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.

Alaska/Yukon Highlights

Dall sheep on the park road in Denali

The Seaview Cafe and Bar in downtown Hope, Alaska. I camped across the street as usual. Later that night the deck caved in while a band was jamming out.

This is a video of me drinking my second Sourtoe Cocktail, a Dawson City institution from way back. A mummified human toe is placed in a glass of liquor and downed, with the stipulation that the toe touch the drinker's lips. . . although some take it a step farther.

Night settles on the Maclaren River Lodge, Denali Highway

Coming in for a landing on the Ruth Glacier, Mt McKinley

Toklat River, Alaska Range

Parking lot cornhole with Tim in Girdwood

The Dempster Highway

The Dempster Highway snakes into the Northwest Territories

Leaving Dawson City, I had no idea what I was in for. . .

The Dempster Highway is a 457-mile dirt road linking the arctic hamlet of Inuvik with the rest of Canada. A gravel berm rolling across hundreds of miles of taiga and tundra, across the Arctic Circle, across mountain ranges, interrupted only by the ferry crossings on the Peel and Mackenzie Rivers. Through the Yukon and into the Northwest Territories. On and on and on.

This is a road trip in the most elemental sense: the road itself is the journey. Simply driving 900 miles of rough gravel through absolute wilderness is a mental exercise. On one morning, entering the Richardson Mountains, the landscape was primeval to the point of exciting mirages of mammoth herds grazing the tundra. The Dempster actually traverses areas untouched by the last ice age, untouched since we walked across from Asia. Back then it was called Beringia, but the landscapes do create a weird, dawn-of-time atmosphere.

Driving the Dempster was a good time. Flying along on top of a 8-foot-thick roadbed, I felt like a train driver blasting north. The views in my side mirrors alternated between a half-mile dust plume and a mud-caked trailer. Fifty miles roll by without seeing a car before a distant brown cloud catches the eye. Headlights emerge from a cloud of dust and flying rocks as a tractor trailer barrels across the plains. Most of the terrain is tundra - a ground-hugging mat of grasses, lichen and mosses broken by clumps of willow and dwarf birch. In the western arctic tundra alternates with taiga (or boreal forest), here dominated by thousands of miles of spindly black spruce. The northern taiga is an incredibly hardy world, where difficult growing conditions and short summers produce short, stunted spruce that may be more than 200 years old. It looks and feels ancient.

The Arctic Circle: 66 degrees and sunny

Then there's the whole arctic thing. Only two roads on the continent cross the Arctic Circle, the Dalton Highway in Alaska and the Dempster. Another reason why there isn't much traffic (there just isn't a lot going on up there.) Although I basically went for the chance to play cornhole at 68 degrees north latitude, it was amazing to cross that storied line. It also opened my eyes to what the true Arctic really is. Far from ice floes and polar bears, the Mackenzie River actually creates a microclimate able to support trees well north of normal treeline. It was more mountains, tundra and taiga, and the realization that the Arctic Circle is yet another human imposition on the land, nothing more than an arbitrary line. But it is cool to drive that far north. . .

When the Canadian government finished the highway in the late 70s, they also built Eagle Plains. A micro-civilization in its own right, it's a truck stop, gas station, restaurant, campground, hotel and bar located 230 miles up the road. High on a hilltop of wind-bent spruce (eagles? plains?) shines this beacon of commerce. I camped there on my way back down, leery of the bug-ridden, creek-side government campgrounds. From my journal, 7/7: Nobody wanted to repeat Night of the Living Mosquitos, so we camped at Eagle Plains. Built in the 70s and never updated. Like camping at a remote roadhouse but with a great, old-school lounge. Heads on the walls, cold beer bottles, a pool table and country music.

In the yard at Eagle Plains

Another stop on the road before Inuvik is Fort McPherson, a Gwich'in First Nations settlement and old trading post. These days, a cluster of houses and several pickup trucks augment a gas station, supermarket and picturesque cemetery. And on the local AM radio station: Good morning to everyone, good morning to everyone. . . Gladys Nightspruce sends her greetings to everyone in town, especially Patsy, remember Gladys is in a nursing home in Whitehorse. . . Tommy Goodall, your sister is looking for you, please call home, your sister wants you. . .
And Tsiigehtchic, a seasonal fish camp-turned-town of 200, at the confluence of the Mackenzie and Arctic Red Rivers. I stopped here in search of dryfish, a traditional preparation of coney (a local, freshwater whitefish.) I asked a kid on a bike and he pointed to a faded blue house. At the door, an old man seemed not at all surprised by a vanload of foreigners in an otherwise deserted street. He sold me a greasy brown bag for $10. Tough, but palatable and mild.

Finally, after hundreds of miles of mountains, rivers, valleys and entire hillsides covered with purple-red fireweed, we hit the city limits of Inuvik. Civilization hit all at once: first pavement, then a cop with a speed gun. A modest grid of gritty humanity followed soon after. For all the dust and mud, the listlessness and loitering, apparent lack of town planning and jacked-up trucks, Inuvik is not without a certain charm. It's blessed with a beautiful setting on the Mackenzie River delta and a cafe with very good coffee. Based on what I saw in the Mad Trapper Pub, there are at least three people in town who play musical instruments. And almost everyone I met was friendly. Sitting in camp, drinking a Coors and barbecuing a whole arctic char, gazing out across the delta, I thought for about five minutes that I could live there. But it takes more than great pike fishing to make a home.

Later that night, after the Mad Trapper, I was awakened by a wind storm at 3:30. As I ran around the massive cook tent, hammering down extra ropes in the twilight, I kept looking over at the ball of fire hanging in the east. Where the hell am I?

Permafrost solutions in Inuvik: houses on pilings and above-ground plumbing