8 minute read
Good Times in the Brooks Range
Draped from the ceiling, a Dall sheep cape is in the process of being cleaned. In the log home’s dim living room, it gathers the fall day’s anemic light. The rich, nutty meat sits in a wardrobe-size freezer nearby. As the year wanes, putting up stores for winter becomes an urge only those who inhabit lean land far from grocery aisles can truly appreciate.
Seated around a rustic table, we’re visiting Berni and Uta Hicker, Bavarian immigrants and homesteaders who have lived on the south side of Alaska’s Brooks Range for almost four decades. Neatly corded spruce and birch, solar panels, a windmill, and a generator cozy their Arctic Getaway, a cluster of rental cabins and outbuildings located in the hamlet of Wiseman (population: 14). Pioneer relics authenticate the grounds: a whipsaw, a Winchester repeater rifle, rusty leg-hold traps, huge blacksmith bellows.
Kitty-corner, in the groomed, grassy yard, a penned turkey gobbles, perhaps dreading Thanksgiving, while his white chicken companion struts, possibly knowing that her madeto-order eggs might prolong her lease on life. Breakfasts are served in the main house, a 1910 dance hall where Natives and miners whooped it up during a flash-in-the-pan gold rush on the Koyukuk River’s Middle Fork. This morning, Berni percolates coffee that could float horseshoes and flips sourdough pancakes for two couples in the breakfast room. Our hosts enjoy the brief annual lull before vans disgorge hordes of aurora tourists in Wiseman.
We rumbled in, unannounced, yesterday on the two-lane gravel road— the Dalton Highway—connecting and the rock shrapnel they flung at our already spider-webbed windshield. Autumn’s flare had intensified the clouds of dust churned up by the sparse traffic. It’s my favorite road, a springboard for bargain high-latitude ventures with serious, belly-flopping potential.
Before the age of manned flight, humans knew no smoother travel—rapids and rocks notwithstanding—than to be carried along by the current of a river.
The Hickers let the three of us crash in their sauna and in a cabin under construction, which I preferred despite its rough concrete floor since its windows admitted precious rays of sunlight, a commodity in short supply 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle in late August.
The following day, we unload our gear from two vehicles at a wooded cut farther north on the Dalton Highway. The Hickers’ son Leo shuttles our truck back to the Middle Fork Bridge, where we’ll beach packrafts at trip’s end. Packs (and packrafts) hoisted, we follow the creek bed upstream, rock hopping, avoiding wet feet as long as possible.
From near the ravine’s head, wheezing like a chain-smoking dragon, I zigzag 4,000 feet up the broad back of a steep, sustained ridge, first on tundra, then on flaked bedrock, to a plateau birthing a Mathews River tributary. Tom Moran, a lanky, 6’5” playwright, grant writer, mountain biker, and marathon runner, steps uphill pretty much in a straight line, deliberately as a heron. His longtime buddy Jay Cable—clean-shaven, lanternjawed, looking like dirt wouldn’t stick to him, though a few extra pounds do cling to his 6-foot frame—has to pause in the ascent as often as I do.
“We hike pretty fast, do very long days (when necessary), and don’t stop to rest very much,” Tom had warned me in an email. If the Mathews was running low due to a lack of snowpack, “there could be a lot of walking.”
To my relief, I manage to keep up, even at the expense of nourishment. My lunch is buried in my backpack. Rest breaks barely long enough to answer nature’s call force me to subsist on a single energy bar for the initial nine-and-a-halfhour leg. I had learned that fine dining didn’t rank among my companions’ priorities when nearing Wiseman the previous day, they had inhaled rubbery, cold Yukon River Camp pizza slices stacked on the center console.
On the saddle, the wind panpipes a monotone dirge on the paddle shafts strapped to my pack. The world opens, a book of sagas, an arena of giants, with views far west into Gates of the Arctic National Park—range upon range marches toward every horizon, paling as they recede. The view encircles more scenery than you could explore over the most fruitful hiking career.
Refreshingly, after the shaley mud at the pass, a rash of ruby bearberry leaves glistens as if freshly painted. Willows burnish the air with a stained-glass glow as we thread through stands hemming the feeder stream. Much dead matter drops even in an evergreen forest in winter’s rude disrobing: dwarf birch and willow, balsam poplar and blueberry leaves— rustling shallows of orange, burnt sienna, scarlet, canary yellow, burgundy; and night too, falls sooner and sooner each gilded day. Between periods of drizzle, spokes of heavenly light wheel across velvet slopes until afternoon clouds meld into an ominous pewter backdrop.
Our camp on a bluff at the tree line overlooks the Mathews’ too-shallow braids. Lichen so deep it preserves footprints makes sleeping mats optional. It’s still fourteen miles to the Bettles River from where, with greater depth likely, we can paddle to the highway. As the temperature dips, Jay and Tom build a driftwood fire on an outcrop below the high-water mark, befitting the racers’ minimal-impact philosophy.
We meander downstream beneath clouds cruising pelagic skies, fording the Mathews repeatedly, tracking through open forest, brittle or spongy underfoot, and skirt the lip of two canyons in search of water to buoy our miniature rafts. The blueberries are past their prime, rendered mushy by the meat-locker cold. The sun’s arc flattens daily until, three weeks hence, darkness and light briefly poise in equinoctial harmony, and nature, holding its breath, braces for partial shutdown. Streams will skim over and sap congeal under bark. Ground squirrels will go narcoleptic for months and grizzlies will squeeze into dens to dream of fawn kills on greener pastures. Wood frogs will clot into olive hailstones awaiting their miraculous revival in the spring. The geese and cranes will have fled, taking their fellowship’s clamor along. Silence will prevail.
Berni had warned us to expect sheep hunters here, and sure enough, we spot smoke wisps, a meat rack, humongous mule tracks, and sooty campfire rings. Ravens accent the spare bushes like notes on a musical score.
At the end of a mercifully mellow day, we pitch our second camp in a meadow by the river’s edge. Tom scales a bluff, scouting the down-valley stretch, while Jay and I relax by the tents. A few big, lethargic mosquitos seem to be waiting for the season’s curtain to fall.
In the morning, we launch the packrafts onto the Matthews at a nearby gravel bar and soon reach the confluence without too much scraping or bumping. The Bettles River easily doubles the volume while maintaining the Mathews’ gin clarity, which causes bottom cobbles to pop, gems magnified by a hand lens. With a rising sun behind us, we dig hard to catch the plaited flow’s deepest sapphire channels. I’m already sweating inside multiple layers.
Before the age of manned flight, humans knew no smoother travel—rapids and rocks notwithstanding—than to be carried along by the current of a river. A shoreline observer might see rafts zipping past like bright satellites; for a boatman midstream, landmarks rotate as earthbound constellations. A glimpse of eternity lies in this swirling. You can step into the same river twice. Rushing continuously seaward while also constantly arriving, the river remains the same.
Presently, an atmospheric counterpart, a fog tsunami, rolls over a fall-dappled upland but never advances beyond. Tatters of mist ghost above the opposite bank, randomly baring Wiehl Mountain’s craggy mien. Civilization has shrunk to the rare buzzing of an overhead plane with its cargo of hunters and oilfield commuters. When quiet reigns, I hear twin paddle blades drip as the shaft rests on the drum-taut rafts. Breezes carry the rich funk of decaying plants. This sun worshipper’s madeleine, a scent equivalent to the post-party blues, spurs memories of time lost, youth vanished, and opportunities squandered. Fall’s flavor, rivaling the best chocolate or romance, is bittersweet.
Final narrows sluice us to the foot of Sukakpak Mountain and into the Koyukuk’s Middle Fork, sweeping, milky, jadegreen. The peak’s marble bulk, ancient seafloor pressure-cooked and uplifted, resembles a deadfall marten trap, apparently, for which it was named. As “People of the Land,” the local Nunamuit saw objects familiar to them in the topography. Despite varied angles afforded by the river’s wheeling, I cannot solve this visual puzzle. I focus instead on precious moments free of thought, on being present, on what might be this year’s last hurrah in the sun.
“The seasons and all their changes are in me,” Thoreau journaled on October 26, 1857. My knees and toe joints, aching since the headwaters saddle, concur. So will my knuckles and shoulders tomorrow. When Ibuprofen is a staple, “Vitamin I,” ingested twice daily, you know your heydays are passed. Yet, as the ecstatic John Muir observed, “There is at least a punky spark in my heart, and it may blaze in this autumn gold...”
