentinel that defines the looming threat of more towers, pipelines, roads, gravel pits…all of it representing millions of dollars of investment…money spent to pour oil into the sky.

There are caribou on the gravel bar, there are caribou on the surrounding hills…the river shines blue, the air has gotten colder, there is a light wind…I can barely hear the hum of the land

by Richard Kahn

The owl flies silently over my head, white and brown wings making no sound…over the river into the tundra, the owl drops out of sight and then emerges from a fold in the land a small creature tucked in its talons…Screeching peregrine chicks hidden somewhere on the cliff face, strident calls, chaotic screaming…pleading, hidden from view. The adult falcon, invisible, screeches a warning…

A group of silent black and white geese run across the gravel bar…Gulls watch, their incessant call not so much the call of the wilderness, but more like a reminder that the familiar lives in the most exotic places…or, perhaps, a reminder that the exotic is merely a perspective shift of the familiar.

Loons call, they are distant silhouettes on the water, sometimes sounding like ducks or geese…sometimes laughing…they run across the surface of the river beating their wings as their feet stir up white wakes…They leave the surface, turn and head upstream, heads down, necks extended, wings beating the air, they fight to fly unlike the hawks, eagles, falcons and owls who float effortlessly on the air…hovering, soaring, hurtling towards the ground, blasting straight into the sky.

And then there is the raven, dark shape, calls like a gull, flies like a hawk, soars with the eagles…In the middle of the night the raven’s call wakes me up…it is close, and unlike anything else I have heard here…sound like wind passing through a long pipe…a bird flute…it is unique and unlike the mimicking cries I hear from the raven during the day…If the caribou are the magician animals, dancing across the tundra, appearing and disappearing mysteriously in their own way, then the raven is the magician bird…dark like a shadow…silent or noisy at will, a mimic or a unique individual…secure, curious, nomadic…

Changing Paths, by Bill Sherwonit

Wilderness Music, excerpted from

Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness

©2010 by Bill Sherwonit

At age 50, nature writer and wilderness advocate Bill Sherwonit went on the longest backpack of his life: fifty miles in two weeks, across mostly untrailed wilderness in America’s remotest and arguably wildest parkland, Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Traveling alone, he explored parts of the Central Brooks Range first made famous by Robert Marshall’s Alaska Wilderness. America’s “ultimate mountains” are also where Sherwonit first got his taste of Alaska’s wilderness, while working as a geologist in the mid-1970s; in a very real way, the Brooks Range transformed his life.

The following excerpt is taken from Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness (published in fall 2009 by the University of Alaska Press), which describes Sherwonit’s solo trek and also moves across space and time while reflecting upon his days as a geologist, his Connecticut roots, the importance of wilderness to humans as a life-affirming, life-changing, and life-enriching presence, and, just as importantly, the inherent value of wild nature, in and of itself.

Camped alone deep in Alaska’s Brooks Range wilderness, I find a comfortable spot along the North Fork of the Koyukuk.  Then, placing my head beside the river’s churning aqua waters, I listen closely to its fluid play of sounds.  I’ve heard beautiful Celtic-like chanting, off and on, for the past few days.  The songs seem to come from outside me, from the forest and tundra and especially the river, but I suppose it could all be in my head.  I’ve even put words to some of the music: “Holy, ho-o-o-ly, holy . . . ”

As the melodies and words play through my head, I’m left wondering what combination of landscape and wind sounds mix with my memories and thought processes – and several days of solitude—to produce these voices, this music.

My musings are interrupted by an unmistakably “real” voice that has nothing to do with my imagination: a howling comes from the forest, behind my tent.  It is a loud, clear, resonant wail that rolls across the valley, of alto key.  The howl triggers an immediate physical and emotional response: heart races, pulse quickens, spirit lifts. Instinctively I turn from the river, binoculars in hand, and face the wooded hills above camp.  With all the tracks and scat on this riverbar and across the North Fork, I’ve anticipated – and sometimes imagined – wolf howls throughout my three-day campout here.  Each morning and night I’ve swept the hillsides with binoculars, hopeful of a miracle.  Now one has come to me.

I peer at two tundra knobs a few hundred feet above camp, then scan the spruce forest below.  Even as I do, the howling resumes.  The first baleful voice is joined by a second, higher pitched.  This one is more of a soprano.  The trembling howls blend and shift key.  Are there more than two wolves?  Hard to tell.  Wolves are known to mix their voices in a way that produces a magnified sense of numbers.

The rain is falling harder now, but I barely notice. The wolf songs last a minute or two, but resonate much longer.  This is what I dream about, to share the wilderness with howling wolves.

I ask myself which is more desirable, to see wolves or hear them sing?  There’s no simple answer, but there is this fact: over the years I’ve seen wolves a half-dozen times, yet heard them howling only once.  Those songs came from a distance in these very mountains, though in another valley, miles to the west. More than a quarter century has passed since that rainy autumn afternoon, but the haunting cries still ring out sharply in my memory.

I don’t think the wolves would disturb anything in camp, but to ease any nagging doubts I walk across the gravel bar and check my tarp and tent. Then back to the water’s edge for more searching.  Even before I reach my “lookout,” I spot a wolf, upstream from camp and halfway across the braided North Fork, not far from where I crossed the river three days ago.  Maybe 200 yards away.  I can’t be fully certain from this distance, but the wolf strikes me as female and that’s what the animal becomes.

If I had to name her color, I’d say white wolf.  But that ignores the subtleties of her coat.  Bringing her into focus with my glasses, I see she has a mostly white face, with some gray atop her head and on her neck.  Her flanks are light gray, legs are white, tail the color of gathering clouds, becoming darker, like storm clouds, at the tip.  In her wettened coat, the wolf appears lean but not skinny, and I assume, for no sure reason, that she’s in good health.

The wolf crouches low as she crosses the mid-river sand and gravel bars, as if to avoid detection.  She glances now and then in my direction and I’m sure she sees me.  Moving slowly, she reaches the final, deepest channel.  She steps gingerly at first, splashing across the milky green river.  Then, for the final few feet, she plunges and swims across.  The wolf stops at the forest’s edge and looks back intently – but this time not toward me.  I’ve swung the binoculars back and forth across the river two or three times, expecting another wolf to appear, but none follows.

The she-wolf moves into the forest and I assume our encounter’s over, but the wolf reappears, walking slowly along the woods’ margin.  Once she steps into the open, smells something on the bar.  Then back under the trees.  She takes one last look across the North Fork and turns away.  Her walk becomes a trot and she’s gone, melted into the forest’s shadows.

Minutes later, there’s more howling – from my side of the river, though farther downstream.  Perhaps the second wolf was unwilling to cross the stream within sight of me or the camp.  The white wolf sings back, briefly.  Then silence returns to the valley, except for the rushing, rattling, humming North Fork and tapping of rain.  In a growing downpour I stand still another 30 minutes, maybe even an hour.

Finally I give up my watch, grab shelter under the tarp.  I notice I’m shivering; from the wet chill, yes, but also from the song of Canis lupus.

I love grizzly bears.  They are one of my primary totem animals, maybe my most important.  To share the landscape with grizzlies is always an honor and delight (and occasionally worrisome).  But to be with howling wolves in the arctic wilds; well, there is no greater magic.  Beneath the tarp and later in the tent, I imagine distant, intermittent howling throughout the afternoon and evening.  It’s amazing how much a river or the wind can sound like wolves.

I’ve had a feeling about this place since first seeing the many wolf tracks along the river.  I’m convinced there’s a den not far away and have wished I might stumble upon it, or even see wolf pups from a distance while scanning the landscape.  But I’m satisfied now.  I’ve had my communion. Both body and soul have been stirred by songs that tell, without words, of mountains and rivers, of mysteries as ancient as music itself.

Throughout this trip, my most memorable times have come as moments of surprise: sudden (even if anticipated) encounters with the Valley of Precipices, Doonerak, grizzlies, a bear skull, now wolves.  Animals have been the best example of this.  For all the looking and “hunting” I’ve done, the wildlife I’ll remember most have come to me. It seems I’m being given new opportunities to let go of expectations and, at the same time, be open to possibilities. Both ideas, and the practice of them, have become important guideposts in my middle years.

After spending much of my life trying to keep things under control, I’m learning to surrender to life’s experiences, while also embracing the opportunities that come my way. It’s not easy, as demonstrated on this trip by my worrying, my off-and-on watch monitoring, and my efforts to stay dry and cozy in my overly large and weather-resistant tent. Yet I’ve remained flexible and taken some risks, both here and generally. It still sometimes seems amazing to me that a person so drawn to comfort and predictability would take the leaps of faith I’ve made, from geology to journalism and then to freelancing. And settling in Alaska, of all places! Not many of my childhood friends – or family members – would ever have guessed that the small, shy, sensitive boy of long ago would become an author, wilderness lover, and activist, or that he’d some day ascend the continent’s highest peak or trek alone across miles of untrailed Arctic wilderness.

The sun briefly returns in the evening and I hike to a rocky knob above camp.  From here I get a better sense of how the landscape sweeps out and away from the Ernie Creek-North Fork confluence and the two streams’ large gravel bars, first to lowland forest and then upland tundra meadows and willow thickets, and even higher to encircling tundra-topped foothills and mountains with bare, jagged ridgetops.  Beyond those hills and mountains are more waves of peaks and hidden valleys.

I feel so lucky, so happy, to be in the heart of this vast wilderness, where wild places still mostly free of human influence span dozens of miles in any direction.  I need these trips for so many reasons: to refresh my spirit, test my limits and stretch my horizons, embrace solitude, expand my sense of what’s possible, encounter “the other,” renew my bonds with wildness in its many forms, and see more clearly what’s important, both here in the wild and back at home.  Still, I can’t imagine making a home here (if it were allowed), so far from other people and the conveniences of modern living.  I don’t try to fool myself: this northern wilderness is a harsh, demanding place, and to live here year-round would require skills I haven’t acquired.

Thinking about the trials and perils of Arctic homesteading, I again recall Ernie Johnson, “the most famous trapper of the North Fork,” for whom Bob Marshall named Ernie Creek. According to Marshall, “Although [Johnson] had come north on a gold rush, he had also been drawn by his love of the woods in this greatest wilderness on the continent.  Here he spent all but about two weeks in the year out in the hills, away from the ‘cities’ of Wiseman (population 103) and Bettles (population 24). . . . He trapped and hunted, averaging a yearly income of about twenty-five hundred dollars.  ‘I can make better money as a carpenter,’ he said, ‘but I am staying out here because I like it among these ruggedy mountains better than anywhere else in the world.’ ”

Here was someone who’d chosen the hermit’s life I once talked about pursuing while fed up with people and relationships during my grad school days; someone who actually chose to spend most of his adult years in seclusion. What revelations and understandings did Ernie find here among the sheep and grizzlies? As much as I desire and seek out solitude, I can’t imagine a life so empty of people.

From the perch above camp I trace much of the route I’ve followed along Ernie Creek, from the Precipices to the North Fork.  Then I look downstream, where I’ll be walking tomorrow.  It appears I’m bound for “the dark forest.”  Thick stands of spruce press close against the meandering river.  I will likely cut through the woods in places, either to shorten my route or where pushed into the trees by steep, river-eroded cutbanks.  I hope it’s not too dense or brushy for easy path finding.

While plotting my route, I hear more howling, downriver.  The wolf song is loud and clear, but brief.  I wish for more, but instead hear only the rush of river. And gradually, more chanting voices.  These are less pleasing, more eerie.  My mind imagines a chorus of “sorry . . . sorry” sung in a mocking, almost malevolent tone.  Is the darkness in this chant tied to my worries about tomorrow’s route?  The chant unnerves me and I’m unable to get the words out of the head as I descend back to camp.  Can such things come from too much solitude?  Again I wonder how much I’m “hearing” and how much imagining.  The presence of these landscape sounds and voices has been among the stranger aspects of this trek.

NPR-A by Richard Kahn

Rain all night…the clouds are down on the lake…It is a cold grey morning…Patches of blue sky breaking through until the days changes in character…Bright sun, light wind, blue sky…the grasses glowing yellow…Pools of water gathered in the folds of the dunes…the hum of the land is loud in my ears…There are no caribou to be seen… their tracks in the sand have been eroded by the rain…The wind blows sand into the ridges…but the day is dry…We walk up though the dunes, past the loon pond and head south in the direction of the vanished caribou. Ground squirrels watch as we cross the tundra. We stop for lunch finding shelter behind an outcrop of blowing grass above a break in the dunes. A highway of tracks marks the passing of caribou. I set up the video camera pointing out across the sand looking east across the lake. We eat lunch and wait. There are several caribou in the distance…We wait…the caribou graze moving slowly in our direction…We wait…a young bull, a cow and her calf, the ground squirrels run across the dunes, they stand, they flick their tails, they chatter and then run for their holes in the side of the dune… The caribou graze and move closer, until the young bull is just below us. He looks directly at me, pauses, and then goes back to grazing…the cow and the calf move closer and then trot off to the east. The bull walks past us up the highway of tracks and disappears over the hill. In the distance more caribou graze and move closer…we wait…the bull returns…he takes another long look at me and then begins to graze. Caribou walk along the lake. A bull walks into the lake until the water reaches his chest…he stands there, brown body, blue water, his antlers silhouetted in the bright sunlight…the caribou graze around us. The ground squirrels chase each other through the tundra. We spend the day in the dunes, sheltered in this one spot, in the shadow of blowing grass, watching the caribou come and go…A day spent on caribou time…watching them meander from plant to plant, walk, sit, trot, graze and then disappear…We pack up, no caribou in sight, ground squirrels in their holes, a gull calls imitating a loon a loon answers. There is not a cloud in the impossibly blue sky…low angled yellow light has the grasses shinning and the dunes glowing…The lake is a deep blue rippled by the wind and shining bright in the evening light…there is a slight chill in the air…It is quiet, there are no animals to be seen…no birds singing, no bugs…just silence…peaceful serene…

Tomorrow we will leave this place, we’ll fly back to the Colville, back to moving water, cliffs, and tundra…This place is unique…A threshold…an entryway into another world, another arctic, another way to think about the land…There are no mountains here…There are no rocks…the only stone we’ve found in ten days is an obsidian spear point…Josh picked it out of the sand and blew away the dust…it shone deep black in the sunlight…We passed the point back and forth, touching the hand of a man extended backwards and forwards through time…and then Josh dropped the point back into the sand where he had found it…This is not iconic Alaska…but it is true wilderness…fragile…intricate…vulnerable. Filled with the change of the weather and the light…wind, silence, blowing sand, harsh cold, dark clouds, rain…migrating caribou…grasses and willows…intense in it’s simplicity…filled with poetry…powerful in it’s simplicity…spare in it’s grammar…It has taught me a simple notion…It is not what you take from the land that has meaning…It is what the land gives you…a concept so simple that it has eluded me until I walked across the dunes and sand of this place…This place is fragile, the caribou mark the land and the wind and weather erase their passing. The only sign of caribou are the deep trails they have worn over time into the tundra high above the lake.

Our presence is intrusive here. If we had met just two other people here we would have been crowding the space. This is a place which should be left alone…rarely visited but widely understood…the elements of wilderness distilled to their most basic ingredients. Sky, water, plant, bird, animal…mixed together they provide the flavor of wilderness. The willows are the caribou…the caribou are the willows.

Nothing wasted here, I reached down to pick up a handful of dried grass to scatter over the spot where I had pitched my tent and find a bird’s nest.

Time passes, one thing becomes another …the caribou tracks which had been a river flowing across the sandy plain have been erased by the rain and scattered by the blowing wind…the tracks become grains of sand the grains mark the passing of the wind forming ripples and eddies around the grasses that dance beside the lake…the sky unfolds around me clouds form and shred…the horizon encircles me…the sun on one horizon the moon on the other…the cloudless sky fills with darkness…fog descends over the dunes…the world turns grey…caribou drift through the mist…silence…only the hum of the land remains constant…ripples

The National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska, by Richard Kahn

by Richard Kahn

There are no geese on the Colville…But, there are loons, and rough legged hawks, and peregrine falcons. We sat beneath a cliff as the peregrine screeched at us from above. A second falcon joined the first and together they screamed at us, warning us away from their nest. As the second falcon landed on her nest I could hear the excited calls of her chicks anxious to be fed.

Hot sun, wind, deep green water, tall cliffs. I watched a rough legged hawk soar on the thermals, hang motionless above the cliff, then the hawk tucked one wing and dropped like a stone, tucking both wings close to its body. Just above the dense alders covering the cliff the hawk opened its wings, thrust out its legs, extended its talons and disappeared silently into the trees…a moment later it exploded from the dense brush and shot straight up into the deep blue sky…silhouetted against the clouds it hung motionless, tucked a wing, turned towards the earth and with both wings tight against its body it once again dropped like a stone…just above the alders it opened its wings, extended its legs, spread its talons and disappeared into the darkness of the alders. Out of the green into the blue…motionless against the clouds…the hawk fell again…disappeared into the dark brush…All the while a second falcon cried as it rode the thermals over the cliff…soaring in circles…screeching…the cliffs shone silver in the early evening light, glistening rock, green hills…

The gravel bar turned yellow, the river reflects the yellow glow of the low angled sun… three loons float by…quacking…swimming back and forth in the current…they are silhouettes against the bright water…an annoyed gull flew at me. I could hear the rush of it’s wings as it swooped above my head…the loons swam peacefully in front of me…the gull flapped in crazed circles diving at my head…circling and diving again and again until he tired of his game and soared off into the pink, yellow, grey blue sky…

Pink sky, blue river turning slate grey as the sun slides behind a distant hill. The constant ceaseless hum of the land in my ears…The pink sky…the hum of the land…the calling falcons…soaring hawks…angry gull…meandering loons…no geese, no geese at all…

A hot day on the river, no caribou, only the falcons and hawks …the bright water…We are camped at the confluence of the Killik and the Colville, the Killik running fast and blue…the Colville slow and green…they merge in front of our campsite…the river doubles in size and flows away from us…A strong wind comes up, the temperature plummets…the hum of the place fills my head…There can’t be enough time here…each moment…ordinary or extraordinary is precious…My mind tires at trying to absorb all the details of the place…my eyes ache from the looking…my spirit is alive from the just being here…Time to wrap myself in my sleeping bag…but I don’t want to give up the day…I don’t want to surrender to sleep…to dreams…to the sound of the flapping tent in the wind…

2010 is the 50th Anniversary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The coastal plains are still not protected. With Canada’s dwindling Beverly herd to the east, the threat of development to these fragile eco-systems is real.  The next two years will bring increased focus to legislation to protect these special areas Because so few have visited, it is important to share our experiences.

We hope you will consider sharing your work, written or other artistic media, for the Ultima Thule web anthology. Please send your submission (up to 5,000 words or ten photographs or other media images) along with a short bio and picture, to Shannon Polson at ps at polsons dot com.

Thank you for helping to bring awareness to our northernmost public lands!

After the haze from faraway forest fires had cleared, we would often sit speechless watching the low light from the midnight Arctic sun paint the gentle hills and mountains around us. The light is perhaps one of the biggest gifts of the Arctic, one of the spectacles of this part of the world less noted than the wildlife. It is the light that pulls together the magic of the most northern lands of our world.

On day nine, just one day before we were scheduled for pickup, winds blew the smoke from those still burning fires back into the Arctic. The clean lines of mountains and valleys dissolved into the brown greyness. It was almost fitting; the Arctic had opened itself up to us, bestowed on us gifts beyond our wildest imagination, allowed us to understand, if only for a moment, our connectedness to the most wild and remote places on earth. And as we prepared to leave this place, its mystery returned, bringing us humbly back to the recognition that our ordinary lives were in many ways different from this land. We were reminded of  the importance of retaining and bringing back that sense of connection, that sense of mystery, to those who don’t have a chance to visit here.

We did a short hike, heading into the hills behind camp. A small group of caribou came toward us from across the valley. Despite their distance below, we could hear their hooves clattering against the stone, then splashing as they entered the river to cross near the wolf den. They then trotted out of site around the mountain. We did not see the wolves, which seemed to be missing a golden opportunity. The caribou would get by this time.

On day ten, we sat and waited at the beach for our scheduled pickup. And waited. There was no sound of a plane. As the smoke thickened, we lost the views of the ridges over which Dirk would be flying.  At dinner we rationed our food, aware that we might be waiting a long while. We counted out our remaining food to figure out how to make it stretch for a couple more days.

A ground squirrel building homes on both side of our kitchen came closer and closer. We named her Winnie. Despite not being indulged by any generosity on our part, she came within feet of us. “Great,” Peter said wryly. “Not even the ground squirrels are afraid of us out here.” If the grizzly and wolves had not set us securely in our place, Winnie certainly did. Still we waited. We did not hear or see the wolves. We watched the wind and the clouds and the river.

Our friend Mark at Denali who has done a lot of work in native villages commented once to us how coming from our culture as we do, it is difficult to really experience a native village. No matter how short or long our stay, we have a finite amount of time to spend there; we know a plane will leave at a certain time, and that we will be on it. In many ways, we visit timeless places even more superficially than we might otherwise, expecting to take in what’s around us quickly and file it away. We are not there to truly be part of a place. In the villages, Mark said, if the weather comes in there wont be any flight. And then you head out hunting, maybe, or fishing. The necessity of scheduled events is not present; the ability to be flexible and be a part of whatever situation evolves in weather, in opportunity, in culture, is much more practical.

I wonder how much the same is true of wilderness. When we choose to travel into wilderness and be dropped off by bush plane, miles from anyone else, hours from the nearest road, we assume a degree of flexibility and risk not as present in a more accessible destination. And yet still we expect to come into the country, and then leave after a certain amount of time. Perhaps it is the ultimate in hubris to think that we can truly be a part of such a place with this kind of expectation, utterly presumptuous to think that we might understand some part of it.

Sitting on the beach, we watched tiny fish jump across the river. We didn’t have a fishing pole. I wondered if we would be able to fashion one and successfully catch fish? We picked blueberries every day, but could we learn to survive here as ancient people did, as the animals did? I felt completely inadequate, ill-equipped to live into all seasons of the land, even survive the waning summer days.

In the week and a half we had spent here, a few willow leaves had yellowed, bear berry plants had reddened in higher elevations, and termination dust had fallen on distant mountain peaks. In early August, fall was arriving. With endless daylight in summer, it is seasons that move through the Arctic more than days, adding to the feeling of entering another dimension altogether. Waiting for the pick up, we were jolted out of the timelessness we had entered and recognized it with sadness.

On our second morning waiting for the plane, we unzipped the tent fly and looked out. The wind had shifted, but the smoke appeared the same. We lay back down. A few hours later, as if in a dream, I heard a buzz. “Peter!” I sleep much more lightly than Peter, who enters his own world until forcibly awakened. So he woke with a start, disoriented. “It’s Dirk!”

We elatedly jumped up and started packing furiously. Peter went to the beach to collect our kitchen, and I started to work on the tent. I’m not sure we’ve ever packed so quickly – quickly enough to get over our embarrassment at our excitement, and almost forgetting how much we wanted to stay.

This was our world – we were of this world – but we also were visitors. We lived the border life, as Thoreau said. We have an obligation to work to protect this world, so that our children and grandchildren one day will experience this wildness, connect to the most elemental parts of creation, understand from where they have come. But we live somewhere else altogether. Dirk took off into the wind, climbing above the smoke to deliver us safely to Coldfoot.

In having come to this place, remote, untouched, we incur a great responsibility. A responsibility to share with others the wildness and wilderness of the most remote areas of our continent. A responsibility to share the mysteries of wolves and bear and birds and light. A responsibility to live in a way that the earth might also be sustained, and to encourage others to do the same. If we do not, this last wilderness will be gone forever. If that happens, there is no more wilderness. We kill an integral part of ourselves, of what makes us human in the best ways, in the ways we will never truly understand because they are part of a larger, deeper web of life which we cannot replicate. We can only destroy it – or protect it. If we allow the wilderness to be lost, we also lose ourselves. And for that there can be no redemption.

We rewarded ourselves after two long days of tundra and river travel with a rest day, getting out for a shorter hike and reading. Peter and I traded Pielou’s A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic and Barry Lopez’ Arctic Dreams back and forth. We also both finished Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food.

Then we were ready to get out and explore. The Nigu River is known for its ancient man sites, seasonal buildings of the Nunamiut, “people of the land,” a group of Inuit which lived inland in the winters and then moved to the coast to trade in the summers. Most of these sites were downriver of us, though we had heard of one possibly closer to the headwaters. Looking at the maps, though, it looked like ten miles out which in tundra terrain was not within our range for a day’s travel. Still, we headed upriver.

We stopped to sit and watch the wolf den from a distance for a half hour or more, but the entrances sat silent and dark, as before. We continued on. As we crested a small knoll thick in willow and dwarf birch, a rancid smell floated up on the breeze, normally clean and almost sweet with the tundra scents. “Can you smell that?” I asked Peter, doubting myself. “It’s really awful!” He could. “I wonder if it’s a kill.” I yelled across the tundra around us in case I had missed seeing something around us and pulled out my bear spray. “I hope it’s a wolf kill and not a bear kill,” I said tentatively. Bears will defend their kills by an aggressive attack, and I wasn’t sure wolves would be quite as concerned about us, though I didn’t know. Peter started scouting around, and I looked hard up and down the slopes around us, feeling a tickle of apprehension creep up my spine. Then we saw a brown area on the tundra below us.

The stench intensified as we approached the spot. Tundra plants in an area approximately 10 feet by twenty feet were matted down and had browned. A caribou leg bone, still attached by ligaments by completely free of flesh, lay curled as if it may have been sleeping. The hoof and hair above the hoof was intact. Bones scattered the area, all picked clean, beetles finishing the job on many of them. Many bones were no longer intact or had been pulled apart; it was a long way from an intact skeleton. And yet the kill was recent enough to still permeate the air with the smell of death and decay.

Pielou mentions in her book the human propensity to anthropomorphize and romanticize wolves because of their similarities to our domestic canine companions. But she notes that one only has to watch a wolf bring down a caribou and begin to eat it while it is still alive to quickly dispel these notions. Bears will frequently come to steal a wolf kill, which, according to naturalists, wolves will relinquish. Because of the proximity of the kill to the wolf den it seemed reasonable to assume that this had been a wolf kill, but there were also two piles of bear scat on the scene. The kill had been shared, intentionally or not.

Most astonishing was the utter decimation of an animal. If there was any proclivity to bestow upon the purity of nature any notions of pastoral peacefulness, coming upon a kill will rapidly change that understanding. And yet this animal had been returned, utterly and completely to the land which had produced it. Violently, surely. But completely.

I was happy to continue on. Crossing the river, we headed across a boggy area and then up onto a long ramp of tundra, climbing several hundred feet. Beginning our ascent we heard a familiar howl, and saw at the top of the ramp a quarter mile away one of the dark wolves, pacing and howling. The wind was strong, so that his howl carried to us in waves. By the time we reached the top, he was gone.

At the top of the ramp though, standing against the strong cold wind, a circle of stones stood out. We investigated. It was a small circle, about six feet across and a foot or two high, looking out and down into the valley with a view to the east and the west. “Well, there aren’t any boy scout troops out here to build this,” Peter said. As far as we could tell, it was remnants of the heavy Nunamiut activity here years ago. Nunamiut built structures to hunt and to live, stone fences to corral caribou into lakes where, slowed by the water, they were easier to shoot. Ninety percent of the Nunamiut diet was caribou.

While the land itself lent a sense of the ancient, the undisturbed and timeless, considering the human presence here hundreds and thousands of years ago added a layer of history incrementally closer to our understanding. It connected us to this place all the more, weaving together the strands of land, animal and human history into the original tapestry of the earth. The sense of completeness seemed to support and buoy us as we hiked. We continued on the side of a mountain, past several small lakes draining one into the other, before turning back.

Opting to give the wolf den a wide berth again, we hiked back on the opposite side of the valley and through what turned out to be a marshy bog, at times deteriorating to what amounted to reeds growing in a shallow pond, mud pulling at our boots with every step. It stretched well over a mile, and I despaired of my boots, now soaked. Peter’s leather boots fared slightly better. Finally we saw a small tundra protrusion ahead and aimed for it, then planning to turn back toward our camp.

The feel of dry tundra under our boots was a relief. After slogging through the bog, I was exhausted. We leaned onto our trekking poles and talked about our dinner plans when a movement ahead of us startled me. “What is that?” Four ears poked into the air just above the willows. We took another step, and tiny heads and bodies came into view- two wolf puppies, one light, one dark. They looked at us with surprise but not alarm, and then turned around and disappeared. “let’s look over the mound!” I said. “Maybe they are just playing!” Another step forward, and Peter said “I think it’s another den.” “But the main den is by the river back there! Why would they have two?” A quick look revealed that Peter was right. Puppy scat littered the ground just outside another hole into the earth, and several bones lay around, notably a section of vertebrae with partial ribs still attached, perhaps brought back from the kill site we had discovered. We backed away, and waited at a distance for a long while, but the pups did not reappear.

We later learned that there is frequently a rendezvous site where pups are brought away from the main den to play and explore, and that must have been what we had stumbled upon, despite our efforts to keep a reasonable distance from the den we knew about. Though we had more bog to get through to get back to our campsite, we walked back hardly aware of the mud through which we walked.

The Arctic had given us more gifts than we deserved, far more than we expected, far more than we had even hoped. Perhaps that is the gift of all wilderness, and all life. If we only allow ourselves to be open to it. But to allow us to feel a part of this timeless and primeval land, to see the circle of life pulsing through it, and to know that we were a part of that energy even as we had separated ourselves from it in our normal daily life – that was the gift we have now that we will never lose.

(Post #3 from the Western Arctic trip. More posts coming over the next few days.)

It was time to get on the river. Wolves woke us again that morning with their howls, and we were reluctant to leave our wide embrace of gentle mountains and treeless tundra, where our eyes so easily roamed the slopes around us and an air of enchantment seemed to float on the breezes.

“We have to come back here some time to base camp,” I said to Peter as we set-up the Klepper folding, canvas-skinned kayak we planned to take downriver. “It’s just beautiful!”

We climbed into the kayak and pushed off into the current with some sadness, leaving our perfect setting in soft Arctic late afternoon light. The beach slipped away behind us and disappeared as the river turned a corner.

After a hot and dry summer, the water was exceptionally low. The v-hull of our kayak, over-loaded with a pregnant woman, a six-and-a-half-foot tall man and gear for eleven days, was too heavy for the upper river. After fifty yards of a concentrated paddle, avoiding the myriad rocks seeming to clutch at our boat, we bottomed out. We clambered out of the cockpit. With difficulty, we pulled and carried the heavy boat over the rocky shoal. Water trickled in tantalizing sunlit threads over the gravel bottom of the river, not deep enough to cover our neoprene boots. We repeated this for five hours. We had only traveled five miles.

Our campsite for the night was determined by a rock. Large and smooth, hidden in a shallow wave train, it snatched the rubber bottom of the kayak. The kayak stopped immediately. The front pitched forward. Before I knew what happened, water was up to my waist. It was 10 PM.

We pulled the kayak and the gear to shore and began to dry what had succumbed to the water. Another 106 miles of river flowed in front of us yet to come. Plans to explore along the way could never be realized at the pace we were forced to take with the low water.

As the sun skittered across the horizon in the cool midnight air, we decided that our primary purpose of coming to the Western Arctic was to spend time together in the most remote wilderness on the continent, not to accomplish a river trip. The river would be here later. Wilderness reminded us of flexibility, and just how small we were. We would go back upriver to our perfect beach. Our hope for a week of base camping would be realized.

After one grueling cross-tundra ferry of supplies the next day, we pulled and lined the boat back upstream, walking in the river while guiding the kayak with ropes on the bow and stern. Tellingly, what had taken five hours to descend took only three hours to line back upstream. As if to confirm our decision, less two people and some gear, the Klepper glided easily through the water against the current. The same hull that had reached for the bottom earlier now cut through the river like soft butter. We were back at our beach at 11 PM.

Exhausted and happy, we bundled into warm clothes. My rain-coat no longer would zip over my expanding belly when I had on my fleece, but still worked as some wind protection unzipped. We settled into our original kitchen site and made a quick meal – Mexican black beans, cheese, and salsa in tortillas. We leaned back into our Crazy Creek camp chairs on the beach, the peaceful small river flowing quietly, talking and laughing in gratitude and relief for the trip upriver and our arrival.

I happened to look up as we ate. As we sat on the beach, just across the twenty-foot wide river sitting on the tundra bank was a silver-white wolf. Her calm wild eyes watched us steadily. We barely breathed, as though our breath might whisk her away. Then, as silently as she had arrived, she stood up and disappeared in the willows. She appeared again on our side of the river, trotting easily on the spongy tundra up the bluff behind us to inspect our tent. And then she was gone. We sat on the beach without moving, not wanting an errant move to somehow displace the magic.  Even if this night were our only experience in this place, it was enough. Even if this night were our last on earth, it was enough.

This place, this faraway and ancient Arctic wilderness, had shown us yet again her beauty and her mystery, revealed so much so unexpectedly, when we were willing to just sit and wait. If only we could all understand how intrinsically important preserving our last great wilderness was, and protect it. If only we could know that this place would always be here. If only we could be assured our children and grandchildren could come to this place, and see these mysteries.

After securing our kitchen on the beach, we headed to the tent under the soft Arctic light of a midnight sky. Snuggling into our sleeping bag that night, nearby howls climbed through the soft night air, shivering along the breezes.

(Post #2 from the Western Arctic trip. More posts coming over the next few days.)

Wolf howls woke us our second morning, which continued to astonish us as though they were the first we had heard. Before heading downriver in the Klepper, Peter and I wanted to explore more of the beautiful valley in which we had set up camp. The haze lifted slightly the next morning, and after picking wild ripe blueberries to have with our oatmeal, we headed out for another hike.

Though we had not seen any bear sign, other than the actual bear, as we crossed the river we noticed a large paw print of a grizzly just on the side of the water; interestingly we never saw diggings, as were common in our trip in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and had not yet seen any bear scat; wolf scat was everywhere.

The tundra on the far side of the river was mostly wet tussocks and bogs, but a few small hillocks of dryer tundra or clumps of willows offered occasional relief. We didn’t have to go far before we had our next surprise though. Taking advantage of the occasional dry tundra hillock we paused- and from behind another hillock in front of us suddenly appeared six wolves, four dark and two light, looking at us while trotting and running off into the tundra, dispersing widely and seeming to float over a landscape which caught and held our every step. How nature photographers get shots of wildlife eludes me; the wolves appeared and then were so far off as to be impossible to catch closely. We remained frozen, letting our eyes follow these wild and mystical creatures. The continuous wind carried their howls and barks to us intermittently, snatches of another world which we were finding was also our own. We must have stood there for a long time. We were like small children first encountering the ocean, maybe, or some new reality so foreign and of surpassing mystery that we would never be able to look at the reality we had once known in the same way.

When the wolves were out of sight on the wide tundra before us, we continued on, no more gracefully but held by the spell of the land.  We curved around the hillock from which the wolves had appeared, to sit and watch the den. Built into a high bank on the side of the river, several entrances stood out against the dirt, but there was no more movement around them. It is the time of year that puppies might have been expected to be seen, but the den remained quiet, still.

Despite spending most of our free time out of doors, before seeing a lone wolf trotting down the dirt park road behind the camper bus at Denali last summer, neither Peter nor I had ever seen a wolf.  Our brief encounters in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge the month before had seemed a gift we never could have anticipated or hoped for. Our experiences in two days in the Western Arctic were almost too much to take in.

Longtime Arctic naturalist Pielou notes in her A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic that many naturalists will go their lifetime without ever seeing a wolf. We did not feel deserving. Over dinner that night we talked little, sitting on our rocky beach, stunned in gratitude and wonder, before falling asleep in our tent, again, to the sounds of howls carried on the wind.

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