July 26

It is hot and sunny. There is the relentless sound of the river flowing green and white as it moves north. The sunrise was pink and grey with the river shinning white and blue. The sky was filled with soft pink clouds and the mountains glowed pink in the east. Hidden within the pink horizon was a faintly glowing rainbow. I was a sleepwalker in this early morning light.

The river surprised us yesterday with a series of powerful rapids. One long rapid filled with waves and holes was a complex boulder garden that was easily Class IV. We threaded our way between big holes and boulders, alive in the warmth of the sun and the roaring sound of the river. At the bottom of the rapid, as we floated for a moment in calm water, a bull caribou stepped out of the willows and trotted along the shore before disappearing again into the thicket. It was a moment of magic.

The land here is open with long curves of green beneath the wide arch of the sky. We have become accustomed to this being in and on the land. It is a simple, solitary life with Sharon and me.  We haven’t seen another person since we began the trip nearly a month ago. Our life is spent on the river, surrounded by the rocks, the gravel, the alder, mountains and sky with our imagination filled with images of an animal world. This is a place to be quiet, it is a place to meditate on the meaning of things. It is an opportunity to find balance with the world around us. The place enters our lungs and fills our eyes.

My brain cycles through thoughts of the “other world,” of rectangles and schedules, of commerce and profit, of war and famine. I have a new and more emotional response to death and killing. Disgust for the forces, which see violence as a tool for freedom and safety. Here, miles from anyone, it is clear that you are responsible for your decisions. But in the world that we come from it is easy to believe that someone else will protect you. It is easy to lose the connection between what you have and where it came from, and to understand what it costs in dollars, resources and time.

Here in this simple world everything has a place. Less is certainly more and more is certainly less. There is no profit beyond experience. There is no commerce, there is no waste and nothing is ugly. There is nothing senseless, here, everything is exactly what it is, and there is no confusion.

July 27

I take the solitude, peace, harmony and quiet for granted.  It is just the way things are here. At times I look around and feel as though I am living in my photographs… The landscape fills every space of my being. In the past the lessons, revelations and images of the place would surprise me, having ventured into what was uncharted personal territory, I was filled with a need to share the story of my trip and the lessons I had leaned from the place. But this trip has made me quiet, wordless, but not thoughtless. The landscape has entered me, changed me.  The intensity of being here has not diminished even as it has become familiar. The wildness of the place, the visual intensity of each moment, the excitement that comes from being alone here fills me up, and for now at least it is what I am.

I am not a fool; I am a visitor to this place, at the moment a part of the place but inevitably apart from it. I know that each day here is precious, the time is difficult to come by, it is easy to squander and it is impossible to replace. The lessons of the place are intense. The volume of wilderness in sound, in size and in imagery can only be appreciated in small bites. I chew on each idea, each detail, and over time, bit by bit the place is revealed to me, my commitment to the “search” grows, my understanding moves ahead by inches.

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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