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.

I filmed easy images of stupidity,  a group of caribou appeared, caribou and drums…what a cliché…but there it was…a reality right in front of me…and so I filmed the caribou as they walked among the barrels and then wandered off across the tundra…This was a larger group of caribou than we have been seeing, they moved across the tundra with determination, down the hill towards the river…heading some place they know and we do not…some place they know or sense or feel, some place we can only imagine…which lives in our imagination and gives meaning to this place…We continued across mud sucking tussocks to the second group of drums…I filmed and took photographs and then we headed back to camp walking across a field of wild flowers…white, yellow, pink, blue until we reached the dark flowing river. Just above the river we found the partially eaten remains of a caribou calf…a reminder of the darker rules which govern this place…Then we were into the boat…dark mud and melting ice lines the bank leading down to the dark water…We crossed back to camp, prepared dinner as the sky filled with fast changing clouds…silver light…yellow shafts of sunlight raked the hills…and then the sky opened up with high scattered clouds lit by the low angled light of the sun…Three caribou descend the hill above us and cross the river…they disappear into the glare of light to bright to see…They leave a lone caribou on the hill, who suddenly jumps and runs…We watch as two grey wolves lope across the tundra in the direction of the lone caribou…a story to imagine, with no details to tell…There is a cold wind, there are clearing skies…

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…

(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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