Traversing The Arctic: Author, Book Pays Homage To Rugged Beauty Of Brooks Range

The following appears in the August issue of Alaska Sporting Journal:

‘LOCUS OF MY DESIRE’

AUTHOR EXPLORES ARCTIC ALASKA’S SPECTACULAR, REMOTE BROOKS RANGE IN NEW BOOK

He’s German-born, but Michael Engelhard is now Alaskan personified after a short college stay turned into a lifelong obsession and love affair with the 49th state. The rugged Brooks Range has become a specific obsession of his, and it’s hard to argue with the logic: These vast mountains offer a bit of everything for adrenaline seekers in search of peaks to climb, rivers to navigate, wildlife to encounter, fish to tempt.  

Trained as an anthropologist and having worked for 25 as an outdoor educator and wilderness guide, these days Engelhard lives in a cabin on the outskirts of Fairbanks. He is the author, most recently, of the Grand Canyon essay collection No Walk in the Park, and of a new memoir that pays homage to some of Alaska’s wild side and those who take on the best and most harrowing of the Brooks Range.  

“Summoning my life’s longest, most formative journey, I sometimes put the maps of my Arctic traverse end to end,” Engelhard writes. “When I do, all the wilderness I could ever want spreads across my living room floor, a smorgasbord of possibilities.”

The following chapter about resupplying in Anaktuvuk and titled “The Place of Caribou Droppings” is excerpted with permission from Arctic Traverse: A Thousand-Mile Summer Of Trekking The Brooks Range, by Michael Engelhard and published by Mountaineer Books. 

BY MICHAEL ENGELHARD 

Sunny. A good day, as the resupply goes smoothly.

In a letter to my girlfriend Melissa composed last night outside my tent that I plan to mail from here, I initially claim to write from the Caribou Café, enjoying an Americano stiff enough to float a horseshoe, and an oven-warm blueberry scone, Ben Harper falsettoing on the stereo. It is a fantasy I indulge in, cravings that surface mostly close to a settlement. I know better from previous visits.

Entering Anaktuvuk where the ATV track splices into dirt roads to the cemetery and dump, I make a beeline to a boarded-up house near the airstrip where the bush pilot has stashed a can of white gas for my stove that I could not send through the mail. 

I refill my fuel bottles right there. The post office, a clapboard cabin with a satellite dish, comes next. Operating on “village time,” it has just opened, casually late. The Nunamiut share a sense of urgency regarding clocks with the rural Irish. It’s an adaptation to the vagaries of weather and wildlife honed through the generations, not yet corroded by factories. You can die if you rush things out here, and there’s always time to get important work done.

Besides my regular vittles, I pick up a TLC parcel from Melissa. It is heavy with homemade oatmeal cookies, Nutella, hot chocolate, smoked salmon, smoked oysters, salt-and-vinegar potato chips, and three (!) books, enough reading matter, I hope, to last until Kotzebue. I feel like a boy locked in a candy store overnight and devour the chips and oysters – greasy, greasy, and salty; she intuited my deepest cravings – on the wheelchair-friendly post office access ramp. I fish the oysters from the can and finish by drinking the oil and licking my fingers. 

From the PO, I walk to the corporation store seeking a public phone from which to thank Melissa for the goodies. No dice. Apparently, all Nunamiut now have cell phones. My consolation prize is a dinged pint of Ben & Jerry’s Banana Split, a bargain at eight bucks. I would have paid twice as much for this second lunch.

The locals are friendly, with aanas (grandmas) and taatas (grandpas) and kids asking “Where to?” and “Where from?” and wishing me luck. I’m happy tourism hasn’t ruined this Brooks Range village of about 400 yet.

ANAKTUVUK’S GRID SQUEEZES IN among peaks at the watery crossroads where Contact Creek and the Inukpasugruk River merge with the Anaktuvuk and the John. Thirteen nomadic families gravitated there from the Killik River and Chandler Lake in 1949. They founded the insular village three decades before the park around it was established, hoping that air service, trade goods, a school, and a post office would follow. The new PO in 1951 was a domed caribou-skin tent with a stovepipe sticking out, Homer Mekiana’s Contact Creek residence. The settlement, a scatter of sod houses and wall tents first known as Summit, brackets the Continental Divide. Grandfathered and -mothered in, Anaktuvuk’s Nunamiut are still entitled to hunt, fish, trap, and gather plants within the park boundaries, an exception made for Alaska Native communities.

Every fall, not only animals from the Central Arctic but also the Western Arctic and Teshekpuk Lake herds graced the Place of Caribou Droppings with their presence. Tens of thousands surged through these valleys. Major Charlie Hugo remembers in his youth joining his father to camp for a month and returning with dog teams and up to 60 caribou, enough meat for a year.

Nowadays, there are fewer caribou near Anaktuvuk. Biologists explain the herds’ declines with erratic weather and cyclical population dynamics. The Nunamiut blame sport hunters north of the park for disrupting the fall migration and thereby harming a unique way of life. Aircraft noise could be a contributing factor. A healthy caribou running in panic, overheating, is earmarked for death after only 2 or 3 miles. A pregnant cow stampeded close to her due date dies even faster.

Unfortunately, I can’t take in the local museum’s treasures presently. Must mosey.

TODAY, I AM TAKING shank’s mare on the ATV track out of Anaktuvuk. My  pack weighs a ton. (Really only half of a moose’s hindquarter.) In addition to a small library and Melissa’s sweets, I carry 12 days of food and fuel, thereby avoiding another expensive charter drop between here and the Noatak River. I’ll haul every ounce of this load, even if it kills me. 

I may have to budget a layover day or two because of that trail-less country, and my flimsy footwear and recent parcel pickup. It’s ironic. Just when the going has gotten easier, I’m going lame. My jokes always have been, but this sort of physical failure is new to me. Ninety-three miles separate me from the Noatak cache, number six: my last. If bears haven’t figured out acetylene torches, it will hold my blow-up canoe and three weeks of food. On the river, I’ll be doing a lot of sitting, resting my feet. Time to buff up the upper torso and arms, not just the legs!

Dinner tonight is polenta with dried mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, and Parmesan. Yum. You’d think I would tire of the same six meals and my snacks. Not so. Each is a feast looked forward to during the day, especially a dreary one. I read Melissa’s letter after dinner; glad to have her in my life. And not just for her Cowboy Cookies, which rock. I sit on a knoll above the John River. It’s as far as my dogs would carry me today. My water source is a hollow that pools tundra seepage brown as tea from the tannins. Home sweet interim home.

After dinner, a rainbow clasp crisp enough to touch, one of the most awesome ever, points out the gold on the southwestern horizon. It of course comes with rain. ASJ

Editor’s note: Order the book at mountaineers.org/books/books/arctic-traverse-a-thousand-mile-summer-of-trekking-the-brooks-range

SIDEBAR

TALKING ALASKA ADVENTURE WITH AUTHOR MICHAEL ENGELHARD 

Alaska Sporting Journal editor Chris Cocoles chatted with author Michael Engelhard about his book and zest for Alaskan adventure.  

Chris Cocoles Congratulations on a great book, Michael. What inspired this particular project? 

Michael Engelhard Thanks. I’d been guiding wilderness trips in the Brooks Range for years and always felt that, with clients’ demands and tight schedules, even on two-week trips there was never enough time to explore places the maps or charter flights in the range temptingly hinted at. I also wanted to experience the Brooks Range in their grand totality to get a true sense of their dimensions. Lastly, I knew that a long trek would hold challenges and rewards that shorter journeys lack.

CC At its heart, does this book pay homage to the adventure that calls on Alaskans and those who come to Alaska to seek that adventure?

ME It is the culmination of that “call of the wild” that first brought me to Alaska, in 1989. Originally, I was only to stay for a year as an exchange student at UAF. But I caught the bug bad. As a matter of fact, I had wanted to live up north since my 20s – too much Jack London at a susceptible age, you could say. I was a cheechako, a greenhorn, when I arrived, but had a steep learning curve, mostly learning from my mistakes. Part of the adventure has also been “the culture,” from Fairbanks cabin life to the lifeways of Alaska Native communities, which I experienced early on, through my anthropology fieldwork.

CC It seems like you met some fascinating people along the way in your travels. Can you speak to the uniqueness of these Alaskans and how resilient they can be? 

ME The Interior and Arctic Alaska certainly rank among the most challenging environments one can imagine, and the more I learned about how Native cultures managed to make livelihoods here, the more impressed I became. Their ingenuity, knowledge of the land and sea, as well as their mental and physical toughness perhaps is only trumped by the adaptability they showed in the face of culture change during the Russian and American periods. But even newcomers get plenty of opportunities to prove their mettle. Try using an outhouse at 50-below! 

CC Speaking of people, you have an anthropology background. Have you always been interested in human behavior? 

ME In my youth [in Germany], I traveled quite a bit, and if you’re open-minded about it, you can’t help but be affected by that. I first visited the U.S. in 1982, hitchhiking through the Southwest and ending up in Guatemala. I spent time with a Hopi family in Arizona and with Mayan fishermen on an uninhabited island off the coast of Yucatan, which stoked my interest. When I started to attend university in Munich, I specialized on hunting and gathering societies from the very start. And UAF had one of the best northern anthropology programs.

CC So many writers, outdoorsmen and outdoorswomen who I’ve corresponded with have spoken with so much reverence about the ruggedness, beauty and mystique of the Brooks Range and other wilderness areas in the state. What did you discover about those mountains in your travels? 

ME Well, it would take a book to answer that question. And I’m not even sure that that is enough. If you could fully explain it, it wouldn’t really be “mystique,” right? But there’s just something about the landscape up there, the openness and the quality of the light that I find unique – though it quite reminds me of the Colorado Plateau’s desert, my other spiritual home. 

Another part of what keeps bringing me back is that life processes up there still largely play out as they did at the end of the Pleistocene, the climate crisis notwithstanding. You have a full deck of carnivores, unlike anywhere else in the states, which makes you feel truly alive, immersed in your surroundings, feeling a part of it all, and not the most significant one.

CC There was so much pushback about the Ambler Road potentially threatening fish and wildlife in and around the Brooks Range. How important is it to protect those areas and others in the state?

 ME I think you have to draw a line somewhere and say “no more.” With each compromise between development and conservation goals you give up some ground, ground that in most cases can never be fully redeemed. And “the ask” will always be more, because that’s the nature of our economic system: growth for the sake of growth, benefitting the few over the many. The forester and conservationist Aldo Leopold – the first westerner to realize the importance of predators for healthy ecosystems – wrote that one sign of “intelligent tinkering” is to keep all the parts. We don’t even know the full blueprint of the thing that we’re tinkering with and certainly are doing a poor job of keeping the parts. 

CC Do you have a favorite species of Alaska fish or wildlife that you’ll always have respect or admiration for? 

ME Bears are high up on that list. In no other wild animal have I detected personality so clearly. Faced with bears, you can see them thinking and making individual decisions. And no two are alike, which may not come as a surprise to Native peoples or wildlife biologists. I am also inordinately fond of some birds, like redpolls and chickadees – what grit to survive as they do in the dead of Interior winters. Ravens are another favorite, tricksters that in some ways mirror ourselves. And the Arctic caribou, for their epic migrations.

CC You traveled by both foot and raft during this journey. Did you have “white knuckle moments” in both modes of travel that you can share?

ME Sometimes the most harrowing moments weren’t “white knuckle,” like when I developed an Achilles tendon problem and thought that I could not finish the trip. Or when I slipped and fell in an icy ravine and could easily have dislocated a shoulder. The true white knuckle moments were usually due to bears; they’d be prowling near me in pea-soup fog or show up in camp unannounced or chase after me in the river. 

CC Tell me about what triggered your love for the outdoors.

ME My parents took me and my brother on vacations to the mountains and coast when we were kids. Then I did a stint in the army, during which I spent a lot of time traipsing around and sleeping in the woods. But I think it’s mostly innate, a part of our evolutionary makeup. Like walking as our primal form of locomotion. I believe that some people are just more in touch with this nature aspect of our heritage than others are. 

CC In some of your early adventure experiences there, can you recall a “welcome to Alaska” moment? 

ME Yes, as a sort of reality check, one stands out. In my first summer, I foolishly tried to walk from Ambler to Anaktuvuk Pass. A few hours into the woods, I stumbled upon my first live grizzly ever. He was either pissed off or grubbing, I couldn’t tell which, but dirt clods and branches were flying. That so intimidated me that I aborted my hike. A mellower welcome was my first view of Denali from the West Ridge of UAF. A photo from that vantage, which I’d seen in Germany, had sealed my decision to attend UAF rather than the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. 

CC You’ve really experienced quite a trip in writing this book. But Alaska is such a massive place, is there another Last Frontier adventure you still want to experience? 

ME I’m not a huge fan of the “Last Frontier” metaphor – people assume, as they did on the frontier, that you can do pretty much whatever you want to. No rules or regulations, right? In general, I decided long ago that I’d rather keep going back to a few select places – the Brooks Range among them – getting to know them well rather than spreading myself too thin. “To climb the same mountain a thousand times rather than to climb a thousand different mountains,” in a manner of speaking.

CC Your Ice Bear: The Cultural History of an Arctic Icon chronicles the polar bear. Are you concerned about that species’ long-term sustainability, given effects from climate change and other factors?

ME I am worried about all creatures that we are losing on a daily basis from such root causes. Polar bears are more visible, “sexier” charismatic megafauna, perhaps, but not more important, per se, than pikas in the grand theater of evolution. We’re in the middle of the sixth mass extinction, causing it, and keep sleepwalking through it.  

CC What advice would you give to a Lower 48er who wants a true – if not safe – Alaska experience and fish or hunt there for his or her first time there? 

ME Take a guided trip with a respected outfit or join up with outdoorsy Alaskan friends. Or do what I did when I hiked out of Ambler, as long as you’re ready for consequences. And try to leave your preconceived notions of what Alaska is, or what you want it to be, at home. Truly open yourself to this place. You may catch the bug as I did and move here. ASJ