Trip to the Arctic Refuge - Part 1

Getting to where you can get there from there

Getting to the Arctic Refuge, located in the extreme northeastern corner of the state of Alaska is not simple. From Oregon, you have to fly to Seattle, transfer to a flight to Fairbanks, then take a charter air service to a village where a bush pilot will then take you the remainder of the way. We flew from Fairbanks to Arctic Village, a small native Gwich'in town, then were flown in a small 3-seater to our put-in point. Sometimes there is a story in just getting there so here's where the journal begins:

Wed. June 19th
Flight from Portland to Seattle leaves on time at 8:30 pm. I sit next to a woman who is going to hike to Machu Picchu in Peru with her family later this year - it's several long days of backpacking just to get there she says. Next, the flight from Seattle to Fairbanks seems very long, especially so being a red-eye. I sit next to 2 kids who keep the lights on the whole way and play with a digital video camera for 4 hours.

At Fairbanks, my luggage is just about the first off the plane - when has that EVER happened? Not to me before! I arrive at B&R Bed & Breakfast after a taxi ride in a funky old Suburban filled with so much junk there is barely room for my luggage. The taxi driver points out beaver ponds along the way. He asks where I will be going and I tell him about the Refuge and the north slope. He says he has never been up north of the Arctic Circle - hard to believe someone would live there and never do it!

B&R is in a small house in a residential area. Rose, the bed & breakfast owner, has left the door open with directions to my room. I lug my heavy duffel up the stairs and into the room. It is now about 2 am Alaska time and I am quite tired. The room is quite small(the bed just about fills it up - where to put the duffel is a challenge - it finally goes between the bed and the door). There are a few mosquitoes in the room to welcome me to Alaska and I fall asleep easily.

Thurs. June 20th.

When I get up around 8:30, Rose is already up and she makes breakfast. I seem to be the only visitor right now. Rose is a very friendly woman, late 50s I'd guess, judging how she talks about her grown kids. Divorced, she owns and runs the B&B by herself. I scarf down scrambled eggs and bagel and fruit, then try to figure out what to do with the day. I had flown in on Wednesday night since it was the only way I could get a decent airfare (for some reason all the flights that landed today were over $1000). Our group won't meet for the first time until tonight at 7 pm at a restaurant in town. I figure I'd better do something about the water bottle I had packed - I don't think it will last the trip - it nearly didn't last the plane ride after it dropped on the floor a couple of times. I ask directions to the nearest big market and am told there is a Fred Meyer of all things about a mile or two away so I walk there - it is probably about 2 miles since it takes me about a half hour at a fast walking pace.

At Fred Meyer I find a great collapseable water bottle on half price sale. I also inquire about bear repellent spray. A very good salesman (I say very good since he sold me) convinces me to buy one at $40 a can after telling me all sorts of stories about people who were mauled by bears, including the guy "just last year!" who had his eye gouged out! He says "it's your life - is it worth $40?"

Here's how this stuff works (it's a pepper spray). When the bear is charging at you at up to 35 miles per hour (yes, they can run that fast) and gets within 25 feet, you calmly pull the safety off, then aim it at his face and it is supposed to stop him cold.

I forget to ask the salesman how many cans he had sold that had actually been used, if the users had used them correctly, and out of those how many had been satisfied with the results. I also forget to ask how you tell if a bear is 25 feet from you in the wild and what the spray will do if, say, the bear is really 27 feet away when you do it. Or if the wind is in front of you. Maybe they don't get many post-use consumer comments on this kind of product, particularly when it doesn't work.

I return to B&R and now decide to visit the University of Fairbanks - their museum is supposed to be the best in the state. Rose gives me directions for a shortcut taken by hiking over a hill on the campus that will cut about a mile off my walk there. On the way, I notice the bus stop where I will need to pick up a bus to get downtown tonight. A guy is there and notices that I have the same kind of day pack as he. He talks my ear off for about 15 minutes (until the bus comes) complaining that the bus is a hassle - you never know when it is going to come and it stops too many places - his car is evidently not running and he doesn't have the money to get it fixed and doesn't know when he will, so he's been having to take the bus for about a month. Finally the bus shows up and off he goes.

After finding my way to the University, I walk up the hill Rose described, (it's behind a rec center building and there are large ominous signs on the hill that say "Keep off - extreme danger!" However it is clear there is a well-worn path. So much for keeping students and itinerant wayfarers like myself off this hill.

The museum is fantastic - it's small but packed with wonderful exhibits on the natural and human history of the state. Great exhibits included one on powerful (politically and industrious) pioneer women of Alaska as well as another on the internment of Japanese in Alaska during WWII and native people that the racist government thought were Japanese (i.e. many in the Aleutians had mixed ancestry). I rent one of those wireless earphone things that you type in a number corresponding to an exhibit and it gives you the story, including environmental sounds like native people building and then launching a kayak, etc. It takes a couple of hours to see everything.

I leave the museum after buying a book called "Out Among the Wolves"- a series of essays on the wolf edited by John Murray. My weather karma for the trip is off to a good start - it evidently had rained heavily while I was in the museum, but has stopped now.

It's now mid afternoon and so I read a bit, talk with Janiene by phone, until it's time to take the bus downtown. The guy I had met earlier was right. The bus doesn't seem to adhere to the schedule that is posted on the bus stop. It took a very weird route, including going off into some neighborhood with very narrow streets that didn't seem like it should have a bus route (no one got on or off there). Fairbanks isn't that big really, but the bus took about 40 minutes to get from where I was picked up to "the bus barn" downtown, which was the last stop - and the one I wanted since it was closest to the Thai House Restaurant.

When I got to the restaurant, the only person who had arrived ahead of me was Danny Sommer, from Los Angeles. Danny is a middle school science teacher in his late 20s who when not teaching school, travels extensively. He's been to exotic places like Thailand and Katmandu, has climbed Annapurna, and taught at Outward Bound. We are soon joined by Nick & Marcia Anton and Ken Atkinson. Nick and Marcia, who have known each other since they were kids in middle school, are in their 50s - Nick's a physician and Marcia is a retired family therapist. The two of them are originally from Iowa, but have lived in Santa Rosa, CA since 1975. Ken at 76 is the oldest - a grizzly, retired Anchorage lawyer who has been an Alaskan since the late 1940s when he got out of the service.

The only person NOT there was Karen Jettmar, our trip leader and owner of Equinox Wilderness Expeditions! We finally receive a phone call (cordless is brought to our table) and it's Karen. She's stranded in Kotzebue - a small village in northwestern Alaska. She had been on a trip that was due back 2 days before. They got caught in a snowstorm and now she was late trying to get a flight out - she'd have to fly to Anchorage first and then up to Fairbanks. Since we are supposed to fly to Arctic Village and then on into the Arctic Refuge by bush flight tomorrow, it is clear we won't be leaving on schedule.

(The Thai food was great, by the way - I definately recommend it!)

We leave the restaurant - it turns out Nick & Marcia are staying at B&R that night - what a coincidence! They've rented a car so I didn't have the horrors of the bus system to look forward to. Ken becomes the contact point with Karen - he will update all of us when he hears from her.

Friday, June 21

We start the morning - 3 of us at B&R chatting with Rose about how we probably will need to stay there another night. She luckily doesn't have anyone else coming in. By around 11 am we check in with Ken - still no word from Karen. Cabin fever gets to us and we decide to go out and do something. We drove out to the University's "large animal research area" where they had caribou and musk ox for study. There were also a lot of Sandpipers running around. The whole area had huge fences around it so it took using binoculars to see the animals. They looked awfully uncomfortable - this was nothing like their natural habitat and it was about 70 degrees in Fairbanks that day - much too hot for them. We then stopped at the botanical gardens and then got back to check in with Ken at 1:30.

Ken drops the bomb that Karen is en route and we should meet at Wright Air Service at 2 pm. I still have stuff strewn all over my room as I had started repacking, then quit when it seemed like we wouldn't be going out until Saturday. With all limbs flailing, I manage to pack everything up - separate out what will be left behind in Fairbanks and what will go into the duffel, in about 10 minutes. It turns out I left one tennis shoe behind but didn't discover that till later. We then pile in Nick & Marcia's tiny rental car. It's hard to believe 3 of us and all our gear fit into something the size of a Geo (it was some other model but about the same size subcompact). But that wasn't enough - we have to pick Danny up since he doesn't have transportation. So we drive to the hostel where he is staying and squeeze him in as well. Kind of funny - a bunch of mostly post 50 year olds playing "how many people and junk can we stuff into the car". I think someone was holding on to something that was sitting on the roof - but I don't remember what it was.

Wright Air is not at the regular airport terminal - it's located out where the private planes and freight services are - in more of an industrial park that borders the airport. They are in a non-descript 2 story manufactured building and we check in. Ken is there, but not Karen. At around 2:30 a call from Karen comes in - she's at the main Fairbanks terminal. She gets to Wright Air by 3 but asks the pilot of the flight (that was supposed to leave at 3 if he will wait while she picks up some stuff. At 4:30 we are ready to go.

We are in a 10 seater twin engine plane. The flight to Arctic Village is magnificient. We fly over meandering rivers and forests - not a human settlement in sight. We cross over the mighty Yukon River, which completely bisects Alaska into 2 north and south portions. The Yukon River starts in the Yukon of course and flows nearly 2000 miles to the Bering Sea after draining nearly 330,000 square miles - it is the 4th largest waterway in North America but is usually frozen up to 7 months out of the year.

After an hour we see the Brooks Range in the distance and about a half hour later we land on a remote gravel strip, which turns out to be the Arctic Village air field.

There are some sheds alongside the airstrip, including a plywood building with a hand written sign on the outside which says "Welcome to Arctic Village. You are now on Venetie tribal land governed by Native Villages of Venetie tribal government sovereign identity established ratified June 25th 1940."

 

Arctic Village lies just to the south of the Brooks Range and most of the Refuge, by the Chandalar River.

Three of us decide to walk into town to see it. Karen says its about a mile - I think it is two or three - it takes a good 40-50 minutes. The town is tiny - a small strip of buildings all on gravel or dirt roads. The newer buildings are all on posts or big concrete footings to protect the permafrost.

People living in permafrost regions originally learned this the hard way. Buildings which had been built the way they are down here soon sank in the muck. Heat from a building will melt the permafrost, causing the land to sink. Filling it in becomes a losing proposition - the only thing that works is to respect the permafrost and to build with it rather than to fight it. They found the same thing out trying to build roads in permafrost regions that also sank.

We meet 2 women who have been alternately staying in Arctic Village and exploring the Refuge over the past month. They are friends with a small boy named Olaus who is a resident and they are carrying him around on their shoulders. I wonder if he was named after Olaus Murie, who with his wife Margaret were instrumental in achieving protection of the original Arctic Wildlife Range in 1960.

They tell us about a crumbling down log church and bridge we should see, so we walk down and take pictures there.

On the way back, we pass the Tribal Council Building and Marcia starts a conversation with a young woman who is on the council (they are about to have a meeting that night). We learn that the woman is one of Sarah James' nieces. Sarah James is quite famous outside of Alaska now, as perhaps the best known spokeswoman for the Gwich'in people, and the recipient of the Leadership for Change Award in 2001.

We then head back to the airstrip and are just in time to finish our dinner in the shed. It starts to rain furiously, again my weather karma had kept us dry during the long walk from town. The rain doesn't last long, however.

Our bush pilot, Dirk, shows up not long afterwards to let us know it is too late for him to take us into the Refuge, but he'll be back in the morning. We talk with another pilot on the airstrip later. Both say they are seeing a lot of wildlife on the Kongakut River and we might want to go there. We hold an impromptu meeting about it and decide we should change our plans. I agree to it with the understanding that we will try to fly into the 1002 area (the area where the oil drilling would occur) at the end of the trip since, on the Hulahula River we would have gone right into the heart of it.

We decide to spend the night in this shed rather than pitch tents (it's awful packing up a wet tent anyway) so we are ready to go first thing in the morning.

I can't sleep however, initially due to loud snoring from someone. Also, this was my first night above the Arctic Circle. The sun is out 24 hours at this time of year - it won't set until some time in August. So I get out and walk about, taking pictures.

Being in the Arctic in the summer does strange things to your body clock mechanisms. I had been told this, but now am experiencing it. It is midnight but could just as well be noon. However, the lighting is a bit different at midnight since the sun is lower in the sky. At higher latitudes as you approach the north pole, the difference in the height of the sun above the horizon becomes minimized. But here it is still noticeably different.

At midnight, the sunlight gives everything an ethereal amber cast - the landscape becomes particularly striking with its yellow shades and long shadows.

Karen is still up after sorting gear and we both walk down to the lake that adjoins the village to take pictures. The brief rain showers we had experienced has deposited a thin layer of snow at the tops of the hills.

We can see the storm - now a wind-whipped, elongated, very large cloud receding into the distance. The sky is a deep blue and the landscape around the lake is stunning - trees and grasslands glowing yellow under the midnight sun with the land and the far end, including the receding storm, reflected perfectly in the lake, now as still as glass. I use up nearly a half roll of film on that lake, it is one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. And we're not even in the Wildlife Refuge yet!

I finally get sleepy around 2 am and turn in.

Continue to Part 2