Brooks Range, Anaktuvuk to Takahula Lake (Packraft)

On short notice and with little planning, my partner and I caught a flight to Anaktuvuk Pass this summer and set out toward the Arrigetch Peaks region. It looked like a relatively short distance: National Geographic conveniently misleadingly fit the entirety of Gates of the Arctic National Park on a single side of a single map, giving the profound misimpression that such a vast landscape can be grasped in a glance.

Of course, I didn’t merely navigate by a glorified highway map, and did glance at the distances: Some 75 miles as the crow flies, which seemed imminently reasonable for a week’s travel. Roman Dial recommended 4-7 days (see packrafting.org and packrafting.blogspot.com for many variations of Brooks Range crossings), and I imagined game trails that resembled freeways in between long stretches of open tundra.

Within several hours of setting out from Anaktuvuk Pass, it was evident that travelling would be a little harder than I’d thought. Not until we were airborne did I calculate what a week to the Arrigetch meant--just a day and a half paddling some forty or fifty river miles, including several miles of pulling boats through painfully shallow water. Most of the paddling was on flat, slow water, and what would have been fun rapids was too low to paddle.

Determined to move quickly, we cooked dinner and paddled for hours afterward each of the first two days, arriving at Wolverine Creek around 1030 p.m. after an evening and a day of paddling. Not that the scenery wasn’t overwhelming: Something about the Arctic sky seemed broader, the light more radiant. Travelling quickly meant passing from vast expanses of tundra into mature forest in a single day. Nonetheless, we were aware that the river was the easy part, and we’d just travelled until fairly late in the evening before needing to get up and bushwhack upstream the next day. And while entering the forest was a fascinating visual experience, I was a tad distracted from the scenery by trying to estimate just how high the willows and alders climbed up the hillsides and might confound travel.

Fortunately, travel was possible upstream in the rather wide bottomland of Wolverine Creek. Myriad game trails transect the forest, with smoothest passage well back of the alders and willows that crowded the banks. After a while, the valley narrowed and we made the first of several hundred stream crossings, each imperceptibly shallower than the last as we approached the creek’s headwaters.

Everyone has their own standards--this year’s Wilderness Classic victor averaged 50 miles per day through trailless terrain. Personally, I’m satisfied if I can make it 10 as-the-crow-flies miles through brush in a day, accepting that a river valley or mountain side’s contours add significantly to the straight line distance. And that is just about what we did, walking for days through brush, across gravel bars and tussocks. It took two days to ascend Wolverine Creek. It would have been difficult but pleasant walking except for the prospect of bears obscured by brush, and indeed I nearly ran into one, literally, on the second day.

We were walking along making noise, when I heard my partner yelling. I sensed an extremely large object right next to me, and retreated perhaps ten feet to where she’d been walking behind me. Turning around, I saw a grizzly bear extraordinarily close to us. He charged, stopping a few feet short of us. We examined his impressive jowls and even larger cranium. After pausing mid-charge, he circled, shaking his head and making noises that we didn’t interpret as friendly. Then he huffed, turned, and ran. And we continued walking upstream through miles of shoulder high brush.

Leaving Wolverine Creek, we crossed the upper Iniakuk and upper Nahtuk drainages, probably the most remote places I have ever been. Beyond the terminus of each valleys, great obelisks and dry spires rise in the middle of a seemingly endless Arctic landscape. It was worth all the brush thrashing, bear baiting, and tussock stomping for a single minute gazing out past Nahtuk Mountain and the headwaters of a half dozen rivers.

After walking down the Nahtuk River, we ascended to a low saddle, not quite above brush line, and camped before descending toward the Pingaluk River. This demure pass seemed to be on the cusp of the highlands, with tundra above and cottonwood riverscapes below. The next morning, we kept climbing rather than descending, taking the high route over several ridges en route to the Lower Pingaluk. To the south, soaring towers of the Arrigetch lacerated the horizon and sunlight bled out amidst a bank of clouds.

Earlier in summer, the lower Pingaluk would have been paddleable. But August’s low water, in a low-snow year, left it dried out. First we walked down flat gravel bars, then weaved downstream across gravel bars and on game trails as the river deepened into a gorge. At its most profound, the river descends through rocky chaos as it converges with its large western tributary. Then, improbably, there was a perfectly wide, flat, open forested bench right near the confluence, the kind of place Muir said one might want to remain for a minute, a day, or a lifetime.

The upper Pingaluk River valley expressed a pastoral wildness that is unlike any I’ve seen, with tranquility of well space pines and open woodland juxtaposed against sudden whitewater gorges and the trepidatious awe one feels in such a remote place.

Below the gorges, the Pingaluk opened up into a wide valley approaching the Alatna River. Its scale, the distant mountains and intimate forests and suffused light, suggested a celestial iteration of Hudson River School painters.

After walking for hard miles through brush and tussock, it could have been a relief to reach the Alatna River. But it is never a relief to become more remote from remoteness, to return from a pilgrimage.