Crossing The Gates of Alaska:. Dave Metz
LAND OF EPIC PROPORTIONS
I’ve had a map of Alaska for years, displayed on my wall in epic proportions. It doesn’t simply display the names of towns and the length of rivers like most maps. It portrays the lowlands and the endless mountains in fine detail and vivid colors, starting with dark green at the lowest elevations where marshes, peat bogs, and woody forests lie, moving to yellow where the mountains begin to take shape, and finally golden brown where the peaks are highest. The Brooks Range is almost completely golden brown as it spans a thousand miles clear across the state horizontally like a corrugated barrier plopped down as if marking the end of the known world. To traverse the Brooks Range, you would have to follow the lay of the land and walk double that distance. The range is excessively wide and forms a subtle horseshoe shape with both east and west ends curving slightly farther north than the middle. Off the map, it’s really a world that shifts dangers with the extreme change in seasons, and you would have to be nearly insane to travel there in the dead of winter when biting wind and lung-blistering cold could kill you when your back is turned, and partly a fool to endure the height of the summer mosquito season. I stared at that map a lot, dreaming about the wilds of Alaska and when I was planning my trek across the range.
Only a handful of people are known to have traversed the entire length of the Brooks Range. Most made the trek from east to west. Only a small fraction made the trek in one unbroken push, and even less did it completely on foot. Of all the reading I’ve done about journeys there, no one traveled the exact route I planned to take. I didn’t choose my route because it had never been done before—it may have for all I know. I chose my route because it looked like one of the best ways to connect with villages where I could get food. I couldn’t afford a lot of charter planes flying me in food drops. I had to mail my food to villages along the way. I also picked the town of Kotzebue, Alaska, to start; it had a fairly large airport for the size of town it was, where I wouldn’t have to connect to a smaller, plane in Anchorage or Fairbanks. I could fly an Alaska Airline jet all the way from Portland, Oregon, to Kotzebue. This meant I didn’t have to spend time waiting for connecting flights that would expose my dogs to cold and unfamiliar surroundings longer than necessary.
Curious, I searched the Internet to find out who had traversed the entire range. Dick Griffith had the first documented crossing from 1959 to 1979 traveling west from the village of Kaktovik to Kotzebue by foot, raft, and kayak. Roman Dial was the first person to complete the traverse in one season, traveling from Kaktovik to Kotzebue in 1986 by skis, foot, pack raft, and kayak. He made another partial traverse in 2006, incredibly traveling east from Kivalina to the Dalton Highway in just under twenty-three days. Keith Nyitray, who appeared in the April 1993 issue of National Geographic, made the first continuous trek of the entire range, starting from Fort McPherson in the Northwest Territories, Canada, heading west to Kotzebue. He made the journey in about ten months by dogsled, foot, snowshoe, raft, and canoe. He nearly starved to death on the Noatak River and endured a couple of months without seeing another person. I read that article at least a dozen times and oft en left it on my nightstand to thumb through before I went to sleep. I considered Nyitray’s feat the greatest land traverse I had ever heard about. A foot traverse across the Brooks Range lacks the glamour of an expedition to the North Pole or a shot across Greenland because you can’t travel nearly as far and there isn’t really the danger of crossing vast reaches of ice. But the rainbow of colors on my map alone told me the rough and changing terrain could stop an army in its tracks. For a man alone, it could make him break down in despair. You’re also not likely to get much notoriety when you’re finished. When you’re done you will have to return to the niche in society you came from and it’s likely not too many people will give your accomplishment much of a glance. I didn’t care too much about that. The Brooks Range was the best frontier I could find, the best place to lose myself.
There were a few more remarkable crossings of the Brooks Range. I thought all of them were nearly impossible. Never did I think I would make it across the entire range in one season, mainly because I knew I was going to have to travel farther between food drops, which meant I would have to carry a larger load and travel slower than if I could have set up a dozen or so drops. There are only a few villages in the Brooks Range where I could mail food to, so I knew my pack was going to weigh close to a hundred pounds at some points, but I went into my journey with the single goal of remaining in wilderness for a few months. I needed some sort of goal to be able to stick it out for more than a couple of weeks. I added the trek so that I would have somewhere to walk toward, a sort of end point to reach, which I didn’t really care if I made it to or not. I simply wanted to reach the mountains and learn something about nature and myself. But I planned my trek out thoroughly over a thousand miles across the entire state, just in case the miles rolled by and I found myself doing better than I expected.
I prepared a long time to cross the Brooks Range and the Gates of the Arctic National Park, though most of the time I never realized specifically the long trek I would endure. From as young as ten when I learned that such a place like Alaska still existed in the world, I always had my sights set on it in some way, where rural woods were only a minute fraction of what true wilderness was supposed to be like. I wanted to be good at every aspect of moving through nature. I wanted to be able to sprint through the forest quickly and to run for long distances. I wanted to be flexible, strong, and able to climb trees like a gibbon, and most important, I wanted to develop a phantomlike sense of direction so I could never get lost.
I must have traveled to Alaska about a dozen times from the time I was eighteen until I began my trek. The land acted like a magnet on me and I couldn’t stay away. My first trip was when I was eighteen. I drove up to Denali National Park with a mutual friend of my grand-father’s. His plan was to drive up and learn how to become a bush pilot. My plan was to hitch a ride with him until I found a suitable place to step off the highway with my backpack and disappear into the backcountry. Well, I did that in Denali, and the reality of the land sank into me. It was mainly the immensity of Alaska and the absolute lack of people that struck me. I was instantly hooked on the place, but I wasn’t mentally ready to travel the land yet. There was no place to get more food if I ran out, and no one to help me if I were to get into trouble. The first night alone I was scared, camping in grizzly bear country without any protection at all. I didn’t really understand bears then, so it made my trip unnerving. I kept expecting some raging monster to rip through the wall of my tent and tear me to pieces. I didn’t understand that bears weren’t nearly as dangerous as I had been convinced, and that my hardwired primate brain amplified fears that were only mildly warranted, especially at night, especially alone. Satisfied that I had seen enough to realize that Alaska was the place where I wanted to come back to, I left a few days later and flew home to Oregon with my last $300 in the world. The enchantment of the last frontier had been permanently implanted within me, deeper than I could have imagined.
I conditioned myself to hike off trail, mainly because I always liked slipping through the foliage to get close to the copiousness of nature. And I always knew one day I would be going to some exotic wilderness still smoldering somewhere on the planet where humans had not yet slashed trails or roads across its fertile turf. I wanted to be ready. When I wasn’t traipsing off trail in the woods somewhere, I was training fanatically: running, cycling, lifting weights, or climbing trees. I love working out. Sometimes I would lift logs in the woods when I wasn’t near a weight room. I think most of the people who traversed the Brooks Range were athletic much of their lives. I can’t imagine anyone just one day deciding to go for an extended trek there without having some sort of a physical fitness base and the mental strength that comes after it. Sometimes I had doubts about why I was doing all those things and spending so much time in the woods. But I never once accepted that I could do without wilderness, even when I was a child.
It wasn’t until I was about thirty that my specific preparation for trekking across the Brooks Range took shape. I scanned a lot of maps over several years, always searching for the most efficient route. I pored over highly detailed maps, mile by mile, until I had a navigable route plotted out all the way across the state. I not only chose my route out of convenience, but also by picking the areas I liked the most. The route I finally mapped out for my 2007 adventure was mostly unique. I would be heading from west to east unlike most other adventurers whom I had read about who had traversed from east to west. I wouldn’t be floating any major rivers, either. Adventurers