Adventures in the Northern Wet

Most people who romanticize about sleeping in tents don't do it very often. Each year I average 150 bag nights, in a tent, somewhere. Leading camping tours from April to November, from the deserts of the Southwest to the Rocky Mountains to Alaska and the Yukon, I've seen a lot of weather. On Key West my tent became a stifling greenhouse and I had to sleep outside on the sand. Overlooking the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories, I woke to a survival situation at 3 am as a sudden windstorm threatened to blast our tents off the knoll. Nothing quite like running around in the middle of the night, arctic sun still up, frantically hammering down ropes. In West Glacier, Montana, a September morning revealed soaked tents, sodden, collapsed cook canopies and expressions of grim doubt. Last summer in Seward, Alaska, our campground turned into a frigid, muddy lake overnight. While my passengers were out watching killer whales in the fjords, I was mopping out tents and digging drainage canals.

Last summer in Alaska I saw a lot of rain. It felt wet, but when camping and living out of doors, all weather becomes a richer, more intimate experience. After several days of cold rain and mud, a two-hour break of sun can feel like a two-week Caribbean vacation. By the end of last summer, after three months of leading trips in Alaska, I was saying things like "One clear day is worth three rainy days" and "The only bad weather is weather that keeps us from doing what we want." Which is actually true. And besides - if you're in a kayak, on the water, paddling through brash ice, socked in by cloud, who cares if it's raining?

Water, in various forms, is one of the most dynamic and salient aspects of the Alaskan landscape. Clouds, glaciers, rivers, harbors, bays and sounds, the ocean, rain, fog, snow, ice - they're all on display in The Last Frontier. Never passive, water only caused me real trouble when key roads were washed out in flash floods in the Yukon and eastern Alaska. In one case this was a blessing in disguise, as I had no choice but to reroute a tour from the Yukon to the Alaskan Arctic, seeing some amazing landscapes I wouldn't have otherwise. Here are a few photos and words from up north.

Resurrection Bay and Seward Harbor

From the journal:

6/30/10 Destruction Bay, Yukon
". . .woke up in Tok to the first sun in five days. Everyone was cheerful and stripped down to t-shirts. By 10:30 it was cloudy again. . . as I write this in my tent it's coming down. Everything is wet and dirty. No mountains visible anywhere due to cloud cover. And nothing to do tomorrow but hike or sit. . . it has to break sometime, doesn't it?"

6/14/10 Seward, AK
"Lying in a broken, shitty tent with water coming in. Been raining all day and doesn't look like stopping. Mud and puddles everywhere. Quiet mood. Wet tents. The hike to Harding Icefield tomorrow will be tough if it doesn't let up. . . what else can we do in Seward?"

7/25/10
"Alaska is teaching me to enjoy every nice day."

7/31/10 Fairbanks, AK
". . . drove to Whitehorse anyway. Found out that afternoon that they'd repaired the Dempster Highway washouts and gotten one lane open again. Changed everything again - calling, booking, canceling, booking again, getting on the phone with the DOT. After a beautiful seven-hour drive north to Dawson City, the first thing we saw in town was a sign saying the Dempster had been washed out again. . . the Taylor highway (only other way out of town) had been washed out but was supposed to open Friday morning. . . we made it through to Chicken and then hauled ass to Fairbanks. Later found out someone hit the Lakaina River bridge on the McCarthy Road and it's temporarily closed."

8/28/10 Anchorage
"Last time at Denali on tour. . . woke to rain and didn't feel like getting out of my sleeping bag. Also very hungover. . . Spent the lunch stop crawling around in the water, changing the van tire."

Iceberg kayak at the Columbia Glacier

Full moon over Kluane Lake, Yukon Territory

Crossing the Mackenzie River, Northwest Territories

Mount McKinley and the Susitna River

Coming soon. . . stories about good weather.

Wrangell - St Elias

A national park as big as Switzerland with higher mountains. A mind-bending mountain kingdom where four ranges converge, full of glaciers, old volcanoes, bears and copper mines. Only two spur roads actually enter Wrangell - St Elias, the Nabesna Road and the McCarthy Road, built atop an old railroad grade. After the richest copper strike in US history in the Kennecott Valley in 1900, an almost impossible railroad was built to transport the ore hundreds of miles to Cordova, the nearest port on Prince William Sound. After the copper ran out and the mines were closed in 1938, the towns of Kennecott and nearby McCarthy were all but abandoned and the tracks ripped up. The grade was donated to the state and the legendary McCarthy Road was born. Starting in Chitina on the Copper River, it's 60 miles of rough dirt to the end of the road at the Kennicott River (and the footbridge that takes you to McCarthy.)

I've seen plenty of moose, four or five black bears and a few coyotes on the road, having just driven it for the fourth time. Not as bad as it used to be (according to the locals) but with every grading old railroad spikes still emerge. The town of Kennecott has a museum feel since the NPS bought most of the old mine buildings and restored them. But tiny McCarthy (or 'the center of the universe' according to some of the ice guides) still comes to life every night when the bar opens. Every time I bring a group here, I tell them to count the beards and they usually give up around thirty. A lot of characters for a few old wooden buildings hunched along a muddy street.

Gilahina Trestle crumbles quietly along the McCarthy Road

The road ends at the footbridge and the world's most scenic parking lot. In the background is the 7,000 foot Stairway Icefall

Downtown McCarthy

Looking down into a moulin (a water-bored hole in the ice)

Climbing on Root Glacier

One of the world's biggest icefalls, the Stairway drops over a vertical mile into the Root Glacier

Alaska Range

Maclaren Glacier creeping under low clouds

Flying over talus and tarn in Denali National Park

Landing at Healy

Looking north from mile 14 on the Denali Highway

Polychrome Mountains in Denali

Gulkana Glacier from the Richardson Highway

Mount Hayes and friends from the top of Donnelly Dome

Dalton Highway and the Brooks Range

Cruising the pipeline

Still known locally as the Haul Road, the Dalton was built along with the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the 1970s. Just over 400 miles of mostly gravel runs from north of Fairbanks up to Deadhorse and the oilfields of the North Slope, crossing the Yukon River, Arctic Circle and the Brooks Range along the way. Like the Dempster Highway in the Yukon Territory, this road wasn't built for a Sunday drive. An hour can pass without seeing another vehicle. Two headlights and a dust cloud on the horizon become a mud-crusted big rig pulling two trailers, hurling gravel, hauling ass across the tundra. Most of the other pickups on the road belong to oilfield workers or to Alyeska, the company that owns and operates the pipeline. After crossing the Yukon, the Dalton snakes through bogs, bridges several rivers, passes a few million stunted black spruce and crosses the Arctic Circle at 66 degrees north. Not long afterward the jagged, austere Brooks Range rises on the horizon. The most northerly mountains on the continent, these ancient peaks rise like islands above the tundra. The silence is sobering. Dall sheep stand sentinel high on the rocky slopes.

River valleys full of wolf and grizzly tracks rise through willow-choked banks to low hills covered with blueberry and low-bush cranberry.The tundra here is staggering in its variety, with one square foot containing stiff, mint-green lichen, mosses of deep green, crimson and pale yellow and four or five different mushrooms moistened by recent rains. Above the tree line, the mountains are breaking apart, streaming scree slopes into the valleys below. It's a special and stilling place.

My group camped at Marion Creek for two nights, one of the Bureau of Land Management campgrounds along the highway and just north of Coldfoot. On the second day we drove up to Atigun Pass (at 4,800 feet the highest road pass in Alaska.) Then we hiked east along Nutirwik Creek, a braided river wandering in channels across the gravelly valley floor, past animal tracks and up into the hills for views and blueberries. Then an arctic bath as I stripped down and splashed off in Marion Creek.

Road, river and pipeline in the Brooks Range

My office at Marion Creek

Ursus arctos was here

The mosquito killer

Hitching into the Brooks

Atigun Pass in the Brooks Range