Before receding into nothingness, the airplane’s faint roar triggers memories of other planes. Helicopters, too. A flashback delivers me to the mid-1970s. I’m a twenty-something geologist again, not long out of grad school and working this same range of mountains in northern Alaska. Belted into the cramped back seat with two other geologists, I peer out the helicopter’s bulbous plastic windows. Its blades roar and whine, a god-awful white noise.
It’s the end of a long workday and we’re flying high over the mountains, headed for camp, when somebody spots a grizzly. The bear is large, almost certainly an adult male. He’s been grazing on plants in a boggy alpine meadow, but now he sits on his haunches and looks in our direction.
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As the chopper closes, the grizzly takes off running. We’re amazed at his speed and power, the muscles that ripple along his shoulders and humped back as he rumbles uphill across spongy, hummocky tundra. Every now and then the bear looks backward. Tongue hanging out, he sprays shit across the tundra, but he doesn’t break stride until reaching the top of a knoll. There he stands and opens his mouth wide. It appears he’s growling, but his shouts are lost in the helicopter’s roar. Sitting back down, the bear swats at us as we circle two or three times, a couple hundred feet above him.
“Seen enough?” the pilot asks. “Okay, let’s go home.”
It’s not the first time we’ve zoomed in for closer looks at wildlife, but this chase, and the bear’s certain distress, unnerves me. My stomach is roiling. Our terrorizing of the bear is simply wrong. I see no hint of disapproval from any of the others. Unsure of myself, I don’t protest.
As an exploration geologist in the mid- to late seventies, I saw large swaths of the Brooks Range from a helicopter. That was just a few years before Congress designated large sections of Alaska’s northernmost mountain chain as park and wildlife-refuge wilderness, off limits to development. Flown from base camp to work area, I would traverse a ridge or stream drainage, collecting samples along the way, then get picked up and taken to another area, or returned to camp.
I don’t regret those times, but over the years—as my relationship with wilderness has shifted and deepened—I’ve chosen to explore the state’s roadless areas in gentler, quieter ways: by river raft, kayak, foot.
For all of my desire to explore wild terrain, I’ve never been a gung-ho backpacker. And I’ve become even less enthusiastic as a forty- and now fifty-something traveler. I like to take in my surroundings, and paying attention to the landscape is much harder to do when lugging a big, heavy pack. Plus there’s all that bodily pain: aching shoulders and back, blistered feet. My preference is to set up base camps and do day hikes. I may not cover as much ground, but I become more intimate with a smaller piece of the landscape.
The expedition I’m on now is a backpacking-base camping hybrid. With nearly two weeks to travel 50 miles, I can more easily remain tentbound when the weather gets nasty. Or I can take an extra day when tempted by side trips.
Though I keep a leisurely pace by most backpacking standards, this trek presents its share of challenges. At 50 years old, I am doing the longest backpack of my life, across mostly untrailed wilderness, much of it wet, with foot-grabbing sedge tussocks, grizzly bears, and—most worrisome to me—large, braided rivers to be crossed. And I’m doing it alone.
The landscape is new to me, too, though I’ve previously flown over these hills and valleys and spent time in neighboring drainages. Much of my route roughly retraces Bob Marshall’s explorations through the Graylime Creek, Ernie Creek, and North Fork valleys in 1929 and 1930.
A forestry scientist, legendary hiker, and founding member of The Wilderness Society, Marshall is one reason I’ve come here. I want to see for myself the places that he mapped, named, and so vividly described in Alaska Wilderness, his classic book about the Central Brooks Range—and a book that helped reshape my life.
Born and raised in New York City in the early 1900s, Bob Marshall came north to the central Brooks Range in 1929, drawn by “what seemed on the map to be the most unknown section of Alaska”: a mountain kingdom stretching east-west across its Arctic region, the northernmost—and most pristine—chain of mountains in the nation. The Brooks Range fulfilled and inspired him, while deepening his vision for wilderness preservation, a vision that greatly influenced America’s 20th century environmental movement. The route I’m following passes through the heart of Marshall country, now one of the grandest areas within 8.2-million-acre Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve.
Halfway into my trek, camped along Graylime Creek a few miles from the Arctic Divide, I again huddle in my sleeping bag while sheets of rain soak the landscape, pelt my tent. Five of the trip’s first seven days have now been mostly rainy and overcast.
The abundant wetness of this so-called “arctic desert” gets me thinking again about my first years in the Brooks Range, working on a geology crew. Is my memory faulty, or have weather patterns shifted dramatically? I remember the Central Brooks Range of the 1970s as a dry, sunny place—so dry that I routinely left my rain gear in camp. Not a good idea, certainly, when traveling through any mountain range, but by day’s end our packs usually overflowed with rocks and dozens of stream sediment samples. Some of us looked for ways to cut down the weight. I often skimped on clothing and, thankfully, got away with it.
Stirred up by aircraft overflights, climatic conundrums, and too much tent time, memories of my geology past return. That’s not such a bad thing. Geology is what introduced me to the Brooks Range, a place that changed my life and, paradoxically, helped to steer me away from my first career choice.
As the rain softens to a gently pleasing patter, my mind drifts through time and I reflect on my former life as exploration geologist. I recall a place, far to the west in this same chain of mountains, and a summer now 25 years past.
Like Bob Marshall, I came north to Alaska while in my 20s, bringing a scientific background and a desire for adventure. A geologist fresh out of graduate school, I knew nothing about the Brooks Range and (unlike Marshall) had no special hunger to visit the Arctic. Yet I would spend most of my first summer—and three field seasons after that—exploring the same mountain landscape he walked and mapped decades earlier.
Within days, I fell in love with the range’s immense wildness, manifest in wave after wave of knife-edged ridges that stretched to the horizon and beyond; in glacially carved basins that grew lush in midsummer with the rich greens of tundra meadows and rainbow hues of alpine wildflowers; in wolves, caribou, bears, and wolverines; in an unpeopled landscape where one could travel for days, perhaps even weeks, without seeing any signs of humans.
By the end of my first summer in Alaska it had become apparent that my attitudes toward geology—and mineral exploration in particular—were considerably different than those of my friends and co-workers. For one thing, I clearly lacked their passion for the job.
Yet something else, something vaguely troubling, gnawed at me. Many of my buddies and bosses had absolutely nothing good to say about environmental groups. The depth of their anger shocked me. I didn’t consider myself an environmentalist and knew little about the emotionally charged battle over Alaska’s wild lands, a battle that many of my peers considered a direct threat to their livelihoods. But I couldn’t see what was so awful about the Sierra Club or The Wilderness Society. It seemed to me that they were trying to do some good. I was naïve and uninformed enough that I didn’t realize many environmentalists would feel the same sort of disgust toward me, simply because I worked on a field crew seeking metal deposits in the Arctic wilderness.
At 24, my green ethic was a vaporous thing, still years away from taking shape. But I did know this: Sierra Clubbers weren’t my enemies. Still, it wasn’t a perspective I could openly share with my geologist buddies. Not wishing to be ridiculed, I hid my misgivings and questions. Yet little by little, my discomfort built.
I returned to the Brooks Range in 1975, farther to the west with a different crew and field boss. With hopes growing for a major strike—and perhaps a rich new mining district—companies poured money into the region.
Adding to the excitement was a sense of urgency. Large chunks of the Brooks Range had been proposed as national parklands and closed to development. Mining interests hurried to stake their claims before any additional lands were “locked up” by the feds. The rush was on.
Helicopters and planes buzzed across the sky, large tent camps peppered the range’s major valleys. Mere hints of mineralized rocks propelled us into great staking wars, as our bosses tried to outguess and outmaneuver competing businesses. Loaded into helicopters, we flew across the landscape on stealth missions. Sometimes we took long, roundabout detours to our destinations. Dropped at target areas we rushed across rolling hills and hummocky tundra benches, loaded down with maps, compasses, aluminum poles, tape measures, and rock hammers, and determined to claim large swaths of land for our clients.
The stream drainages and foothills we searched for minerals were not far from “d-2” lands that the federal government had set aside for possible inclusion in national parklands. Still new to Alaska and disinterested in politics, I knew almost nothing about those efforts, only that these hills and river valleys were gorgeously, ruggedly wild. And vast enough to swallow entire armies of geologists.
Among the most beautiful valleys was one through which the Ambler River runs. Born among alpine tundra meadows and boulder fields, the Ambler rushes 80 miles to its junction with the Kobuk River in lowlands south of the Brooks Range.
My company established a camp about 25 miles below the Ambler’s source. We set up our tents in open spruce forest, on the river’s western bank. It was a beautiful spot, the wooded valley bottom bounded by dark, gray-walled mountains that rose to 4,000 feet. But especially alluring was the river itself. Stretches of bubbling rapids alternated with quiet pools of crystalline, aquamarine-tinted water that was surrealistically clear. Since that summer, whenever I’ve heard the expression “pure mountain water,” the Ambler is what comes to mind. It remains the purest, clearest, most sparkling stream of water I have ever seen, or can imagine.
The river was so transparent it created optical illusions. As I stood on a rocky bench above one still pool and stared at the iridescent bodies and spectacularly large dorsal fins of Arctic grayling below, my mind was tricked into believing those fish were floating in air. Pools of water that appeared to be waist-deep or shallower might in fact submerge my 5-foot-7 frame.
Over the years, homesteaders, trappers, and prospectors had built cabins beside the river’s lower reaches, but its middle and upper stretches showed few signs of a human presence, other than our tent camp and occasional overflights by helicopters and planes. The summer’s most intense prospecting and staking campaigns were to the south; here we were hidden from the main combat zone.
I relished our seclusion and pristine surroundings from the start. Yet at first the Ambler didn’t seem much different than other northern valleys we had worked, except for the stunningly clear water. That changed as days and weeks passed.
The extraordinary nature of some landscapes is immediately apparent. I think of Denali, or Yosemite, or the Brooks Range’s own Arrigetch Peaks, with their sharply angled, monolithic rock walls and soaring spires. For other places—for instance grassy plains or broad, forested valleys edged by gently rounded hills—it’s a subtler thing. Only with time and a deepening relationship is the magic revealed. The revelation may come as a gradual awakening or a sudden bursting of awareness. For me it happened suddenly and unexpectedly on a sunny but brisk July afternoon, with enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes at bay. The day glowed with brightness.
My assignment was to sample and prospect a portion of the Ambler north of camp. The work itself was routine—bagging samples of stream silt, breaking rocks, making map notations—until I noticed a patch of green-stained rocks. The rocks were coated with malachite, a copper-carbonate mineral. At first I was excited, immersed in a “eureka” moment. This was exactly the sort of thing we sought. I busted open several rocks with my hammer, collected samples, marked the spot on my map.
Only then did it hit me: what if, against all odds, this small malachite-coated outcropping was the tip of a copper-rich iceberg of rock? What if beneath this Arctic soil there was a mother lode of metals, enough to develop a mine? Well, my company and its clients would get rich. Alaska’s economy would get a boost. More helicopter-supported troops of geologists would invade, followed by mining engineers and huge earth-moving machines. And this beautiful, wild valley would be torn apart.
I tried to imagine the changes that would occur here. By my way of thinking, it was an ugly picture. And I realized, with a clarity that approached the Ambler’s streaming water, just how special this river and its valley had become to me. It was a remarkable place, even a holy place, whose purity was held and reflected by those sparkling, rushing waters.
If ever a river deserved “wild and scenic” status, this was it. Could I bear to know the Ambler had been harmed because of work I had done? And what about the other wild places where I had hunted metals? I felt a clash of values, more strongly than ever before.
Still, I wasn’t yet ready to go over to “the other side,” the side inhabited by Sierra Clubbers and their kind; the side that Robert Marshall chose four decades earlier when he sought to “keep northern Alaska largely a wilderness.” Actually I wasn’t sure I had a side. I was stuck somewhere in between. At that moment, only this much seemed sure: I would continue to perform my job earnestly and faithfully—and pray that nothing I did, or found, would eventually ruin these mountains, valleys, waters.
Under a sky growing dark with thick, gray clouds I bagged my samples and finished my traverse, then waited for the helicopter to return. Back in camp, I announced my find to the others. They were clearly pleased. This was good news. We would look harder at the area, likely stake some claims. Good job, the crew leader said. I nodded my head, not certain I agreed.
I finished out the field season and stayed on several months afterward, to help compile data and write annual reports. My bosses were happy enough with my work to offer me a permanent position. But that only fed my mounting uncertainties and insecurities. I feared I wasn’t as talented a geologist as others seemed to think. And my heart wasn’t in my work. There were other things bothering me too, outside of work. I felt unfulfilled and unhappy. Only in my twenties, I plunged into something resembling a mid-life crisis.
In 1976 I moved to Southern California. Talk about culture shock. In six years I never learned to love the L.A. megalopolis and often felt isolated and out of place among its millions of people. But some important changes happened there. Though still mostly apolitical, I started to pay more attention to environmental issues, became friends with conservationists, went on Sierra Club outings. And I began to seek a career that I could love as much as my geology buddies loved their work.
Even as I explored new possibilities, great changes were occurring to the north. A national movement to protect more of Alaska’s wild areas won the support of President Jimmy Carter and, after much fierce debate, Congress. In January 1980, Carter signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, or ANILCA. Among other things the act created several new Alaska parks and expanded others, adding 47 million acres to the National Park System. Among the system’s new jewels: Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, whose 8.2 million acres straddles “Robert Marshall country.”
From the beginning, Gates of the Arctic was intended to be something different. No other park in the system places such a focus on solitude and wilderness recreation; more than 80 percent of Gates is designated wilderness. Bob Marshall would be pleased.
Back in California, a series of events led me into journalism. Weeks into my first semester of journalism school, I knew my geology days were ended. But the pull to Alaska remained strong. In February 1982 I flew north to join The Anchorage Times as a sports writer. Three years later, I shifted to outdoors. It was then that my green side began to blossom. I gradually became an advocate for parks and wildlife refuges, bears and wolves, howling my opposition to state-run predator-control programs.
As time passed, I lost contact with most of my geology co-workers and friends. To a great degree, this came from my inability to bridge the growing differences. In a curious way, I felt I’d let them down.
My relationship with the Brooks Range, on the other hand, has deepened over time. Like Bob Marshall, I have returned there again and again. It’s a landscape I love deeply, one that is always with me. In part that’s because of the shift that occurred one summer day in the Ambler River Valley.
During the three days I’m camped along Graylime Creek, one extended break in the rain lures me into the surrounding hills. Following a ridge north of camp, I ascend to a bench high above the creek. From here I can look miles down the east-west-trending Anaktuvuk Valley, my main avenue into this landscape. It is broad, green, and gently U-shaped, almost pastoral in appearance. The flanks of limestone hills dip gently toward the river, but their ridgetops are contorted into fantastic shapes. Layers of rock once horizontal are now thrust upward to form steeply dipping walls. In all directions are wave upon wave of ridges, most of them barely touched by humans, some not at all.
Above the mountains, rafts of billowing clouds float through a deep blue ocean of sky. The day is a beauty, bright and dry, the nicest of my trek so far. It stirs more memories of my early days in the range, days of rapture just like this one, spent with a wholly different purpose.
I leave my perch and climb higher, up a knife-edged limestone ridge. Looking north, I take in parts of the Anaktuvuk’s upper valley. The river’s source is hidden, but my map helps me picture its birth in a glacier-carved amphitheater bounded by steep and jagged limestone walls.
Returning my attention to this unnamed spine of tundra-fringed rock, I resume my own unhurried explorations. There are moments on this ridge walk when my heart sings. I don’t know how else to put it: I feel bursts of joy that I can’t explain. Nothing specific seems to trigger these moments; no special insights or revelations accompany them. It is, I think, the entirety of this day, this trip. My spirit has been stirred and lifted by this glorious landscape, Marshall’s presence, and memories that stretch back a quarter century. In a receptive mood, I am touched by wildness—and perhaps my own wildness responds.
The wind picks up in late afternoon and clouds the color of bruises build to the south, so I begin a leisurely descent. On my way down I discover dried wolf scat, rich with hair and small bone fragments. Near the top of this same limestone rib there were caribou antlers. It’s a delight, to know I have shared the ridge with wolf and caribou. I imagine wolf traveling here, perhaps stalking prey or gazing across the same vast landscape that I’ve been relishing. Maybe howling to pack mates. Without thinking I face west, where the Ambler River still flows wildly pristine, and howl my own pleasure.
This essay is adapted from Changing Paths: Travels & Meditations in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness, Sherwonit’s most recent book.
Comments
Justin wrote on Feb 19, 2010 3:54 PM:
Please. "
Joe wrote on Jan 23, 2010 8:51 PM:
When I was a boy growing up in Colorado around the 60s I used to hunt for squirrels near our home. This was off Hwy 82 where there was lots of woods around Aspen before Hollywood moved in. In those days I was more apt to run into big game hunters than environmentalists. These days when I go hiking -- I live in rural Michigan now -- I never run into hunters but I almost always run into scientists and conservation volunteers. From my point of view these people are doing more to upset the natural balance of things than hunters ever did. In fact hunters, like cougars, actually have a place in the nature to balance things out. I’m not sure the PhDs with their clip boards and tranquilizer guns do. Don’t worry I’m not part of a growing anti-intellectual group. The anti-intellectual group actually started years ago by the so-called intellectuals themselves when they decided to trash real science for this sappy nonsensical eco business, a warped ideology that comes out of the hippy days of the 60s and still taught in colleges today. I was a chemistry major in the 70s we didn’t see alot of the radicalism in that science like you do the humanities but even the earth sciences had more than its share of hippies. We used to laugh at the geology and botany students because they were always hanging out with the social science majors. Nothing has changed and it’s gotten worse. Just like with the social policies that have been enacted over the years I think the environmental policies are causing a huge upset in the natural balance, not just with animals but with people.
Today now where I used to hunt there are about three golf courses surrounded by million dollar homes. The rich liberals who live and play there took over Aspen years ago and priced out rednecks like me, despite that I have a BS in chemistry. My parents eventually had to move to Grand Junction. They couldn’t even afford the taxes on their land where they raised my sisters and me. I don’t mind so much that the rich liberals moved in and pushed for higher taxes to pay for their liberal ideas which basically pushed out lower income people like my family. I can always find somewhere else to live in this large country where you can find places with low taxes and living just as good if not better. But what I do mind is their preachy attitude when every day they are showing what hypocrites they really are. Obviously they don’t give a hoot about the working classes despite what they say. Their record on environmentalism is worthless. Do as I say, not as I do. They shout for conservation efforts while spending $15,000 a year just to water their own huge lawns not to mention the cost of upkeep for their fancy golf courses (oh, and their vacation homes and guest houses and condos built on the beach…). They are doing more to damage the environment than people like me who used to hunt for gold squirrel and other rodents for fun. I can’t help but get sick to my stomach when I think these same people sponsor the most radical antihunting politicians and I doubt any of them have ever ever even been in the woods before. In Aspen they hold $1,000 a plate dinners and have huge fireworks in their big backyards where people like me used to run around in the woods. It would be funny if it wasn’t so destructive to both animals and our civil liberties. Wherever rich liberals tread everything seems to go to hell.
Even where I live now I notice strange things in the woods. Chipmunks and squirrels don’t show fear any more like they should. They run over my boots and sometimes try to get up my legs. They even surround me at times and do their high pitched squealing. This never happened in Colorado. I don’t hunt them like I used to and I don’t want to. I could be mawkish and say they are getting back at me for hunting their ancestors but any rational person knows animals don’t think that way and aren’t capable of holding grudges the way people can. But scary as it sounds alot of environmental scientists say they can. They even seem to take a warped pleasure in the thought of wildlife getting revenge against people. But what is happening is that thanks to the liberal controlled thinking of all affairs of this country wildlife is in a state of imbalance and as a result will have a uncertain future.
But what can a person do? I am not nearly as powerful as the PhDs and their fund raising pals and the media has decided views like mine are the worthless rants of white trash Chrstian radicals from lowly mid America. I only hope Americans wake up sooner rather than later so that they can see what is really going on with the environmental movement and its hypocrisy. There is a huge oligarchy being created in the name of science and peace and it’s a massive scam. Maybe the more people complain the more we’ll get noticed above the glitz and fireworks of celebrity Democrat fund raisers who don’t invite people like me unless I’m working as a servant. But as times goes on America changes and I don’t see that happening any time soon. We are just too insulated and comfortable for our own good. In the meantime the hobbled hunter is noticing the horrible consequences of his absence. But what do I know? I don’t own a beachfront house in Malibu or a million dollar house in Aspen. I’m just a redneck living off my frugally saved earnings in Michigan. "