Brooks Range Day 7

Two-Pass Day, starting with Peregrine

Loving the views at the top

These flowers indicate good, non-boggy, walking

Kicking steps up Horseshit Pass

Happy to be at the top

Has it really only been a week out here? It feels like at least a month. Been great not being glued to my phone (except for photos, looking at the map, and doing these nightly updates). I thought of this big thing of national importance happening in November for the first time of the trip today. 

Anywho, we left our surrounded-by-bogs spot and were pretty much immediately on more solid ground. We climbed up and up the North Fork of the Koyukuk and then straight up to Peregrine Pass, or rather, just south of it on the map, the place that actually makes sense to cross. The views were spectacular, and the descent was a ton of fun, just a nice slightly slippery field of small pieces of slate, I even ran a bit of it.

We had been thinking about going separate ways back to Anaktuvuk Pass (one over Ernie's Pass and back the way we already came, one on the southern route) but decided to stick together. We did separate a tiny bit (unusual for this trip) on opposite sides of the Grizzly creek, and on benches above that had nice dry ground, a rarity. We were getting further and further apart, but I could see my side was the side we ultimately wanted to be on, and that Nano, who was now crossing the creek would have to come up onto my bench because the river was going to cliff him out of he didn't come up to the bench. I walked a little further, then looked back to verify that he'd come up on to the bench, thought "cool, I'll go wait for him at those--BEAR!" As I turned back around I noticed a bear no further than 10-15 yards away. He could've been on me before I had time to pull my bear spray, but we noticed each other at the same instant (my instantly yelling "Bear! Oh shit! Bear!" may have had something to do with it), and in that instant he turned tail and ran straight up the mountain, gaining several hundred feet of elevation in a couple minutes and going out of sight over the ridge in a couple more. He would turn back to look every so often, see we were still there, and turn and run again.

We ascended Kenunga Creek, which was reasonably short and easy to cross when necessary. We turned up it to go to the next pass, which we named Horseshit Pass. It was muddy and the rock was crap. "Pretty crappy rock, huh?" I asked. "This isn't rock, it's horseshit," said Nano.

Horseshit, rock, or obnoxiously unconsolidated snow postholing, we eventually made it up and over. Thankfully the south face had no snow. (Apparently it's so cold here that the snow has very low moisture. It doesn't consolidate worth beans and leads to a lot of post holing. It can be like swimming.) We didn't descend very far from the pass because Nano liked the views from a ledge. It unfortunately turned out to be a bit windy and chilly though.

We're hoping to be back in AP by the Saturday afternoon flight. It's Thursday and we have 30+ miles to go, some of which might be on the biggest river at the lowest (brushiest) elevations. So we might do a midnight walk--we are north of the Arctic Circle on the solstice, after all.