Hard and beautiful

It has been two, action-packed weeks since our return from the Brooks Range of northern Alaska, and I have been at an utter loss for words to describe the experience. As our time back in southern Alaska and now in Hawai'i fill up the memory banks, it feels important to me to get my thoughts about the experience down, however imperfectly, before they are softened or blurred by too many other memories. That said, I've still been struggling to put words around it. The length of this post is testament. (You, dear reader, might want to grab another cup of coffee before plunging in!)

I've been helped in reading the exhilarating prose of Robert Marshall, who in the last decade of his life, before an untimely death at age 38, traveled extensively through the Brooks Range, and created the first maps of substantial portions of their wilderness, myriad drainages and soaring peaks. Through his advocacy back in Washington, he contributed to large swaths of the tundra being protected as designated wilderness areas, including the Gates of the Arctic National Park named in honor of his travels and the eponymous peaks he christened, so that others might have the same amazing wilderness experiences he and his companions had seeing and experiencing their untrammeled wildness. His Alaska Wilderness is recommended reading for anyone whose curiosity about this place is piqued by our experience. Much of the book is set within a few air-miles of Wild Lake.

On this trip so full of amazing travel experiences (visiting the summit and telescopes of Mauna Kea this week, for instance, is an unforgettable moment culminating a decades-old wish), our time in the Brooks Range is one of the best travel experiences of my entire life. Explaining how and why is a little involved.

First, our hosts. When Julie and I arrived in Anchorage, we were already stunned by the sheer generosity of Linda and Everett. They opened their home to us, repeatedly made it clear that we should just feel at ease and that we were under no obligations to them. Their casa, our casa. It was also immediately clear that these two people were each, as individuals, accomplished and enthusiastic adventurers. Together, they comprise a force of nature. Hearing their tales of reaching summits of peaks we'd admired respectfully from our motorcycles on a distant patch of comparatively comfortable tarmac, as they battled hypothermia or impassable terrain, stirred my imagination. These people live in a big way in a big world. Alaska is their perfect home base. But what is also striking about both of them is that, despite being driven and having every reason to flaunt their various accomplishments, neither seem to have appetite for any self-aggrandizement. In fact, quite the opposite: the two things that light both of them up were being outdoors somewhere beautiful, and encouraging and supporting others to experience the same. There is not a "look what I did that you couldn't do" bone in their bodies. Despite solid reasons why there could be.



Julie and I had been planning to use our stay in Anchorage for some much needed recuperation after 8,500 miles on the road, the last stretch of which was spent in near-constant motion traversing a gigantic forest blanketing mountains upon mountains for nearly two thousand miles. We were excited about -- gasp! -- having regular access to laundry, and catching up with friends, and cleaning and organizing and disposing of our gear before setting off on the next leg of our trip. Yet, when Linda and Everett invited us to share their unique, remote portal in the the arctic -- their cabin at Wild Lake -- a fire of curiosity was lit, which over the following week continued to burn brighter as we realized how vast a place Alaska is, and how difficult it is to take it all in, and how rare an opportunity we were being offered.

I've mentioned that our hosts are people with powerful wills and strong convictions, as well as generous, hospitable spirits. Our time at Wild Lake taught me much about how force-of-nature determination entangles with, dances with, subdues and is subdued by a landscape like the patch of the arctic we visited. Let me elaborate.



Everett began constructing the buildings that comprise their site on Wild Lake nearly 25 years ago. His vision for the site includes five buildings, including the main two-story cabin, a shop, a shed for storage, an outhouse and a cache. The cache is a small cabin perched atop steel posts 20 feet in the air, and is used for bear-proof storage and as an extra bedroom with great views of the lake and surrounding mountains. The Wild Lake penthouse suite, you might say. Presently, the cache is complete and the exterior of the cabin is nearly complete, with some interior finishing work remaining. That said, both buildings are as comfortable as any place we've stayed throughout trip. They are both compact, well-organized and, as they say, "thoughtfully appointed" for the local environment. That includes:

• a heating system, which remarkably for September, we never had occasion to use, but which provides triple redundancy in fuel sources in case we had, including diesel, propane and wood;
• the heavy duty sheathing and insulation (great when it's 60 below zero, I'm sure);
• the solid steel window shutters (grizzly and storm proof, unlike many of the other cabins nearby, which have been ransacked at some point by Ursa A. Horribilus);
• the steel mesh covering the screened-in front porch and the metal ramp leading to the front entrance (both of which cause discomfort to bears, and therefore discourage attempts at entry);
• the location, orientation and coloring of the cabins (which made the buildings blend into the environment, and difficult to see from the lake);
• use of screws, not nails, throughout the construction; and
• the amazingly arctic-grade foundations of these buildings, comprised of a bed of gravel five feet deep to create a stable temperature barrier (when it melts, the permafrost has the annoying tendency to cause most structures to sink into and be consumed by the tundra), every cubic yard of which Everett moved into place by hand with a shovel and pick-axe, atop which rest the balance-adjustable footings which can be tuned with a wrench that looks like it was used to tighten the cables for the Golden Gate Bridge.

To imagine the passion, the determination and the sheer output of energy required to create such structures in this landscape -- a landscape which at every opportunity seeks to defy "permanent habitation" -- is staggering. To contemplate that every screw, board, piece of steel, tool, shingle and liter of fuel was carried into this place typically by airplane, occasionally by snowmobile and, in one near-disastrous incident, by helicopter gives me great pause.

I was tempted to make comparisons between Everett's drive to complete these buildings to Fitzcaraldo (and Werner Herzog) moving a ship over a mountain in the Amazon, but the other thing striking about these two is how inwardly focused they are about this monumental project. When Julie and I resolved to accept their invitation and join them in Wild Lake, Everett took us out to lunch to counsel us against going, or at the very least to be sure that we really knew what we were getting into. Wild Lake is not at place for everyone, and he wanted to make sure our joining them wouldn't hurt us, or our trip, or damage our experience of Alaska. It was a profoundly compassionate gesture, which brings me to my next point.

Second, the work. I told Everett how after the summer of riding the motorcycle -- physically demanding, to be sure, but hardly exercise -- that I was looking forward to working hard with him at Wild Lake, pushing as hard as I could, and getting my body into swimwear-shape before heading to the tropics. I count appreciating the value of hard physical labor, especially with a tangible, visible outcome, among the lessons I learned from my father and my employment as a lackey for his construction company during summer breaks throughout high school. There's something existentially satisfying, for me, in piling lumber, clearing brush, framing a structure or (especially fun!) tearing one down. It connects to some little-boy-in-the-sandbox part of me, to see the world affected by my efforts in this way.

There was no shortage of such opportunities at Wild Lake. Indeed, I didn't know how long it would take to fill and position 100 sandbags, but that achievement represented days of combined effort for me, Everett and Max, Everett's eldest son, who joined us for the trip. The process goes a little like this: First, locate a spot on the beach with an abundance of sand with as little rock mixed in as possible. (Rocks make the bags heavier, and also make them uneven and inconsistent. The virtue of a well-made sandbag is that it is interchangeable and interlocking with every other sandbag.) Step two, locate your bale of sandbags amid the sizable cache of construction materiel deployed about the site. In our case, these were heavy-duty, synthetic bags Everett had custom-made to his specifications. Step three, since the bags were sown and baled flat, each one had to be turned inside-out before being filled. (The fabric had a coating with a nice abrasive -- shall I say, "exfoliating?" -- quality, too.) Step four, fill a bag with sand. I'm not sure how much they ended up weighing (our guesses were just on either side of 50 pounds a piece; as my arms and back adapted over the week, they definitely felt lighter). Step five, close the bag by rolling the top down and piercing it with "hog rings" (so-called because they are used in the pig-farm business to pierce hogs' noses to prevent their natural rooting behaviors, by causing discomfort when they do), using a specially designed pliers to crimp the rings through the top of the bag. Step six, stack the bags on the beach for transport. Step seven, load the bags into the canoe, motor them to the shore nearest the cabin, and stack them again for their last transport. Step eight, move them from the shore (one slung over the shoulder, or three to a wheelbarrow load) to wherever they need to be deployed. Step nine, finally, place them into a retaining wall. Everett alone, employing his master-masonry skill with the bags, earned with more than two decades of practice, alone completed step nine.

Now, repeat steps three through nine approximately one hundred times.



The retaining walls, in this case, were being used to prevent erosion of the new gravel pad for the storage building -- the first gravel work at their site being completed with the help of heavy-duty power equipment, an ancient bulldozer being driven and maintained by Mick Manns (and that's a story worthy of its own post). They represent the core accomplishment of three people's dedicated effort over long days (9:30am-ish until 8:00pm-ish at night, with a ninety-minute lunch and a couple of beer breaks in the afternoon) in frankly, optimal weather. (Although we carried all of our cold-weather riding gear with us to Wild Lake, anticipating snow, we ended up spending days in jeans, T-shirts, and rubber boots, with temps in the high 60s or even low 70s and enough sun to earn an arctic tan!)

This work had the desired effect on me. I fell asleep each night exhausted but satisfied that we'd done our damnedest that day. My body responded favorably to the constant lifting, torquing, hiking, carrying and otherwise exerting required by the work. Julie's experience during much of this week was substantially different from mine, and we both had this odd sense of being together but apart. I credit a good portion of that to my arriving back at the cabin for dinner so exhausted I was nearly catatonic -- not unhappy, mind you, just regressing toward the pre-verbal. (Yeah, me, at a loss for words!) Julie on the other hand was able to spend a big chunk of time writing and reading and editing video, and with Linda, took immaculate care of us grunt laborers through tasty meals, timely refreshments and clean up. (Thankfully, we did get to have some shared experience, too, on our canoe trip to Trout Lake.)



In addition to being a rewarding physical challenge, the work was a great window to get to know Everett better. Let me say something on that point that he would probably prefer that I not include here. Without revealing his age, I should have a substantial youth-advantage on him when it comes to hard work. (He, alone among those of us gathered, reserved the right to hold a figurative "age card." The few times he played it were in jest, pantomiming reaching into his vest pocket to produce it in his hand, and never to get out of hard work.) Combine this with the fact that the man has destroyed his back from years of back-breaking gravel work, and you'd think I'd be able to run circles around him. In fact, I could not come close to keeping up with him, and doubt that situation would change after months of getting in Wild-Lake-shape. He's a tiger, and if you don't see it in him at first, just try to keep up with him hauling gravel.



Of course, another thing about Everett, and Linda, is that they are both madly in love with the landscape that surrounds their cabin. And it's little wonder why.

Third, the land. Before arriving in Coldfoot -- the spot six hours north of Fairbanks on the Haul Road, where we'd board a De Havilland Beaver to fly into the landing strip across the lake from Linda and Everett's cabin -- I had some idea of the kind of landscape that would be greeting us. Linda shared numerous pictures with us, and together we watched an amazing documentary of another arctic traveller (and fellow Minnesota native!) who walked and paddled the Brooks Range from the Alaskan-Canadian border to the Arctic Ocean. What came through from these two-dimensional images was the barrenness of the tundra and the ruggedness of the endless jagged mountains.



Oddly, once arriving, I was astonished to learn how alive such an apparently barren place, in fact, is. The lakes were teeming with fish (except, that is, for the one Lake Trout I pulled from its depths), with ripples on the water where they'd broken the surface visible every few minutes. There were ducks and swans and loons and surely other waterfowl I missed. There were predatory birds, too, including a bald eagle that treated us all to a show by tormenting a pair of loons, who launched into just about every song in their repertoire (likely in the interest of guarding their young). There were abundant signs of mammals, too, like the rabbits, who inexplicably love eating the synthetic material of the sandbags, and the porcupines, who drop quills while munching on the plywood Everett has staged below the cabin, as well as abundant signs of wolf and bear (both black and grizzly, with grizzly being more common). Julie spied a fox dashing into the woods, and we saw a line of Dall sheep marching along a ridgeline from the air en route to Wild Lake (prompting our North-Dakota-native pilot, Dirk, to command them to "get in my freezer, now!") The primary large mammal we observed "in action" were moose. Our visiting corresponded to their rutting season. There were lots of signs of their activity and once when Max and I think we caught them in the act at the shore across the bay.

The lake is also an amazing sight. Nestled amid the mountains, your eyes would never disclose its true size: a long ellipse with a pinch point in the middle, it runs an amazing seven miles end to end. Beneath the peaks, determining scale seemed almost impossible. We'd look across the lake at a point off the bow of our canoe, the motor running full steam, and that distant point would just sit there, distant. I also could not fathom that this body of water runs 700 feet deep. The one person known to have drowned here, in 1974, was never found. It is easy to understand why.

There are also the skies, and the clouds, and the stars.



But the real stars of the show in the Brooks Range are the mountains themselves. They are endless. As Robert Marshall put it, they appear as the waves of a turbulent sea, frozen in rock, that stretch as far as the eye can see in every direction. They reflect so many different moods of the sun, sky and season. The reds of the abundant blueberry and cranberry bushes, the greens of spruce and grasses, the yellows of the deciduous trees preparing to drop their leaves, and the grays, charcoals and blacks of stone, and the white of snow and ice at the peaks.



We learned from a documentary about the Gates of the Arctic National Park that the Koyukon people native to this region have a tradition of not pointing at or referring to the name of a mountain, out of respect, since something so small and insignificant as a person should not presume to speak on familiar terms with something so powerful and eternal. Spending time in this place, I understand that sentiment. The mountains are simply awesome. And so, I hesitate to say more, lest lovers of mountains arrive in droves, but if mountains were my one and only, I don't know where else I should be.



There is so much more to say, about the gentle, predictable and pleasant rhythm of our camp life together, of Max's patient and forgiving fishing lessons for me (it had been a long, long time), of Linda's amazing cooking (constantly feeding all of us, every meal), of our day-off trip by canoe down the Wild River to Trout Lake, of learning to hike through sedge tussocks (akin to walking through a Ball Crawl), and of course, of the incredible generosity that opened this experience to us.



But this will have to suffice in conclusion: I will never forget my time at Wild Lake, and I desperately hope it is not my last time in the Brooks Range. Thank you for that, Linda, Everett, Max and Mick, with all my heart.