I’ve always wondered why my husband Dan loves guiding for Arctic Wild. Every year since I’ve known him, he usually disappears for a few weeks in Alaska, returning sunburned, disheveled, yet also happy and more ‘centered’.

This year I had the opportunity to travel with him, on a trip with 4 other people canoeing the Kokolik river.

The first time I truly realized this trip was special was when it took two bush plane pick-up and landings to get there and back. I could see thousands of caribou during the flights. I also saw herds of muskox and watched a grizzly bear chase something, stumble and somersault! Before I knew it, our pilot Dirk was landing the plane next to the Kokolik river. I climbed off, helped unload the baggage and watched the plane fly away, leaving us far from civilization.

Photos really don’t do this place justice. I really hadn’t appreciated how far and wide and north Alaska is. The terrain and wide skies are beautiful. Even the clouds seem bigger here. The scenery was inspiring. After we set up camp, I followed some muddy caribou tracks to the river and found a place to sit, beginning a short series of trip sketches.

During our trip, we rowed over 60 miles through some varied landscapes. Initially we’d hoped to see the migrating caribou. On the very first day we began encountering animals I didn’t even think I’d have a chance to see.

Over the duration of the trip, we saw thousands of caribou (some with babies), some very close. Also 3 grizzlies, a beautiful white/tan wolf, 3 wolverines (I think it was a female and her 2 young), herds of muskoxen, 2 foxes, loads of fat marmots and arctic squirrels. Terrific birding- we saw and heard many ptarmigan, sandpipers, plovers, gulls, ruddy turnstones, harlequin ducks, perigrine, gyrfalcons, rough-legged hawks, gold eagles, merlins, canada geese and more.

There were no real trees. Many bushes, but mostly grass and flowers– food for caribou. The wildflowers were stunning.

Almost every day we hiked, then canoed to new places to camp. The sun never set, it was bright all night,

much to everyone’s delight- especially for the birders in the group.

Dan, as the guide, did the cooking and coffee making for us. No lower-48 restaurant has the view we enjoyed every night! He also brought a scope, and pointed out other views for us to see. He was quite busy, and obviously enjoying himself. I couldn’t hog him all to myself. After dinner the group would sip cider, coffee or tea and talk about what we’d seen during the day. We had an fun group of people with lively discussions, especially regarding trying to identify the bird songs we heard.

How was the weather? A little bipolar. Some days, warm in the upper 60′s turning quickly to cool and stormy. Hail, thunderstorms and wind. Rainbows, double and triple rainbows, sunny blue skies. Extremely beautiful clouds, stormclouds or white fluffy clouds.

You can hopefully see from my sketches the basic camp that was set up– a cook tent, washing area and another tent where we could huddle inside if it was raining. Everyone set up their personal tents far away from the cook tent, and from each other. I was fascinated by the skies and textures of the rocks, flowers and grasses.

Unfortunately, despite the long sunny days, the trip seemed to end quickly. We canoed down the river one last time, unloaded our gear and waited for the plane to return us to Fairbanks.

I’m glad I was able to take the trip, and feel fortunate to have seen the wild in the wild. Who knows how long this piece of country will remain as it is? One day I hope to bring my son, so he’ll be able to view this beauty for himself.

Hard working guide

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…

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