Crossing The Gates of Alaska:. Dave Metz
cold, one that is designed to spill out liquid fuel onto the burner so I can light the fuel and allow the stove to heat up. The heat then will allow the pressurized fuel in the line to start burning as it hits the outside air.
Julie handles all the logistics back home that I can’t do here. She is the woman I thought I would never find in my life. She is the anchor to which all threads of my journey are attached. Without her it would be hard for me to complete my trek. I can’t depart until I have two stoves that function. To lose both my stoves or to have them break would be the end of me, because I wouldn’t be able to melt snow to drink, and building fires in the brutal wind would be nearly impossible. Besides too much wind, there isn’t any wood that is easily accessible. Only inside my tent can I stay warm enough to manage the arctic conditions when I’m not moving.
After warming up in the post office lobby while making my phone call, I mosey back to my camp under the bridge. There is no need to rush. I want to stay warm, but I don’t want to sweat, either. Moisture next to my skin will leave me chilled to the bone. I feel the warm blood oozing through my toes so I can slow down and still retain the warmth. When I first go outside, only the first twenty minutes require some intense exertion to warm up my extremities; aft er that I can slow to a comfortable pace.
Knowing that tonight is going to be bitter cold again, I pull my sleeping bags out of my tent to let the condensation evaporate into the dry, arctic air. They dry well enough while the wind is blowing, even with temperatures below zero. One good thing about cold air is that it usually has low humidity, and this benefits me in a number of ways. My clothes don’t retain as much moisture and my skin doesn’t retain sweat for long, so I don’t get very dirty. My glasses don’t fog up, my sleeping bags stay fairly dry, and the inside of my tent doesn’t hold as much vapor. Wood, when I start using it to build fires, will be normally dry and easy to burn.
I break down all the boxes my food arrived in and lay them on the bottom of my tent, under my pads, to insulate us even more against the frozen ground. Then I build a two-foot snow wall all around my tent and put chunks of snow on the bottom parts of my rain fly where it wavers in the wind. This should protect my tent from the wind and give me at least five more degrees of warmth inside. “Just like paradise,” I say when I’m done.
I got Jonny eleven years ago with the intention of taking this journey, or something like it. He arrived by plane from Alabama, numb with loneliness from being uprooted from his family. I wish I had driven out to get him. I could have spent a few days getting to know him before I took him away from all that was familiar. He was only eleven weeks old and almost completely black, but as he grew older, the tan around his shoulders and over his legs began to stand out.
I worked several odd jobs over the years and attempted to get to quite a few wild places on earth during my years with Jonny. When I traveled north, I took Jonny with me. When I went south to tropical climates, I left Jonny home in Oregon with friends or family. I went places most people have never even heard of, like the Tama Abu Range of Sarawak on the island of Borneo and the Mackenzie Mountains in northern Canada. I had a difficult time seeing journeys through, though, because often when I would get to a place I would discover that it wasn’t remote enough for me. Part of the forested habitat would be badly fragmented and all the people would be too dependent on a capitalist economy, not on their traditional mode of gathering food. I traveled to Peru three times. I kayaked both along the Amazon River outside of Iquitos and up the Los Piedras River in the Madre de Dios region to search for the Yora Indians.
I searched for the nomadic Penan Indians in Borneo, walking alone in the mountains for several weeks through pure, primordial forests that boggled my understanding of nature. Pliable vines with sharp hooks would latch on to my clothes as I tried to slide by, and hordes of leeches held firmly to my skin. I followed old signs that the Penan had been there—their overgrown trails and abandoned shelters—but I never found them. I returned the following year to hike into an even more remote region of Borneo’s mountains. I was lost for three days and meandered along densely clad, jungle ridges somewhere near the headwaters of the Adang River. I had to climb high up into trees to look for ridgelines off in the distance to figure out where I was, just like I had practiced in Oregon. Sometimes I felt so disoriented that I thought my compass had to be broken.
I went to Venezuela to hike in the Guiana Highlands, hoping to find the nomadic Hoti tribe, but I barely got away from the Orinoco River before I turned back. I boated across Brazil, from Peru to the ocean, thinking about finding the Awa Guaja tribe near the end of my trip, but I got mugged in Belem by two young men. It was my boiling frustration of traveling across the Amazon jungle for two weeks in a boat loaded with obnoxious Brazilians and not getting out into the rain forest that made me so heated. Normally mild mannered, I was like a bomb waiting to go off. I drove my muggers away aft er I pummeled one man’s jaw with my fist. They lost their nerve about robbing me and once I calmed down I lost my nerve about traveling to outlying regions of Brazil with so many hostile and unpredictable people around.
Jonny and I traveled to Alaska a number of times. I resolved to finally find and spend a long period of time roaming in a wild land, surviving on my own like humans had done for a million years before. I wanted to fish in the rivers and lakes, and collect berries in the summer, but mostly I simply wanted to hike across the unmolested land, day after day, free to go whereever I chose. Alaska seemed to be my last chance to immerse myself in wilderness, and after having spent many months in Alaska over twenty years, living there and traveling there, this was going to be my best adventure in nature yet.
TOO COLD TO WAIT
In 1980 Jimmy Carter signed into law the Alaska National Lands Conservation Act, which designated federal protection for nearly 80 million acres of public land. It’s a mind-boggling amount of land, dwarfing many states and some countries. It would take me years to walk across that much land. On my trek I will travel through the Gates of the Arctic National Park, the Kobuk Valley National Park, and the Noatak National Preserve, which are all parts of this protected land. The law Carter created was controversial, as development could have been profitable, but being public land it belongs to everyone in the country, and the only way to ensure everyone gets a stake in it, including people not yet born, was to protect it. I used to believe that all of Alaska, whether protected by law or not, was still in a pristine state. I thought once I got away from Anchorage or Fairbanks and the few major highways, I would find an untarnished land everywhere I went. And when I was eighteen that seemed true, so I didn’t really pay much attention to which areas were designated by law as wilderness. I figured anywhere in Alaska I went would be good. There didn’t seem to be any need for wilderness protection, but I’m learning that the escalating transformation sweeping the modern world is even having its effect on Alaska.
March 25, 2007
The air temperature outside still hovers around zero degrees Fahrenheit, but during the night it gets much colder. As the morning progresses into the afternoon and the sun’s rays hit my tent, little ice particles that have plastered the inside walls from my breathing during the night begin to float down like a light snow flurry. The particles that fall are crispy and dry, and they soon evaporate. There is plenty of oxygen inside my tent from the cold air, so I’m comfortable with my tent sealed up, with every vent zipped shut to keep out the cold. I run my little iso/butane stove inside to boil water, but this is dangerous. I can get away with it because I know this stove well, but I don’t recommend it to anyone unless they are freezing to death and there is no other option to get warm. I’m careful not to knock it over and I operate it for only a short time; the oxygen level in my tent decreases as the toxic fumes increase. Iso/butane stoves have their advantages sometimes. They are often simpler to operate than a white gas stove, and they are often smaller. Iso/butane stoves use pressurized canisters so they don’t require any priming with a pump. The mixture inside the canister is a liquid when it’s under pressure, but once it hits the outside air it turns into a flammable gas. It makes for easy ignition, and you can light them even when your fingers are almost numb.
The next night is also cold and I wake up with numb toes. I’m not sure how long they have been that way. I get worried about frostbite. Since I’m already in both of my sleeping bags and under a tarp with four pairs of socks on, I’m not sure what more I can do to warm them up.