by Jon Krakauer
Over the preceding weeks I’d become attuned to wolf song and the whistle of golden plovers, walked through a snorting tide of caribou, gazed down from untrod summits, gorged on fat grayling pulled from crystalline streams. And now I’d stared into the eyes of Ursus arctos horribilis, only to discover that the star of my nightmares was even more discombobulated by the encounter than I was. I would see four more grizzlies before the month was out.
I’d climbed and fished in the emptiest reaches of the American West, but Alaska made the wilds of the Lower 48 seem insipid and tame, a toothless simulacrum. In the Arctic, for the first time in my life I was surrounded by real wilderness. Even as a callow twenty-year-old, I understood that such an experience, in the late-twentieth century, was a rare and wondrous privilege.
Six years later, in 1980, the United States Congress recognized the singularity of the Brooks Range and set aside eight and a half million acres of it as Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. A vast sprawl of wilderness the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined, Gates is the second-largest unit in our national park system, yet few Americans have ever heard of it, and fewer still have actually been there: Gates is visited by some 2,000 people a year, compared to the 9.3 million who visit Great Smoky Mountains National Park, or the 3.8 million who visit Yosemite.
This gaping disparity is largely a function of access. Yosemite lies three hours by automobile from San Francisco Bay and the region’s 3 million residents; tourists can gawk at Half Dome, El Capitan, and Yosemite Falls without ever stepping out of their air-conditioned cars. Although Gates of the Arctic has scenery that rivals Yosemite—and eleven times as much acreage—Gates is situated in remote northern Alaska. It’s impossible to drive through Gates, because the park has no roads. Within the park boundaries, moreover, there are no ranger stations, no motels, no snack bars, no souvenir shops, no maintained campgrounds, no facilities of any kind. Except for widely scattered game trails, there aren’t even any footpaths.
The park’s administrators do not consider the absence of amenities to be a shortcoming. In the opinion of the National Park Service, rather, the fact that Gates is a hard place to get to, and even harder to get around in, is its saving grace. Park regulations have been formulated to keep development and visitation to a bare minimum.
Not everyone is pleased with this policy. Critics carp that Gates is an “elitist” park. What’s the point of setting aside such an immense tract of land, they ask, if it’s effectively off-limits to all but a tiny handful of the American public?
The answer, explains John M. Kauffmann, a now-retired civil servant who was in charge of planning the park in the 1970s, is that “the northern environment is easy to damage and slow to heal. Human impact is felt much more strongly than in temperate latitudes.” Some arctic lichens grow less than a sixteenth of an inch annually. A hiker’s footsteps can leave divots in the tundra that take forty years to grow back. The passage of a single all-terrain vehicle is apt to scar the muskeg for centuries. “When we were planning the park,” says Kauffmann, “we realized that this was America’s last big chunk of raw wilderness. There would never be any more. If Gates of the Arctic were to be made as accessible as Yosemite, the very things that make it worth preserving would be destroyed.”
In his book, Alaska’s Brooks Range, Kauffmann writes that when deciding how much development should be permitted in Gates, he and the other planners quickly determined that it would be best “to do absolutely nothing”:
Draw a protective boundary and leave the place alone: no roads, no trails, no bridges, no campgrounds, no interpretive signs, none of the woodsy aids and conveniences with which most parks are equipped. They would change the character and the quality of the land. Visitors would take the Brooks Range on its terms, not theirs. We borrowed a karate term to call it a black-belt park. Not for neophytes, it would be at the ascetic end of a spectrum of national parks, with no one park needing to be all things to all people. We remembered Aldo Leopold’s comment, “I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”
Thanks to aerial cartography and satellite navigation, alas, there are no more blank spots on any map, not even in the Arctic. Every year more people troop through Gates. The National Park Service has estimated that by 2010, the annual tally of visitors will swell to 18,000—an absurdly small number by the standards of other parks, but a ninefold increase over current visitation. Some environmental advocates, Kauffmann among them, believe many of the park’s most extraordinary attractions have already been irreparably damaged by excessive use. Last summer, curious about how “America’s last big chunk of raw wilderness” was holding up, I returned to the same part of the Brooks Range I visited in 1974.
I embark for the backcountry, like most people who visit Gates, from the metropolis of Bettles, population thirty-three, twenty-five miles outside the park’s boundary. Twenty years earlier, there had been a single bush pilot in town; now there are three competing air-taxi services employing a half-dozen pilots. Accompanied by Alaskan friends Roman and Peggy Dial, I climb into a 1956 de Havilland Beaver moored on the Koyukuk River. Pilot Jay Jespersen opens the throttle, the airplane’s aluminum floats lurch free of the roiling current, and we fly north by northwest under a lowering sky.
Two hours out of Bettles, we bank hard over a small lake. Jay scans for moose or other obstacles, brings the Beaver down, and we wade ashore in a light rain. As the airplane flies off, the roar of its engine reverberates from the surrounding peaks, quickly fades, and is replaced by a monumental silence. I feel a long way from anywhere. In fact, we’re closer to Siberia than Anchorage or Juneau. The nearest highway is the haul road for the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, 140 miles to the east. Grinning like a thief, I shoulder my pack and follow Peggy across the tundra.
The lake where we landed is the source of the Alatna, one of the major rivers draining the Brooks Range. For the initial leg of our three-week Arctic ramble, we intend to paddle forty-seven miles downriver, but the mighty Alatna begins as an ankle-deep trickle, so our inflatable rafts remain in our backpacks and we walk until the river becomes deep enough to float.
The Alatna flows down a broad U-shaped valley bounded by rubbly escarpments rising into the clouds. Clumps of caribou—two hundred here, seventy-five there—file slowly across the stark terrain. From the air, the valley had looked as smooth and manicured as a golf course, but it turns out to be the typical swamp of tussock tundra. The valley bottom is covered with millions of spongy, cauliflower-shaped mounds of cotton grass, twenty inches high, which make for slow, frustrating travel. One must either high-step over each mound, which necessitates walking in the sucking bog from which the cotton grass grows, or stride uncertainly from crown to tippy tussock crown, inviting pratfalls and twisted ankles.
To escape the tussocks we search out gravel bars along the river, wading back and forth across the stream to link them. Everywhere the damp sand is imprinted with the tracks of caribou, moose, wolf—and bear. Comparing my size 9 boot to a fresh grizzly print, I estimate the bruin would wear size 20 Nikes.
Roman, and especially Peggy, share my “bearanoia,” as she calls it. In 1986, Roman walked, skied, and paddled a thousand miles from one end of the Brooks Range to the other, and Peggy, pregnant with their first child, accompanied him for a month of the journey. Near the headwaters of the Nahtuk River, a tributary of the Alatna, they surprised a grizzly sow foraging among the blueberry bushes. Unlike the bear I’d met in 1974, which immediately ran away, this one bluff-charged them repeatedly.
“Bears have poor eyesight, so they’ll bluff-charge in order to see how you react,” says Roman, a peripatetic professor of biology at Alaska Pacific University. “If you act like prey and run, they’ll assume that’s what you are.” Somehow maintaining their composure, Peggy and Roman edged away from the grizzly’s turf as nonchalantly as possible, and after charging four times, the bear left them alone.
On this trip I’m carrying a weapon to defend against bear attack, the first time I’ve ever done so: an aerosol can of pepper spray of the sort urbanites use to ward off muggers. Additionally, Roman has a small handgun. Back in Bettles, I showed my pepper spray to a bush pilot named Barry Yoseph. “Yeah,” he pronounced as soon as he stopped laughing, “I reckon them bears will be mighty pleased to see you carrying that stuff. Should add a little spice to their supper.” The pilot was only slightly less disdainful of Roman’s revolver. “You think that little toy is gonna slow a bear down? Only handgun with enough pop to put a bullet through a grizzly’s skull is one of these here,” he’d insisted, unholstering a giant .44 Magnum like the one Clint Eastwood made famous in Dirty Harry.
Yoseph’s comments weigh heavily on my mind as I walk past an embankment where a grizzly has dug up a parka squirrel den. The excavation, which is recent and extensive, looks like the work of a backhoe gone berserk.
After we’ve covered four miles on foot, the Alatna becomes marginally deep enough to float our tiny rafts. We only have two blow-up boats for the three of us, so Roman and Peggy share one, and I take most of the gear in the other. It’s a pleasure to let the river propel us, but shortly after casting off, the Dials rip a hole in the bottom of their overloaded craft, forcing us to stop and make camp on a gravel bar where we can dry the boat over a willow fire and patch the leak.
By morning, the rain clouds are gone. It’s only August 5, but the air already has a sharp autumnal bite. Lazing around camp until noon, we sip coffee in the muted sunlight and watch the underwater antics of small wren-like birds called dippers. When we get under way, feeder creeks rapidly bolster the Alatna’s volume, transforming it into a flume of whitewater that carries us south at three times our walking speed, with scandalously little effort.
Within an hour of breaking camp, we reach the vanguard of the northern tree line, a single puny spruce resembling an overgrown pipe cleaner, and soon thereafter scrubby northern forest known as taiga (a Russian term meaning “land of little sticks”) crowds the shore. The Arctic sun scribes a low arc across the sky, never climbing much higher than the horizon, casting the denuded bluffs above the valley in a spectral glow. When we pitch the tent at day’s end, we have paddled more than forty miles.
Twenty years earlier, six friends and I spent thirty-two days in the Brooks Range without seeing another soul. In the morning I am thus taken aback to see a group of ten people camped across the river. Before the day is out, moreover, a yellow Cessna disgorges two additional planeloads of wilderness seekers on a nearby lake.
The Alatna, like most big rivers in the Brooks Range, flows fast but has no rapids more challenging than Class 2 riffles (on a scale of 1 to 6). If the rugged terrain and absence of trails make hiking through this country a labor-intensive grind, waterborne travel is downright cushy. Which explains why the great majority of visitors to Gates of the Arctic flock to the half-dozen navigable rivers–and why, in a park with so much acreage and so few humans, those visitors are often dismayed to encounter other people.
I’m disappointed, too, although I shouldn’t be surprised. Before we’d left Bettles, chief ranger Glenn Sherrill warned, “You can hike through 99 percent of Gates and I guarantee you won’t see anyone. But park use is heavily concentrated along the Alatna, the Noatak, the John, and the North Fork of the Koyukuk. If you’re looking for solitude, stay away from these rivers. The only other place you’re likely to run into a crowd is in the Arrigetch.”
The Arrigetch Peaks, a cluster of sheer granite spires west of the Alatna Valley, comprise one of the loveliest places in Gates of the Arctic, if not the world. Hence its relative popularity, although the “crowd” to which Sherrill referred amounts to no more than 50 to 150 people annually in the entire 150-square-mile Arrigetch massif. “Down in Utah, where I was a ranger until transferring to Alaska two years ago,” Sherrill mused, “a number that small would effectively be considered zero use. In Gates we consider it extremely heavy use.”
Fifty or a hundred visitors a year is a problem in the Arrigetch because in the High Arctic, that many people, no matter how careful, are bound to leave an indelible mark on the landscape. Not very many years ago, the trudge up Arrigetch Creek demanded attentive route-finding and nasty bushwhacking through all-but-impenetrable alder thickets. Now the march of boots has trampled a muddy thoroughfare up most of the lower valley. At popular campsites, the tundra has been worn down to bare earth. Bears in the area have grown habituated to human offal, prompting rangers to place steel barrels at the busiest camps so that the bruins won’t pilfer backpackers’ food and garbage.
As Peggy, Roman, and I hike up Arrigetch Creek from its confluence with the Alatna, though, we encounter nobody. Halfway up the valley the makeshift trail we’ve been following peters out, and we see no further sign of human passage whatsoever.
The higher we ascend, the more the country resembles the phantasmal scenery of a Tolkien novel. Our route takes us across soft carpets of reindeer lichen beneath sinister black cliffs and hanging glaciers. The creek, opaque with glacial sediment, is never far away. Most of the time the stream is a thundering cascade, frothing from drop to drop over gargantuan blocks of stone; at other places it slows and spreads into placid cerulean pools in which reflections of the surrounding alps shimmer like hallucinations.
At the head of Arrigetch Creek, we find ourselves in a natural cul-de-sac, nearly encircled by soaring vertical walls. We continue the only way possible: by going up and over the top—a climb of 4,000 vertical feet that culminates on an airy summit as slender as a thorn. The whole expanse of the Arrigetch is visible from this vantage, a dazzling chaos of mile-high granite pickets. As we descend to the west, into a virginal cirque cradling a half-frozen lake, I am reminded that it is the astonishing wildness of this place, even more than its splendor, that is responsible for the bittersweet rapture expanding in my chest.
A mere two-day walk (albeit a strenuous one) from the relative hubbub along the Alatna has transported us into a landscape as primeval as that which moved Bob Marshall so powerfully six decades ago. Describing the country east of the Alatna, the celebrated conservationist wrote: “Nothing I had ever seen, Yosemite or the Grand Canyon or Mt. McKinley rising from the Susitna, had given me such a sense of immensity….No sight or sound or smell or feeling even remotely hinted of men or their creations. It seemed as if time had dropped away a million years and we were back in a primordial world.”
Marshall wasn’t the first Caucasian to penetrate the Brooks Range—navy lieutenant George M. Stoney noted the “rugged, weather-scarred peaks, lofty minarets [and] cathedral spires” of the Arrigetch while exploring the Alatna as early as 1886—but Marshall was the Arctic’s most ardent champion. He is responsible for the name, Gates of the Arctic, which he bestowed upon a pair of stately mountains bracketing the North Fork of the Koyukuk. Park planner John Kauffmann observed that Marshall’s appellation has “captured the imagination of all who have heard it. It did much to bring about national park status for the area.”
For millennia before Marshall or Stoney ever set foot in Alaska, of course, Athapaskan (Indian) and Nunamiut (inland Eskimo) hunter-gatherers lived and traveled throughout the Brooks Range. According to an oral history passed down over the centuries, the Nunamiut people were created by a giant deity named Aiyagomahala. After giving them life, he taught the Nunamiut to live off the land, and showed them how to survive the brutal cold and long night of the Arctic winter.
So that he and his teachings would be remembered, Aiyagomahala set one of his Brobdingnagian gloves down beside the Alatna River and transformed it into the most spectacular cordillera in the Brooks Range, the peaks now rising around me. The Nunamiut christened them the Arrigich, which in English means “fingers of the hand extended.”
Prior to 1890, bands of Nunamiut roamed across much of what is now Gates of the Arctic National Park. Contact with white explorers and whalers at the turn of the century, however, int
roduced epidemics of measles and influenza for which the natives had no immunity. During this same period, the teeming herds of caribou that provided them with most of their food, clothing, and shelter went into cyclical decline. Ravaged by famine and disease, the surviving Nunamiut migrated from the mountains, their traditional homeland, to settlements on the Arctic coast. By the time of Marshall’s first trip to the Arctic, in 1929, they had all but vanished from the central Brooks Range.
Today the Nunamiut are back in Gates of the Arctic. Most of those who live within the park reside in the village of Anaktuvuk Pass, a settlement of plywood shacks and prefab homes huddled on a broad windswept divide near the source of the John River. There are no flush toilets in this community of 250 (the permafrost makes plumbing problematic), but there is electricity, cable television, a handful of telephones, a fancy new school—and an astonishing number of automobiles, given that there is nowhere to drive beyond the few blocks of gravel streets that comprise downtown Anaktuvuk.
Village existence is an incongruous blend of the timeless and the modern. A wage-based economy has supplanted the subsistence life of old to a great degree, but hunting and trapping remain an extremely important component of Nunamiut culture. On occasion, this has led to conflict with the National Park Service.
The Nunamiut have forced the Park Service to rethink some of its fundamental policies. Initially, Kauffmann explains, the agency was inclined to regard Gates as it regarded parks in the Lower 48, “where the rules were clear and long established, hunting, even for subsistence, was out of the question, and native people were usually artifacts of the past rather than a living part of the ecosystem.” In Gates, however, park administrators had to make concessions to Alaskan politics, native traditions, and idiosyncrasies of the northern lifestyle. Ultimately, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 (ANILCA) decreed that subsistence hunting and trapping would be permitted in the park by natives and non-natives alike.