TRCP Communications Manager Experiences A Wild Alaska Fly-In Trip

Great piece from Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership Western conservation communications director Noah Davis from his trip to Alaska.

A lot of folks who are lucky enough to take a fly-in hunting or fishing trip to Alaska say the extreme remoteness doesn’t fully hit them until the pilot takes off and the sound of the engine disappears. 

But for me, it was on the flight in. I knew the pilot wasn’t going to stay. He wasn’t included in our float trip plans. 

We flew over 150 miles from the airstrip, and once the Dalton Highway faded from view, the full expanse below was wild country. For 150 miles it was great mountains and long rivers and jeweled lakes and no roads or trails. To get out from where we were going was a distance that my brain was having trouble comprehending. I’d backpacked in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. I’d hunted wild country in the Rocky Mountains. But this place, the Brooks Range of northern Alaska, held a remoteness to a magnitude I’d never experienced. 

Davis also weighed in on fishing and hunting in the Brooks Range and the impact the proposed Ambler Road could have on fish and wildlife in the region, though the Bureau of Land Management has halted the proposed gravel road project that would connect the Dalton Highway with a mining operation. The road would cross salmon-spawning rivers and potentially threaten wildlife habitat. Here’s Davis on what he experienced, although this particular hunt was further away from lands that would be affected by the Ambler operation:

However, the sweeping crescent of the Brooks Range running east to west across northern Alaksa offers, in its totality, the wildest country left in America. The land that the Ambler industrial corridor would cut across along the Kobuk River is different from the landscape of my hunt, but the remote character is similar, and barreling semis and thousands of culverts interrupting the movements of iconic Arctic animals and fish and degrading the wild space would ruin the experience that so many hunters and anglers travel so far to reach. 

The Brooks Range must be conserved to ensure future generations experience this remote country. To struggle through tussocks, to wade freezing rivers, to see grizzly tracks in the sand, to watch caribou cross country, to eat blueberries by the fistful, and to fall asleep exhausted at the end of the day and dream of doing it all again the next morning.  

The proposed Ambler Road would forever alter the wild character of this country. The 211-mile industrial corridor would slice across the southern foothills of the Brooks Range and require over 2,900 culverts with the potential to cinch off spawning areas for sheefish and Arctic grayling. The estimated 168 daily trips on the road would likely impact big game movement such as the Western Arctic caribou herd that migrates through the region.