If you had asked me a few days ago how I felt about my ten-day adventure in Gates of the Arctic National Park, I would have hesitated to say it was fun. Instead I would have complained about the never-ending cold and wet that surrounded my four friends and I, and the brutal terrain, and the ongoing sufferfest that the trip turned out to be. But after a few days of processing the trip in my comfortable Airbnb in Anchorage, Alaska, I can now say that the trip was the experience of a lifetime and I’m so grateful that my friends and I made it happen.
On August 7th, we watched as the van that we had spent the last six hours in speed off North along the Dalton Highway to Prudhoe Bay. The Dalton Highway runs from Fairbanks to the Arctic Ocean, and is the main route for truckers to get from civilization to the oil fields up North. The “highway” is really more of a dirt road, and my friends and I watched with caution as our van driver slowed down and pulled off to the side of the road every time a big semi went roaring by us through the rain and mud.
But as the van drove out of sight and the five of us were left on the side of the road, with no one around for miles and a general sense of direction, in the middle of the Arctic Wilderness in Northern Alaska, we were chaotically excited. We were totally alone—this was the beginning of our real wilderness experience that is so rare for outdoor-enthusiasts. It was highly unlikely that we would see anyone for the next ten days.
Our first three days in the Arctic were amazing. It was sunny, warm, and not too windy. We slept in as the sun never really set at night, making it nearly impossible to tell what time it was based on the outside light. We started hiking around noon, and would go until 7 or 8pm, when we’d stop and set up camp before turning in for the night. We passed through massive valleys, with equally massive rivers and peaks within them. We saw caribou antlers scattered across the tundra and grizzly and wolf prints in mud next to streams and creeks. It was the Gates of the Arctic trip that we were all hoping for.
It wasn’t until after our lunch-break on Day 4 that our luck ran out. We packed up our lunch spread and took a left turn into a valley where we would hike to Summit Lake, the halfway point along our route from the Dalton Highway, to the small Native town of Anaktuvuk Pass in the middle of the park. It was only a few minutes after we began walking that we stopped to put on our rain gear. Rain pants, jacket, waterproof socks and gloves—these would prove to be essential as we remained wet for the majority of the trip.
The sky opened up and began raining pretty hard. We were walking through a mix of bog and tussocks, the worst type of terrain to encounter on an off-trail backpacking trip in Alaska.
Walking over bog in the Arctic tundra is like walking on a temper-pedic mattress. Your feet sink in several inches as the bog gives way under your weight, but doesn’t deform or crumble. It springs back to life as soon as your foot leaves it. The bog is made of small plants, shrubs, and permafrost layers and it usually isn’t too bad. Once you get used to it, walking in the bog can be predictable and it’s easy to adjust your body and walking technique to account for the initial sinking of your feet into its “squish”. Sometimes though, especially in low-lying areas, the bog is fully saturated with water, and as your feet sink into it, they sink into a saturated sponge, soaking your shoes, socks, and feet.
The bog quickly becomes a dream when you enter a field of tussocks in Alaska. The tussocks, or “tus-SUCK” as my friends and I dubbed it, are a hiker’s worst nightmare. The tussocks are clumps of grass that grow through bog in odd ball-shape formations. They look like unsuspecting piles of grass scattered across the tundra, usually with a few inches of space between each clump. Quickly, you learn that you can’t trust the tussocks. After stepping on a few, I realized that the tussock is less trust-worthy than a scree field on a steep mountain slope. The tussocks roll over so easily. For example, if you put any weight on top of a pile of grass, it acts like a giant bowling-ball, and will roll over in an unpredictable direction. This makes the tussocks fantastic ankle-rolling terrain, and is slow-going and eventually brutal on your joints and hips, after spending hours walking through only a mile of delicate, sneaky tussocks.
Anyways, it was raining. And it was raining hard. And we found ourselves in the middle of a mile-long stretch of tussocks and saturated bog, which we had to hike through to reach Summit Lake, where we would make camp for the night. We were soaked and annoyed at our slow pace, but eventually we reached the end of the tussock field and walked up to a huge marsh area.
The marsh is the third annoying type of terrain in the Arctic. It is endlessly vast, brutally cold, standing water. In the marsh, your feet can sink so deep into a filthy, muddy, freezing-cold stew. I once watched the bottom-half of my 120cm trekking pole disappear into the marsh before stepping in the same area and quickly turned around to find another way through. Except there was no other way through. I just had to suck it up, and accept the fact that me, my pants, socks, and shoes, are all going to be soaking wet.
So, after another hour of wading through the worst marshland I had ever seen, we were soaked from the ridiculous rain storm that just passed over us, our shoes were soaked and our feet were numb from the marsh, and our bodies ached from the miles of tussocks and bog. And it was only Day 4.
The weather and the terrain remained brutal for the rest of the trip. The rain did not let up on Day 5. We had planned to take a rest day then, but decided to push on along our route. Sitting in the tent all day to avoid the freezing-cold rain sounded way worse than hiking through the freezing-cold rain, where at least our physical activity would keep our core temperatures up. We had to go over Peregrine Pass, the highest point of our route, which stood at about 5,000 feet elevation. The rain turned to snow as we approached the pass, and we couldn’t see any of the surrounding peaks that were smothered in clouds and fog. We followed our route on an inReach, only to realize that the USGS map we were using was actually wrong, and we had gone over the wrong pass and had to go up and over another pass, the real one, in order to get back on track.
We emerged from the tent on the morning of Day 6 to more snow. It wasn’t sticking, but it was snowing and the wind was blowing hard. Our rest day would have to wait again. We kept hiking. It kept raining and snowing. We would stop for five minutes to gather ourselves and take a few sips of water, and we’d get cold and our fingers and toes would go numb. Other than a few hours of sunshine, the next four days were the same until we flew out of Anaktuvuk Pass on August 16th. It was cold, rainy, and windy. We’d wake up to snow each morning. We only sometimes could make out the shape of a jagged peak behind thick clouds. We crossed dozens of cold rivers and found our way through miles of tussocks and bog.
Keep hiking, keep hiking, keep hiking. Stay warm. These were the only thoughts that my brain had the capacity for. This trip was not a life-changing experience. I went into Gates thinking I’d learn something about myself, about who I am and what I want out of life. That’s what has happened on the other long wilderness trips I’d done, so I figured this wouldn’t be any different. But as I was continually cold and as it rained and as the wind blew, I asked myself each day, “just how far can I push my limits before I break? Just how much longer can I go on with this before I crack?” That was the mentality that we all had. There were no revelations in Gates. We were fully immersed and distracted by staying warm, staying dry, staying fed, and staying sane. In Gates, there was only surviving.
As I sit in my warm and dry room and look back on a trip that had so much potential to be epic, but was less than ideal due to weather, I am grateful that nothing else went horribly wrong. We all had a pair of dry socks and a dry change of clothes, and a tent that kept us dry and warm each night. Without any of these things, we would have been a lot worse off. We all had food, plenty of food! Our food barely fit in our four bear cans and two ursacks on the first night! Without food, or if something had happened to our food, our trip would have been a lot more difficult. We had two inReaches to help with the route navigation. If we had gotten lost, or off track, we could have run out of supplies, or our tent could have given into the constant rain and snow, and we could have been in real trouble. We were so lucky that we only had bad weather.
I didn’t get the epic, life-changing experience, or any kind of epiphany in the ten days I spent in Gates of the Arctic. Instead, I had a ten-day, all-encompassing distraction from my every day life. I had no time or energy to think about my life, where I’m going, what I’m doing, or about my relationships. All I could focus on was doing my best on the trip, and getting out safely with my four other friends. Maybe that was the beauty of Gates. Maybe the wilderness doesn’t always have to be beautiful and full of lessons. Maybe a ten-day intense distraction was exactly what we all needed.
