Adventures in Onionism

It's raining out, I'm resting my foot, and I'm tired of trying and failing to fix my refrigerator. So I'm going to write blog posts.  You'll probably remember that I went to Alaska in June. I already wrote summary thoughts (which, thank you, dear reader, engendered multiple comments) but I'll put everything here and re-organize it as well. I flew to Fairbanks and took the Dalton Highway Express (DHE) shuttle ~12 hours north to the Brooks Range. It's not as bad as it sounds. Yes, the road was bumpy, but every single other passenger was a fellow adventurer, and the drivers had interesting Alaska experience, so I enjoyed it. (I do wish one guy had shut up for a single moment, but it was still fun despite his non-stop inane comments.)  I backpacked about 80 miles in 6 full days, went over five 5,000' passes (one of which was over 6,000), plus a couple other lower ones. I didn't see much wildlife, except for this cute fox after I was done hiking and waiti...

Coastal Mountains from the flight to Seattle Huh. Well, I'm on a plane to Seattle looking down on some spectacular Yukon and SE Alaskan glaciers. Now *those* are mountains! (I kid, I kid, all mountains are glorious in the sight of (non-existent) God.) But seriously, how on Earth do you do any sort of human-powered travel down there? Anyway, my first trip to the Brooks is over. I carried as much food as I could fit in two bear cans (well, one Ursack and one can) and I pretty much ate it all, so I'm going home.  I woke up, walked the 4 miles of ATV track and gravel road to the village. Walking by the village dump was a bit of a downer, but I checked in with Amy about hopping on a Wright Air flight home, and then had a nice chat with Ranger Al about the park, the village, federal employment, etc. He's a wealth of knowledge, having been a seasonal NPS employee (the only one in Anaktuvuk Pass) for 18 years. He answered all the questions I posed in my previous post--basically yes...

Oof. Got an enjoyable late start and descended Confusion Creek. I decided I wanted to try and make the loop a tiny bit longer and get a bit more of the "there's nothing left to the north but the Arctic" views, so I climbed up on a ridge. It was a nice moment, except marred by the fact that I was at least a mile away from where I thought I was (my guess before I turned on GPS). I was well further north, off the good base layer maps that I downloaded, and outside of Gates of the Arctic National Park. Not problem, really, even a bit neat. Except these unforced errors became a bit of a pattern. I descended back to Confusion Creek and climbed up a ridge to get to Skimo Creek. It was a dry creek bed full of dry rocks, which felt rare and interesting, since every single drainage on the trip, and plenty of non-drainages too, have been full of water. Eventually some running water surfaced in the creek, then went back under, and I stepped on a large flat boulder and thought "o...

Got a nice long restful sleep. But I was bummed to realize when packing up that I really truly have only three days of food left, and the store, which isn't too great to resupply from anyway, is closed today (Sunday). Guess I'm finishing midday Tuesday! I set out on my solo loop up Contact Creek and down Confusion Creek. I checked in with Amy one last time (the Starlink connection was still open) and asked her to move up my Wright Air Services flight back to Fairbanks so that I (a) won't be starving and bored and (b) so that I won't smell awful on my Thursday afternoon flight from Fairbanks to Reno. I saw some folks headed towards the ranger station and started up a conversation, turns out they were the researchers we saw yesterday, and they were doing bird counting. I tried to ID the most common bird I've heard so far by its call, his best guess was tree swallow (ironic because there are no trees here). I finally got moving and headed out of town up Contact Creek. ...

Perfect time to start a hike Very cold, though Hit by the sun at 2:46AM Done with the loop around 5AM Off goes Nano Woke up at 11:30 PM and starting hiking under the midnight sun. Unfortunately the sun was behind a mountain until 2:30 AM even if it was technically above the horizon and plenty light out. Also, it was very cold. The first few creek crossings were painful, and we avoided crossing the main river nearly at all cost. Eventually after an hour or two it became not-the-worst, but still pretty annoying, and after maybe three hours, immediately after an obnoxiously deep and unsurpassable duck pond that we had to go around, we found the ATV trail we were pretty sure would exist closer to the village. We walked 5 miles of that, sometimes awful and boggy, sometimes halfway decent, and the village was in view. We saw a few researchers outside the village (found out later they were doing a bird count for NPS) and strolled across the airstrip in town a few minutes after 5 AM. Anaktuvuk...

Big day. We woke up below the pass and as usual, walked by plenty of nice dry camping spots further along the way. We descended the drainage and joined the Tinayguk River, which we'd heard might be big and powerful. It wasn't really an issue since we were so close to eh headwaters, but we had to follow it 10+ miles and pass lots of feeders. It didn't really have much of a gravel bar to it, and the rocks were slippery as snot, so I didn't like crossing it. We stayed on the left side for a while, first on a bench, then on good moose trail. We eventually switched over to river right, climbed onto a ledge and just shwacked and shwacked and shwacked. Sometimes the game trails were good, sometimes they weren't.  So after maybe 12 miles of mostly shwacking, we crossed over into our next drainage and climbed up to the pass above Inukpasagruk Creek. I underestimated how long it would take, but it was far less crappy rock than many other climbs. A nice frozen lake greeted us ...

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...

We skirted a lot of creek edges like this But it didn't always go, somtimes you just had to climb up up up to get out We popped out into this wonderland River ice is good walking, way nicer than unconsolidated slope snow Woke up late after a night spent coughing nonstop. We descended Alinement Creek, which wasn't so bad. The crossings weren't super deep, maybe a fast one or two, and we could often skirt the edge of the side we were already on to avoid crossing. Eventually we climbed up across a hill connecting it to our next drainage, the North Fork Koyukuk. We stopped for lunch, but Nano has to get water so he descended to the Koyukuk and I stayed on a bluff enjoying the views of big mountains, possibly Wien Mountain and Mount Doonerak. And then there were three wolf puppies playing with each other maybe thirty yards away from me. I go a good look at them through the monocular. So cute. Unfortunately in my attempt to get Nano's attention I scared them away, so I didn...

Oh boy. I woke up early after a fitful night of trucks going by on the highway. We made great time heading back up to our route, the out and back resupply section went much faster, as we stumbled on a game trail high above the north side of the creek we had to cross 10 or so times yesterday on the way in. The climb up from there and the descent down the other side were also easier--we stayed out of the creek and luckily the terrain wasn't too brushy or boggy. When we got to Kuyuktuvuk Creek that all changed. The crossing were all above the knees on me, fairly swift, and uncountably large in number. We'd occasionally go around but it was quite brushy. Finally around lunch time after the umpteenth sketchy crossing we bushwhacked our way to an unnamed tributary, and then bushwhacked we'll above it for a couple miles since it was a narrow rager. There were occasional game trails, but I only gave them a C- grade. It was actually kind of hot, but thankfully there weren't many...